Results for “singapore”

498 found

1. Davis Kedrosky defends Jared Diamond, a good piece.

2. Is “war-related” a “factor” in financial market returns?

3. Global inequality in well-being has decreased along many dimensions.

4. Overview of the new ARPA-H.

5. “WWSS?”  Or, “What would Singapore say?”  You don’t have to agree, but the question is usually worth asking.  Here is Singapore on LLMs.  And if you don’t already know it — I covered it years ago — here is one of my favorite videos, namely Singapore Complaints Choir.

That is the new book by Nigel Biggar, and it has already created a storm of controversy because of his claims that the British empire is, in my words, “underrated.”

Let me first say that I am in no way upset at this thesis being put explicitly on the table.  And the book has many valuable discussions, covering issues such as how hard (at some point) the British worked to ban slavery, what were their motives for empire, what kinds of pressures for assimilation were asserted, and much more.

My disappointment is how little space is devoted to the topic of sustainable economic growth.  In which parts of the empire did British rule boost sustainable economic growth, relative to a counterfactual of peaceful interaction but no conquest?  Singapore and Hong Kong seem obviously much richer and better off due to earlier British rule.  Malaysia likely as well, though the magnitude of the gain there is smaller.  But Sierra Leone not?  The country is miserably poor and has had numerous years of civil war, with a legacy of slavery as well.  Who could object to trying another run of history there, removing the British imperial role?  It is hard to see that it could get very much worse.  But then where does one put Kenya?

And what about all the other places in between?  Most notably historic India?  Biggar does consider the growth topic very explicitly on pp.165-176, mostly in the context of India, but I would have liked to see much, much more.  And I wish he had noted that post-colonial rates of growth in India were generally higher than under British rule, even with a lot of badly conceived socialist policies.  Perhaps British rule was required as a kind of pre-investment (railways? English language?), but all this could receive far greater attention.

I am happy to recommend this book, but I am not sure what is the ultimate standard of judgment of British rule.  So much seems to depend on which is the relevant counterfactual.  There is always the “cheap” argument of “better us than them,” whether it be the French, Dutch, Portuguese, or whomever.  And how should we think about Ireland, where centuries of British rule only pay off after 1970 or so?

In any case, most episodes of British rule could have been much, much better than they actually were.  So I am not convinced this book is framing the questions the very best way, though it is certainly the framing that these days will draw the most attention, the strongest attempts at cancellation, and the most ardent defenses from the Right.

It was not exactly the book I wanted, but I hope you read it.  You can pre-order it here, or as I did have it shipped from UK Amazon.

1. Singapore grades itself on its pandemic responses.

2. Higher U.S. high school graduation rates seem to be real.

3. New on-line journal FUSION is soliciting submissions, mix of liberty and tradition ideas.  And Civic Future fellowship (UK, improving the public sector and its workers).

4. How much safer is construction?

5. “Held to maturity.”

6. Is GPT-4 coming next week? (speculative)

1. The coastal-hinterlands imbalance in West Africa.

2. Those who code Bitcoin Core (WSJ).

3. Shoichiro Toyoda, RIP (NYT).

4. Does the entrepreneurial state crowd out entrepreneurship? (Singapore?)

5. More on black holes (again, speculative).

6. The Numey is an attempt to design a truly Hayekian currency.

7. Will AI be a dud for venture capitalists?

8. Rebecca Blank, RIP.

Have you ever visited Zagreb, Ljubljana, or Bratislava, and noticed how boring they are?  They still feel like backwaters, not the national capitals they are.  That is no accident, because they “grew up” under the Habsburg monarchy and in the Austro-Hungarian empire as second- or even third-tier cities.  Vienna and Budapest, the seats of that empire, are correspondingly overgrown, and remain so to this day.

Britain faces this issue in a much more extreme form.  London was once the capital of the largest empire the world ever has seen, was it 1/4 of the world’s population at its peak?  After that it was the de facto financial and economic capital of the European Union, and it remains the de facto financial and economic capital for Europe more generally.  The global ascent of the English language strengthens these tendencies.

That leads to an extreme hypertrophy for London, which indeed is currently the best city in the world but in a modestly populated country.  However this central role for the city makes the UK as a broader nation richer to only a limited degree.  So the extreme wonders of London lead to a partial (permanent) atrophy for the rest of the country, which is precisely what we observe.

For all the mockery of “Singapore on the Thames” as a concept, southern England and the London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle already have far surpassed Singapore, and I am referring to recent not historic achievements.  Does Singapore have innovations that compare to the vaccine and Deep Mind?  I don’t see it.

Therein also lies the curse of southern England.  The region’s most marvelous achievements are ideas, and the value of those ideas is largely capitalized elsewhere.  Unknowingly, southern England is playing the “effective altruist” role for the world as a whole.

Singapore, in contrast, doesn’t generate many new ideas.  It invites in MNCs, and the capitalizes much of the value of that production in the form of higher wages and higher land rents, the latter often accruing to the government and which are then (to varying degrees) distributed back to the native population.

And there you go.  Whatever you think is the best British fiscal policy, it isn’t going to reverse that state of affairs.

1. Revisions to views about the patriarchy.

2. Ongoing failures in monkeypox response.

3. What happened when the rich stopped intermarrying (speculative).

4. If you scroll through you will see talk of a possible Magnus vs. Nepo rapid match for WCC.  And with sets, a bit like tennis.

5. Craig S. Wright is still at it, model that!

6. Reshoring is succeeding in Singapore (WSJ).

7. At least for now the German trade surplus is gone.

Max Tabarrok has an interesting new idea for governance, Interland:

Interland takes the intersection of the law codes of a large group of nations. This will produce a minimal reasonable set of laws which is highly resistant to lobbying and growth.

Anyone who wants to add a new agricultural subsidy, building height limit, or immigration restriction has to convince everyone in this group to add it before it passes in Interland. This makes the institutions of the country consistent and durable.

Durability is only good if the thing that’s lasting is also good. We have several reasons to expect this to be the case for Interland’s institutions. First, Interland will have a shorter list of statutes and regulations than any other country in its group. This isn’t unconditionally good, but since the mechanisms of democracy are likely to overproduce rules it’s the directionally correct adjustment. Even better is that all of the laws that Interland does have will be more universally supported than most of the laws in other nations, since they are by definition the set of laws that many nations agree on. As more countries are added to the intersection, Interland’s law code would be further distilled into human universals. Finally, Interland will be the freest nation on earth. Anything which is allowed by any member of the intersection will also be allowed in Interland.

Importantly, Interland’s constitution will be positively constructed. This means it will be a list of all of the things the government can do, and anything not listed is not within the government’s authority. This is in contrast to parts of the American constitution and Bill of Rights which define government authority by tracing the negative space that its authority cannot cross, but there was significant debate over which method was best during the drafting of the American constitution.

So what sorts of laws would Interland have? All nations share a lot of their basic criminal code. Murder, theft, and rape are all illegal in every country so they’d be illegal in Interland. Abortion, homosexuality, multi-family, and multi-use construction would not be illegal although many countries outlaw them. Nuclear power construction would be much easier thanks to the laws of France and South Korea, and almost all drugs would be legal or at least decriminalized.

…Interland’s taxation and spending would be minimal, mirroring nations like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Luxemburg. But by all accounts these nations have effective and comprehensive public services. Unfortunately in the eyes of some and thankfully for others, Interland would have a state police force, a public road network (although toll roads would be allowed), public parks, and libraries.

Read the whole thing for some discussion of other issues and limitations.

I think this is a compelling idea. Establishing a new country is difficult, of course, but the ideas of interland can be applied to already existing countries or sub-countries. A US state, for example, could declare itself an interland–Interland: New Mexico–and pledge to adopt only those laws that every other state has adopted. A country in the OECD or EU could declare itself an interland and so forth.

The code of Interland could also be useful in and of itself as a reference point. If we had an Interland database one could compare how close or far countries are to Intereland and in what respects they differ. Interland could be a virtual country and a model code–a country and code to which other countries can aspire to much like the Uniform Law Code.

Viva Interland!