So, I started the LKY book, and my first impression is, as expected, that Singapore succeeded by understanding that you can only succeed by actually doing well, and being able to make credible promises, not by bs, grift and self-deception.

Benefits of a small (geographical) state (1): when you invest in public goods, everyone can see and use them to a much greater degree than usual.

(2) Government at the level of a single integrated labour market.

(3) The discipline of being dependent on the voluntary cooperation of people you cannot politically coerce. (trading partners, skilled migrants, international investors)

(4) Shorter and more visible feedback loops between policies and results.

Traditional downside: People invade you and steal your stuff.

Doesn't work when your wealth isn't mainly in what you have but in what you do.

For Singapore the threat was always at the start when it was unclear what they would become.

LKY appreciated the importance of talent and education: almost every chapter contains a variant of "we sent our brightest students off to university <in the west> and brought them back to run the country."

He is also refreshingly un-PC, I keep having "he said the quiet bit out loud" moments.

Normally in relation to intelligence, education, social mobility, cultural integration and so on.

"A precondition for honest government is that candidates must not need large sums of money to get elected..."

Another recurring theme is LKY talking about the need to get <some group> to change their opinion on social and cultural norms. Chinese on Business, Malays on Education, Men on their preference for less-educated wives, farmers on HDB life, everyone on cleanliness and corruption.

Okay, back to the second half of the LKY book. Less interesting to me in that it is mainly about geopolitics: Singapore's relationships with its neighbours and the outside world.

Most leaders in the region come across in Lee's telling as paranoid, xenophobic and delusional.

The issues and dynamics seem very different when not told from the perspective of left-leaning anglo-american academics and journalists!

LKY is sensitive to the virtues and faults of everybody equally, and his writing shows great patience with personal foibles and weakness.

In order to modernise East Asia has needed to learn from the experiences of the West. Noting that this can be very different from learning from how the West has understood its own experiences.

There is an irony in Western intellectuals indulging in so much self-hate about colonialism that they end up angrily telling former colonies how they ought to feel about the things that we did to them.