Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and long-time leader of modern Singapore, passed away on March 23. I regret I never saw him in person, but I did live in Singapore from 2010-13 and read his memoir From Third World to First. His accomplishments are extraordinary whatever you think of him. The western press is a little unfair in constantly calling him an “autocrat”. It’s true that he outlawed short skirts and long hair for a time, censored foreign publications, and locked up a few Communists for decades without a proper trial. But that was the Cold War, and before you judge, you have to consider the utter chaos and climate of fear that was going on all around Singapore in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea, China, and pretty much the rest of Asia at the time. Singapore stayed relatively calm, peaceful, safe, and eventually became prosperous on his watch. Singapore has a parliament with regular elections. They are dominated by one party that only considers a narrow range of policies, partly because that party is popular and has served the people well, and partly because there are strong barriers to entry built into the system for opposition parties that might consider a wider range of policies. But replace that one party with two parties that are only slightly apart on the narrow range of policies they consider, keep the barriers to entry, and you have the U.S. system.

Economically, Singapore took full advantage of its critical location in the global shipping network. They focused on foreign direct investment to build industry first in low wage manufacturing, and gradually built up to advanced industries today such as refining, chemicals, drugs, technology, finance, etc. They have something called the “central provident fund” – this is a personal social security account that people save their money in (it’s not optional) for retirement, housing, and medical care. This money gets invested in the local and global economies and earns a good rate of return. Almost all housing is developed by the government and subsidized – but it is not exactly “public housing” as we think of it in the U.S., because it is owned rather than rented. So it’s more like a condo where the government is your condo association. You can buy your first unit at a discount to the market price, then resell it later at the market price, although the government puts some limits on who can buy where and when. So the combination of this housing scheme and savings scheme has built a fairly broad base of wealth for the population without resorting to a large income redistribution or social insurance scheme like we see in Europe and the Anglo-American countries. Lee famously believed that this would be counter to “Asian values”, part of which is maintaining very tight family units that take care of each other in times of need.

Although I enjoyed my personal time in Singapore, it was a little too cold and corporate for my taste. Too many people seemed to view accumulating wealth and designer handbags as the primary objective of everyday life. Although I agree that people were tolerant of religious and ethnic diversity, I perceived a coldness between strangers on the street, and even between neighbors, that I found disturbing compared to the way people treat each other in the U.S. and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. People sometimes expressed petty racial and class-based attitudes that would at least engender some guilt in other places. Sometimes I felt that Singaporeans have allowed themselves to become the perfect example of the new Homo economicus species described in the economics textbooks. The country also has some demographic challenges – fertility rates are low partly because women have so many more career and life options available to them than in the past. This is great, but because Singapore is so small it is going to mean a dramatic drop in the native-born population. Immigration can compensate in terms of numbers, but the culture and sense of nationhood will somehow have to adjust to this. A shared love of designer handbags is not a good cultural foundation for a nation.

Singapore has an unbelievable PR machine. You should assume that things there are never quite as rosy as the propaganda they put out, nor as bad as the western press sometimes accuses. Regardless, it is pretty amazing to think how far it has come since the ashes of World War II, and hard to point to another figure who has created a prosperous modern country through sheer force of will like Lee Kuan Yew.