by Parag Khanna
A proper technocracy is far more flexible than dogmatic regimes and more capable of changing course than democracies. Lee Kuan Yew originally had socialist pretensions before pivoting in the 1970s to less regulated Hong Kong–style labor markets. Paradoxes thus appear that make perfect sense in practice, if not in theory. Singapore can be described as freewheeling—it has no trade restrictions and prostitution is legal—but also as a nanny state: it has the world’s most robust government-subsidized home ownership scheme, mandatory savings for retirement, and a universal and cost-effective public health care system. It is a top-ranked free market, yet the government manages half the economy through state-backed companies. In other words, it is a libertarian nanny state in which capitalist self-reliance fuses with redistributive handouts and a large official role in the marketplace to ensure the stability of government revenues. It is big government but also lean government.
A Singaporean civil servant, Peter Ho, differentiates between blame-seeking and problem-solving cultures.9 Whereas Western democracies today have wish lists, Asian technocracies have strategies. Democracy guarantees neither that good ideas will emerge nor that they will be implemented. Good technocracies are equally focused on inputs and outputs. Their legitimacy comes both from the process by which the government is selected and from the delivery of what citizens universally proclaim they want: solid infrastructure, public safety, clean air and water, reliable transportation, ease of doing business, good schools, quality housing, dependable child care, freedom of expression, access to jobs, and so forth. The technocratic mind-set is that delay in getting these things done is itself a form of corruption. Instead of playing perpetual blame games, good technocrats are always out to solve problems.
The technocratic playbook that Singapore follows focuses on building societal agility through strategies codeveloped between government, industry, and academia. For such a small country, it has a highly diversified economy. The unemployment rate is nearly zero. The SingPass system puts all official documentation and functions within reach online. The government sets reasonable key performance indicators (KPIs) that are tracked at regular intervals to assess progress. In no other society is the delivery of public services so diligently monitored through KPIs. From passport checks and public toilets at the airport to banks and university administration buildings, Singapore is populated with touch-screen tablets asking you to rate the service you’ve received—and the government actually pays attention to the results. The government is also transparent about its own performance. The annual audit of all public and publicly financed institutions, from banks to universities, is an open naming and shaming exercise, putting online and on the front pages of the Straits Times any lapses in fiduciary or other standards.
This opens the door to appreciating that Singapore has a very strong democratic culture even if there is limited democratic choice. Voting is mandatory—as it is in Australia, Belgium, and some other democracies. (Given the low voter turnout in many Western societies, their electoral outcomes can hardly be considered democratically legitimate unless they, too, adopt mandatory voting.) Politicians hold weekly dialogues in public housing courtyards and function rooms. Parliamentary debates and budget hearings are open to the public and televised. Citizens comment vocally on everything from taxes to transportation to health care spending. If the national pension fund’s portfolio returns just 1 percent lower than expected, citizens start to howl. The government also organizes hundreds of deliberative consultations, conducts extensive surveys on all major policy questions, and channels online petitions to a parliamentary committee. Some caricature Singapore as the French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s “good despotism,” a regime that seeks to gratify the people’s desires and “spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.” But, as Plato foresaw, only an educated population can responsibly assume democratic rights.
Despite all of this inclusive dialogue, Singapore does not overconsult. Deliberation never degenerates into paralysis. Citizens armed with real-time information want a voice in policy—but they also want action. Because Singapore’s leaders enjoy the trust of the public, they have the capacity to autonomously weigh diverse factors and make comprehensive decisions. In short-term-oriented electoral democracy, the future has no constituency; everything has to be “sold” to the people as a quick high. But as the political psychologist Philip Tetlock has demonstrated, full transparency over political deliberations can lead to decisions aimed at being popular rather than correct.10 Hence democracy must be supplemented by technocratic instruments that assess the long-term implications of decisions and offer correctives.
Tetlock’s work also demonstrates the failure of experts to correctly predict a range of political and economic events. This is not a knock on technocracy. Governance is not about predictions but about decisions. Technocrats aren’t supposed to compete in prediction markets but listen to them, as well as to subject-matter experts and the public, and craft holistic policy. Indeed, there is ample evidence that Singapore’s ruling party, even though it faces little electoral competition, responds to citizens’ concerns and even reverses course on policies when necessary. For example, when rapid immigration overstressed the transport system, the public outcry led to significant immigration restrictions. When foreigners were allowed to invest in the public housing market, it caused price volatility that angered locals; the policy was changed overnight. Concern about adequate elder care for the rapidly aging population and the high cost of living has prompted substantial increases in welfare and social spending. Being self-correcting is more important than being correct in any one thing.
The technocratic backbone of any successful government is a professional civil service. Civil servants are stewards of governance who know how to administer federal agencies. They should possess intellectual know-how, robust capacity, and bureaucratic autonomy. According to research by the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, which emphasizes impartial hiring and promotion, statistical diagnosis of social and economic data, and the number of advanced degree holders employed, Singapore’s civil service is second to none. It is run like a spiral staircase: with each rung a civil servant learns to manage a different portfolio, gaining firsthand experience and building a broad knowledge base. By contrast, US politics is like an elevator: one can get in on the bottom floor and go straight to the top, missing all the learning in between.
Just as important as what the civil service does is how it does it. Scenario planners are embedded in every ministry. These “foresight officers” conduct their own research and global case studies to frame impartial scenarios for leaders to consider on an ongoing basis. Singapore’s Civil Service College (CSC) has invested more than $10 million in simulations that resemble Pentagon war gaming. Scenarios are designed to pull leaders far out of their comfort zone and develop robust strategies to maintain the country’s relevance. To create the most realistic scenarios and plans, the civil service recruits for expertise in economic strategy, infrastructure, environmental stewardship, defense, and social services. Urban planning, for example, is handled by teams meshing architects, economists, demographers, ecologists, and many other experts. Rather than building more vertical bureaucracies, such horizontal mechanisms pool resources and apply them to functional challenges such as monitoring borders and aviation, tracking supply chains, ensuring food security, and protecting critical infrastructure. Along the way, generalists become specialists and vice versa. Collectively, Singapore’s civil servants are a well-rounded team of humble perfectionists.
Lee Kuan Yew stressed the importance of an effective administrative bureaucracy that would enforce the rule of law and be impervious to corruption. One successful antibody against corruption is having highly paid ministers whose visibility demands that they view government service as a trusteeship rather than as a pathway to later wealth. Even after the salaries of cabinet ministers and other senior officials were slashed by one-third to one-half in 2012, Singap
ore’s public servants are still the highest paid in the world. Civil servants earn high salaries and also receive modest bonuses tied to national economic performance. Each year, several hundred of them are selected by competitive evaluation as “administrative officers” who earn double the standard salary.
Max Weber, the father of modern government science, would have been gravely worried by the state of the United States’ federal service, which has been in decline since the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s. The more than 2 million US civil servants (including half a million postal service workers) across more than four hundred agencies are underpaid and overworked, often use archaic software, and are subject to periodic government shutdowns. They have no mandate and little incentive to learn from other countries. Institutional memory—the accumulation of historical knowledge—fades as professionals retire and politicians consult neither the repository of experience nor the experts who have lived through it. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have been essential to providing policy evaluations and recommendations independent of industry lobbyists, but today the GAO’s work is often ignored, while the CRS shies away from tackling politically controversial issues. Great Britain, too, has suffered immeasurably since the Margaret Thatcher era of dismantling the once vaunted civil service. Instead of David Cameron consulting the civil service to produce scenarios on the impact of a potential Brexit for public consideration before the infamous 2016 referendum, the unprepared successor government of Theresa May hastily cobbled together a committee to help chart the country’s path into the unknown. This is neither the process nor the outcome any sensible Asian nation would wish to emulate—whether technocracy or democracy.
Finding and executing on the best ideas is far more likely in a meritocratic system. A meritocracy is not just about intellectual achievements but about tangible experience. It promotes good people from within rather than circumventing them with political appointees. Meritocracy mitigates revolutionary demands because there is a sense that higher social standing and leadership are open to all based on their skills and hard work. Producing a pipeline of skilled leaders requires an unshakable commitment to public education. Singapore’s current prime minister is a computer scientist, and serving a term as education minister is an essential stepping-stone to higher office. Like its technocrats, teachers in Singapore are respected and paid well.
American-style political oligarchy is neither technocracy nor meritocracy. In a meritocracy, declaring a candidate “unfit” or “unqualified” is not merely a campaign epithet but a measurable proposition. Trump won the election even though most voters felt he was unqualified to be president. In the United States, “electability” clearly refers to being capable of winning an election, whereas in a meritocracy it would mean one’s deservingness to do so. Furthermore, saying things that are unconstitutional and unethical doesn’t make you just figuratively disqualified but literally disqualified.
Even a meritocratic technocracy like Singapore needs to be careful not to slip into an oligarchy alienated from its people. In 2011, long-standing parliamentarians from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) lost elections for appearing elitist during campaigns. In 2017, many citizens were excited to have a chance to elect their (ceremonial) president only to find out that the qualification criteria were narrowed to favor only one. (This was done in the name of promoting a minority-race female, Halimah Yacob.) Some people simply want to see unexpected faces with unconventional backgrounds appear in the country’s top ranks. The trends suggest that this will happen. The PAP’s share of the popular vote has dropped from nearly 90 percent in the 1970s to less than 70 percent today. For the first time in 2015, every single parliamentary seat was contested by multiple parties. Nonetheless, in that election, the PAP actually gained back numerous seats it had previously lost simply by taking on board the opposition Workers’ Party’s platform of investing more in new transport infrastructure and public housing and curbing immigration. No matter what the parliamentary balance, a half-dozen nonconstituency MP seats are allotted to prominent voices from business and civil society who regularly make conscientious and critical statements on government policy.
Owing to its British inheritance and one-party dominance, Singapore’s parliament is a mix of Oxford Union and consultative assembly. In a technocratic system, the purpose of parliamentary democracy is not simply to elect representatives but to have parliaments be a mechanism for constant consultation with the citizenry. Remember that elections are retroactive: they often punish rather than prescribe. Because they are a referendum on individuals as much as issues, they don’t provide citizens guidance on specific policies. Voting by itself is therefore far from the best means of capturing popular sentiment on an ongoing basis. For that, we need data: qualitative data, such as surveys, polls, and social media, and quantitative data, such as demographic and economic trends. The combination of social and sensor data can be more comprehensive than election results, for it is broader in scope (covering the full spectrum of issues rather than being hijacked by hot-button topics) and fresher (collected more regularly than infrequent elections). Scaling technology is easier than scaling trust, but the former can be a path to the latter.
Westerners think of data tools as aiding democracy, but in Singapore, democratic deliberations, whether elections, initiatives, surveys, or social media, contribute data sets that help technocrats steer policy based on all available evidence. For example, data that represent the poor, elderly, or youth—such as their financial behavior and education status—are essential inputs for leaders to ensure that they are taking everyone’s needs into account. Singapore is not a slave to the data it gathers but balances data and democracy so they complement each other: data can determine which policies are necessary, while democracy can modify and ratify them. That is precisely what is happening as the country raises health care spending and increases subsidies for the poor. Data-driven technocracy is thus superior to representative democracy alone because it captures the specific desires of the people while short-circuiting the distortions of potentially corrupted representatives and special interests.
There is an acute irony in the pace at which Asian technocracy is adapting to modern technology and calls for “digital democracy.” Western polemicists used to argue that communication and social media technologies would make Chinese authoritarianism obsolete once everyone had access to mobile phones, satellite TV, and other information channels. But in fact these technologies and the transparency they bring about are putting the heat on unresponsive democratic leaders while reinforcing the legitimacy of technocratic regimes that are responsive to public needs.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said that Singapore is becoming a “normal” country with democratic “toing and froing.” But make no mistake: Singapore’s people are far more interested in tangible delivery outputs than in democratic inputs for their own sake. They want a credible intellectual check on authority, not partisan gridlock. There is a slippery slope from technocratic consultation to democratic populism—and the former should never be sacrificed for the latter. Today no country can afford the kind of short-term, narrow-minded populism that targets electoral outcomes rather than national performance and wastes months or years on “lame-duck” preelection paralysis.
That is why the Singaporean public is so fixated on the next generation of rising leaders several years before the next election. Unlike rule-for-life authoritarians, Lee Kuan Yew stepped down as prime minister in 1990, twenty-five years before he died. His son Lee Hsien Loong wants nothing more than to ease into retirement by 2021. He can sleep soundly knowing that a dozen ministers in their late forties and early fifties are building a collaborative transition team years in advance. The fact that nobody descended from Lee Kuan Yew is likely to lead Singapore anytime soon (if ever again) bothers almost no one. Instead, Singapore is evolving toward a far more sophisticated collective presidency, a d
emocratic-technocratic committee with a broad and deep knowledge of all aspects of governance.
With stability anchored and generational change in leadership at hand, Singapore is coming to terms with harsh laws that have their origins in expired conditions and outdated norms. There are active and heated public debates about revising the Internal Security Act (ISA) to limit the government’s power of preventive detention, initiating a freedom of information act, curbing restrictions on political assembly, decriminalizing homosexuality, and abolishing caning as a form of official punishment. For each such law, there is a historical and cultural context, whether British colonial rule, fear of Cold War Communist insurgency, or the values of an elderly Christian population. Singapore is not afraid to evolve its ethical codes, but it rightly remains paranoid. Even as the government learns to trust the public ever more with the responsibilities of freedom, it would be foolish to expect a country even more ethnically diverse than when it was founded to tolerate, in the name of free speech, reckless abuses of liberty such as inciting communal hatred.
As the Singaporean sociologist Chua Beng Huat demonstrated in his book Liberalism Disavowed, Singaporean policy choices in matters of public housing, multiracialism, and state-directed capitalism all exemplify its unique, non-Western path.11 Singapore is an example of how objectives such as racial equality have to be engineered to guard against tribalist proclivities. There is a difference between diversity and inclusion. Theoretically, democracy provides the crucial instrument to keep multiracial societies at peace because all are given equal voice. But this alone does not eliminate racial factors in social, economic, and political decision making. Indeed, the existence of race-based and religious parties in India and Malaysia only hardens a competitive mind-set among ethnic and racial groups. Successful management, or transcendence, of such tensions demands both a higher sense of unity and policies that actively bring diverse groups together. This is why Singapore requires that public housing blocks be cohabitated by substantial percentages of Chinese, Malays, and Indians and that every slate of political candidates be made of up individuals reflecting the country’s racial diversity. Even though the leadership does not yet feel comfortable having a non-Chinese prime minister—though the most popular politician is a Tamil Indian—it has had many Indian presidents and justices and a Malay female president, and Indians make up a disproportionate share of the present cabinet.
