Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  To Lee, this delicate matter concerning the innate and differing abilities of people was not just of academic interest. His views about the nature of human society were of considerable importance as they would influence profoundly the social and economic policies he pursued in Singapore.

  He held strong views on these thorny issues. As a pragmatist, he concluded that they would have to be faced squarely before leaders could decide how best to act so as to achieve the goals of development for their societies.

  These ideas evolved as a result of his experience and reading over the years. They were not what he originally believed as a young man at Cambridge drawn to the ideals of the British Fabians, a group of left-wing intellectuals at the vanguard of the Labour Party at the time. They were convinced that inequalities in society stemmed largely from unequal opportunities. If economic and social disparities were removed, or reduced, they assumed that the gap between the haves and have-nots would also close. The concept seemed appealing and noble enough. But reality, he soon discovered, fell rather short of this sanguine belief.

  “We were too young, and the experiment in Russia and in Britain had not gone far enough for us to see, which we now see clearly, that there is a limit to what you can do in society.

  “With human beings, you can give everybody equal opportunities, but the results will not be equal because they are of unequal abilities. Some people run faster than others, some people can lift more weights than others, some people can play better music than others, and some people are better at mathematics and will score more in the sciences. And I think that has been, for Britain, Russia and China, the real breaking point of the system. For instance, the British Left believed, and we believed with them, in the ’40s and ’50s, that equal opportunities would bring about more or less equal rewards. We did not know about this Bell curve, that it existed in every population from time immemorial.

  “Equal opportunities meant that in the first few phases, in the ’50s and ’60s, we were able to throw up engineers, accountants, doctors from the children of hawkers, taxi drivers, labourers because they were not given opportunities. And we drew our scholars – 60, maybe 70 per cent of our best scholars were from the very uneducated rungs of society.

  “But over 30 years, we can see now that the educated marry each other, as was inevitable, and indeed in our case is not happening enough, to our detriment. The result is, today, out of 10, we’re lucky if we get three from the lower-educated groups. Although the higher-educated groups are only about 20 per cent of the population, they provide us with 70 per cent of the scholars. It is a fact of life and you can’t change it.

  “You see, starting block, a marathon, get ready, all at the same line, fire, off you go. One hour later, you see the wide differences between those who are still steady, pushing ahead, and the stragglers struggling at the end. Two hours later, five, six, are in front, racing to beat the record. That’s the problem of life.”

  Diamonds in the population

  Lee’s realisation of this came in the early 1960s, shortly after he and his PAP colleagues had taken charge of the government in Singapore. The multiracial nature of Singapore society made any disparity in ethnic achievement starkly obvious. They showed up in the yearly school examination results, which he tracked closely.

  He concluded that all societies displayed signs of what he termed a “population diamond”. At the centre was the bulk of the people, of average intellect and abilities. Above this, IQ and competence levels rose to an apex. Below the centre, and in about equal proportion to the apex at the top, abilities tapered off, down to the educationally subnormal and mentally retarded.

  Despite the difference in ability, he felt that all men were entitled to be treated equally and fairly, and accorded the same dignity and respect as citizens. The government’s role was to train each individual to his maximum ability.

  The most able in society would have to be drawn into the top rungs, given the most important jobs through a strictly meritocratic system. This group at the top – he guessed that they made up between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the population in any society – was the yeast which would raise the lot of the entire society. These people would have to be thrown up by a meritocratic system – or sought out by the society’s leaders – and nurtured from a young age. To them would fall the responsibility of the top jobs, both in government and the private sector. Lee dismissed suggestions that such a system was elitist. Rather, he contended, it was based simply on a pragmatic recognition that not all men were of equal abilities and talents. He once said, only half in jest, that to bring Singapore down, an aggressor need only eliminate the top 150 or so men on whom the country relied most for it to keep ticking.

  The less able would also have to be helped, to enable them to do their best and keep up with the rest of society. But for all its good intentions, social policy, concluded Lee and some of his more pragmatic Cabinet colleagues, could never overcome the underlying limits in ability that nature had decreed. Nor should it raise false hopes that it could.

  Lee and Dr Toh Chin Chye held opposing views on the subject of equality.

  Cabinet clash: pragmatists vs “ideologues”

  This, however, was by no means a unanimous view. In fact, it split the Cabinet down the line.

  Singapore’s first Cabinet – In 1959, the Cabinet comprised Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Deputy Prime Minister Toh Chin Chye, and these ministers: Yong Nyuk Lin (Education), Ong Eng Guan (National Development), S. Rajaratnam (Culture), Ahmad Ibrahim (Health), Ong Pang Boon (Home Affairs), Goh Keng Swee (Finance) and K.M. Byrne (Labour and Law).

  “We – Dr Goh Keng Swee, myself, Hon Sui Sen, Lim Kim San – we were the pragmatists. Then we had our, I won’t say ideologues, but those who were more emotionally attached to this idea of making it more equal for everybody – in other words, more redistribution. I would say Dr Toh Chin Chye instinctively felt that way. And Ong Pang Boon too. Therefore, there was a certain benign tension in the Cabinet, and we argued these things. And the tension and the argument went on right till the end.

  “For instance, Dr Toh was against Medisave. He thinks we ought to provide equally for everybody, rich or poor, like the British did and like China has done. I said, ‘The British had failed. And you don’t get equal treatment in China, you get the pretence of equal treatment.’ So the debate was right at the fundamentals.

  “We believed, all of us believed, I believed, when we started off in the 1940s, that differences between individuals and individual performance and results were mainly because of opportunities. Given better opportunities of nutrition, food, clothing, training, housing and health, differences would be narrowed. It was much later, when we pursued these policies in the ’60s, in the ’70s, that the reality dawned on us, the pragmatists.

  “On this issue, even Rajaratnam disagreed with us. He believes all are equal and if we give equal chances, everybody will be equal. And he strenuously disputed that we start off being unequal. But some people can run 100 yards in 10 seconds, others will take 15 seconds, and you can do nothing about it. If you try to give all the same results, then nobody will make the effort to run in 10 seconds.”

  This posed an acute dilemma for the PAP, a democratic socialist party which rode to power on the wave of popular demands for a more just and equal society. How was a popularly elected socialist government to act against the prevailing egalitarian sentiment? Yet, going the other way was to risk disillusionment among a section of the party’s supporters. More importantly, Lee and his more pragmatic colleagues knew that pandering to this was a futile attempt to overcome inherent limits imposed by nature.

  “When we were faced with the reality that, in fact, equal opportunities did not bring about more equal results, we were faced with another ideological dilemma. What is it that you want? Equal results or equal opportunities? Between the two, we felt that in Singapore, if we were to survive, we could not go the way of equal results; we had to give rewards in accordance with your effort
.

  “Now, we did try wherever possible, wherever more would bring about better performance. Never mind if it brings about equal results. If better housing, better health, better schools can bring about better results, let’s help them. But we know that we cannot close the gap. In other words, this Bell curve, which Murray and Herrnstein wrote about, became obvious to us by the late ’60s.”

  Unrepentant socialist

  Equal pay for unequal work is a surefire way to kill productive instincts, says Lee. On the contrary, a worker is motivated to work when he can earn more if he puts in the effort.

  Though a self-proclaimed social democrat, Lee recognised that the masses in society would require more than socialist zeal to drive them to their best productive effort. He concluded that, willy-nilly, individuals worked for themselves and their families. To shy away from this reality was ideological folly. Rather, the state would have to work with these instincts to help raise production and effort, and thereby improve the lot of the workers.

  “Perhaps we have underestimated the human problems of finding the techniques of organising men for production, and of persuading men to accept the disciplines of modernised agricultural and industrial production, if we are to fulfil their dreams. …

  “The capitalists make people work through monetary incentives which we call sweated and exploited labour. The communists do it by regimentation and exhortation and a systematically induced state of semi-hysteria for work, using both the stick and the carrot. The democratic socialist is less ruthless and consequently less efficient, torn between his loathing for regimentation and mass coercion and his inhibition to making more effective use of the carrot by his desire to distribute the rewards more fairly and equally too soon.

  “I am an unrepentant socialist. But in my own state, I have to concede that because it takes a long time to inculcate the high values of public duty and sense of service to the community, performance has been best only when workers are offered high incentives for high performance.

  “Our building programmes have progressed rapidly because we allowed the individual worker to earn as much as he can over his other workers by working as hard as he likes. Our lowest productivity level is in many sections of our own government services such as our publicly owned dockyards where managers are on salary scales instead of the profit-sharing and bonus schemes of private industry, and where our workers are on wage rates which apply equally between the proficient hardworking man and the mediocre and not so hardworking man.

  “We have had to recognise these faults. It has not changed our belief in the basic tenet that no man should exploit his fellowman. We believe it is immoral that the ownership of property should allow some to exploit others. But in order to get economic growth we have had to base our policies on the principle, ‘From each his economic best, To each his economic worth.‘ The ultimate ideal, ‘From each his best, To each his need’, can only be relevant after we have moved away from ignorance, illiteracy, poverty, and economic backwardness.”

  (Speech to Asian Socialist Conference, May 6, 1965; text on page 387)

  All men are equal, but how equal?

  This crucial distinction between equality of opportunity and outcomes was to become a guiding principle in Lee’s approach to policy-making in Singapore, whether in education or welfare.

  “If you want equal results, you’ve got to go one step further and either discriminate against the high performers or give more and better training to the low performers, which was what a section of the Fabian Society recommended.

  “They faced the same problem: the gap did not close although opportunities were equal. And they said, well, all the more reason why the best teachers should teach the least able to make up for the difference, and the good students should have the less able teachers because they don’t require the able teachers.

  “I read this in a Fabian pamphlet written by three schoolmasters. After that, I stopped my subscription, because they had gone mad!”

  Lee was also to develop a deep mistrust of welfare policies, as practised in Western welfare states. These, he believed, had drifted away from their original socialist goal of giving every man, regardless of his social status, an equal crack in the game of life. Instead, they raised false hopes, and furthermore, by promising men equal rewards, they often resulted in some choosing to opt out of the game altogether. He was also acutely aware that Singapore’s small, fledgling entrepôt economy could ill afford such indulgence.

  “In Singapore, a society barely above the poverty line, welfarism would have broken and impoverished us. My actions and policies over the last 30 years after 1959, since I was first saddled with responsibility, were dictated by the overriding need that they would work. I have developed a deep aversion to welfarism and social security, because I have seen it sap the dynamism of people to work their best. What we have attempted in Singapore is asset enhancement, not subsidies. We have attempted to give each person enough chips to be able to play at the table of life. This has kept the people self-reliant, keen and strong. Few have wasted their assets at the gaming table. Most have hoarded their growing wealth and have lived better on the interests and dividends they earn.

  “I subsequently read Frederick Hayek’s book, The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism. He expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Albert Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more ‘social justice’ than what historical evolution, or economic Darwinism, has been able to work out over the centuries.”

  Hayek, a leading conservative thinker and renowned critic of socialism, had dismissed as a “fatal conceit” the idea held by some modern-day intellectuals that human ingenuity could fashion a societal system which was more humane and fair than the invisible hand of the free market. Instead, he contended that an extended social order, such as the market system, was the result of a myriad of individual decisions. Each individual acted on the limited knowledge available to him, without being aware of the full consequences of his actions. Nor were the outcomes necessarily related to the intentions behind his decisions. The market mechanism caused a chain of adaptations and adjustments by men, each reacting to the multitude of signals from others in the system, to achieve order out of disorder. No superhuman being or committee could possibly possess all the knowledge held by these disparate individuals to work out a system that could do better, Hayek argued. Communist states, he added, had failed simply because they did not recognise or accept this human limitation.

  The road from serfdom

  The state of welfare today: French public sector employees protesting against the government’s plan to cut welfare benefits.

  As a student in Britain, Lee witnessed the early years of the popular cradle to grave welfare state. Even then, he was to think the idea worthy, though somewhat misguided. Over the years, though, he would watch the early good intentions go awry as the state-funded system bloated and the pressure for ever more handouts mounted, sapping once vibrant economies of the enterprise and vigour.

  “Welfarism, today, has a meaning which it did not have in the ’40s and ’50s. Welfarism today means the redistribution of wealth through subsidies that makes it possible for people to get many benefits in life with little effort. Therefore, it has led to the failure of society.

  “At the time when I admired them, Britain was moving from the privations of war where hardships were shared –‘hardships’ meaning shortage of food, clothing, housing, fuel – and it extended until several years after the war. They still had rationing for food, for clothes, and they were building houses, they had rent control, and they were beginning to solve the housing shortage by building council houses and so on. So it was seen as a logical extension of not only sharing hardships, but also sharing the benefits of peace.

  “It was subsequently, in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, that the effects of this redistribution of wealth, not d
ependent on individual effort, meant an economy which slowed down, and privation, or rather the lack of achievement and abundance, became apparent.

  “Welfarism, when persisted in, brought about the results which have given welfarism a bad name today. But it did not start off in the ’40s and ’50s with that clear stark meaning. At that time it was about a fair and just society. Equal shares for all and equal chances for all. Many believed, as I did, that equal chances would bring about a more equal result, but it did not.”

  Hence, Hayek contended, the systems evolved over the centuries were superior to any system men could devise. To him, traditions were not just arbitrary social rules. Rather, these had been selected through a competitive process: practices which were successful were perpetuated; those that were not were dropped. There was therefore a Darwinian process of social evolution, or trial and error, at work. Social norms and practices did not stem from some great mind, committee, god or underlying principle, which sanctioned some actions or men, he said.

  Lee shared these sentiments. He was to warn voters often of the dangers of welfare policies which, however well-intentioned, might result in unintended consequences. He had seen how such policies had undermined the work ethic, giving rise to a culture of dependency among the people, when benefits became entitlements and the desire for equal opportunities was turned into a demand for equal results. This was to become a constant theme in his speeches and election rallies, as in a 1976 attack on the Workers’ Party campaign slogan, “A Caring Society”.