This book is next on my reading list. One question that's come to mind before having read the book is if Singapore is an example of a highly-legible planned state's success?
I wouldn't say so. Scale matters. What worked for Singapore, may not work for China.
There is this great article about the story of Singapore[0], it was also discussed on HN some time ago. I believe one of its main takes really resonates with "Seeing like a State" thesis.
Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases
Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.
>There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.
I find this quite interesting. As a programmer I find you can only get to the real requirements by experimenting and going back and forth with the customer.
Applied to politics it would be really helpful if we could easily experiment "in the small" and then incrementally scale what works. However democratic processes, at least in my country, are so slow that most people go for the "go big or go home" approach.
It would therefore be helfpul to have incremental laws where you say start the implementation at city level, maybe in a few test cities, if that seems favorable automatically scale to a few states, and if that still works scale to the whole country.
In a complex economy you need these small "tests" to maybe patch issues before scaling it to the whole country. And you would avoid costly mistakes, trying things that sound good on paper but eventually don't work out well.
Singapore and Hong Kong are exceptions to general trends. Being a small city state/port city gives you the ability to do things that larger states aren’t able to do (similar to banking havens in Europe like Luxembourg and Lichtenstein).
That's a beautiful question. I am not intimately familiar with Singapore's planning processes. The authors above (Jane Jacobs, James C. Scott) would argue that the best cities/countries are ones that have a centralized strategy that leaves enough leeway to enable each community to optimize their specific situation on their own.
I don't know if Singapore does that or not. Do you have a POV?
I've been meaning to read Lee Kuan Yew's "From Third World to First" to learn more but haven't found the time.
Singapore does have the advantage of being compact and having the ability to set policy at all levels at once. The US can't do that, because cities and towns depend on the state and federal governments for funding, but those same cities and towns have some autonomy in how they run day-to-day governance.
