It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
replyNot a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story.
replyedit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
replyas a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience
replyI’m using “neoliberal” because it’s the closest American term for someone who supports free markets and free trade. He was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s economic ideas while diverging from Hayek’s views on individual liberty.
replyA better comparison might be Alexander Hamilton or Abraham Lincoln’s view of free markets combined with an interventionist government. But we don’t really have a neat label for that. In the U.S., free markets get conceptually lashed together with individual rights and limited government.