Kishore Mahbubani, the permanent representative of Singapore to the United Nations, has a book out "Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West" and was speaking at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affiars. (This interview is a few years old it seems.)
The most interesting part for me was the Q&A part where Mahbubani talked about Japan within Asia.
QUESTION: One of the question you ask is: Where are the models within Asia for development? I believe you stressed Japan in particular. Could you expand on how Asian societies can draw upon their greatest strengths to fuse them with Western qualities that you have enumerated?
KISHORE MAHBUBANI: If you are in a comfortable, civilized room, like today, you accept the idea that we all have equal potential, and that there are no natural distinctions between the two of us.
But in the 18th century or 19th century, my ancestors happily accepted second-class status in the British colonial empire. And I asked myself: Why? Why did they allow themselves to be colonized? The colonization occurred in societies which were not necessarily backward compared to Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
One of the great miracles of world history is that a small country like Portugal carved colonies out of huge countries like China. How did a country of 3 million people go to China and say, I’m taking Macao from you? Asians should be forced to think, What did I do wrong? Why did I fall behind?
And what’s even more puzzling is that about 100 or 200 years after the great industrial revolutions, after the great economic advances in the West, still today only one Asian society has caught up with the West, and that is Japan. Maybe Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, et cetera, are getting close. But even a country like China, which was, by far, the most developed society a thousand years ago, has flipped so far back relative to the rest of the world. What has happened?
Asians are doing themselves a huge disfavor if they fail to analyze what has held them back, and, at the same time, they will lose another hundred years if they don’t understand what they must change within their own system to catch up with the West. It is very strange that I am seen sometimes as an advocate of superior Asian values, because when I look at Asian societies, I just see their weaknesses. It amazes me that they are still repeating the mistakes that they made in the past.
For example, in an essay I wrote on the turn of the millennium, I argued that the West succeeds on one very simple principle: meritocracy. You always ensure that you pick the best people to run your societies, your universe. A lesson I learned at Harvard after one year was how ruthlessly meritocractic Harvard was. They didn’t care if you were from Harvard or you had a Ph.D. from Harvard. If they appointed any professor, they made sure that professor was the best in his field anywhere in the world.
That’s the way you run a society and progress. And the trouble is that, unfortunately, most Asian societies haven’t learned such basic lessons.
If more Asian societies are going to achieve what Japan has done, there will have to be far more fundamental questioning than there exists today in the Asian world.
This is a fascinating, fascinating speech and interview. Highly recommended.
The interesting thing is that Japan is far from a meritocracy. For the past 60 years, since the end of WW2, Japan has never been a meritocracy. It is not one today. The prime example of the past few years is Shuji Nakamura, the scientist who developed the blue light-emitting diode which was necessary for the DVD and white LEDs for lighting. He was not compensated appropriately for his innovations and subsequently filed suit against his company. The Japanese courts ruled against him and today he is a professor at UC Santa Barbara.
Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West [carnegiecouncil.org]
I don't get it? My experience is Japan is just as backward in promoting people that have credientials instead of actual results so by his argument Japan should be just as behind as everyone else.
Or is that even though Japan still does that they do it to a lesser degree than the other Asian countries?
I've only read one plausible explanation for the differences between the West and everywhere else; because that's really what it is - there's the West, and then there's everything else. That explanation is not meritocracy - there's as much nepotism, favoritism, racism in both directions (anti-White a la Jayson Blair et. al. and anti-non-White), and other inefficiencies as anywhere else.
That guy doesn't want to accept the obvious, by highlighting "meritocracy" - if you know anything about Victorian-era England, the most powerful country in the world at that time, then you know that incompetence, nepotism and arrogance were their primary personal traits.
Read "Carnage and Culture" by Victor Hanson - you'll get a more convincing picture. He's an author and professor somewhere who focuses mostly on classical military history - but I think he's got the right idea. He focuses on culture as the driving factor, and pretty much rejects Jared Diamond's determinist nonsense on societal development.
The real key differences are these:
1) Primacy of the individual over the state - this does not meaningfully exist in any Asian culture that I'm aware of and it never has, including modern Japan; China is obviously the worst here, though (think about this when you watch "Hero" - primacy of the state overwhelms that film)
2) Individual property rights - witness Gen's banking woes as a symptom of a lack of this, and notice that his likely best option is a New York bank - in Japan! - which also doesn't really exist outside of the cultural West
And that's it. When those things get subverted, the society stagnates. You can see this in action in Western Europe today, where individual property rights have been subverted fairly dramatically - and Europe trembles under the burden. You can see it in reverse in Eastern Europe, where the introduction of property rights and the concept of the individual have led to a dynamism similar to the U.S. And you can see it in ancient China, where the benefits of autocracy (organization, wealth from an agricultural point of view) in a developing society were eventually overwhelmed.
Corruption is a societal ill, perhaps more widespread in Asia than elsewhere, but perhaps not. It is not, however, a root cause. The root causes, and history ancient and modern at least corroborates if not proves the case, are that without primacy of the individual, and without property rights, in the short, medium and long run your society will stagnate.
cdg
Christian, I think your emphasis on property rights is a bit too strong. While I'd agree that they're beneficial in general, I think more important is figuring out the cases in which they should be promoted/relied upon. It's been quite rigorously proven, for instance, that there are quite a few non-pathological cases in which markets do not reach optimal outcomes -- there are many examples arising out of game theory. And the argument for property rights essentially is the idea that they allow the market to allocate resources.
For a more real-world example, there's much concern that having intellectual property rights too strong already has and will continue to impede the development of new technology significantly. And be sure not to underestimate the usefulness of technological advancement and the corresponding economic benefits it brings with it when considering the long term success of societies.
Don't get me wrong: I believe we should default to market-based allocation unless there's reason to do otherwise. But at the same time, we need to recognize that there definitely are times when private property rights don't end up being the best solution. Finding the appropriate times at which to deviate from a market allocation then becomes a key issue.
Having said that, I have an unrelated point. I take issue with the example of Harvard in the speech. Sure, they may award positions on the basis of merit, but that's not necessarily the best strategy for long-term success. You can hire the best names in the field, but by the time they're recognized as the top of their field, many have already passed their most productive years. In academia, you're better off taking a mix of people, both well-established and unproven, and giving the latter a chance to challenge the ideas of the former. From what I can tell, places like Harvard are less willing to take such changes yet that's where you're more likely to get revolutionary advances rather than incremental improvements.
(Disclosure: I'm a grad student and expect to end up job hunting as a PhD in several years so I'm not unbiased on the last point.)
Jon:
It's observable that in some cases pure free-market economies can yield non-optimal allocations, but that wasn't really what I was driving at. I was attempting to make a more "social" point, rather than a hard, data-driven economic point. The core of my point is found in the primacy of the individual over the state, which almost definitionally leads to strong protection of personal property, at least in some general sense. But it's that authority being vested in the individual, rather than some abstraction, that's the key - all else flows from that, and not vice-versa, although there are a long series of disclaimers and whatnot, so that's an intentional simplification.
But to my point, even feudal Europe, which was theoretically pretty statist, nevertheless was a system of mutual individual obligations, granted heavily in favor of the top-end of the power structure. The concept of the individual was heavily ingrained from top to bottom - the obligations were not general to some abstraction, but were specific.
The riot of innovation that has occured over the past 600 years or so in the West, and particularly the U.S., is almost certainly due to virtually unrestrained freedom of the individual to do as they will. State-driven initiatives have almost universally failed to foster innovation anywhere at any time in history, except in the very narrowest sense. Basically, if you want to lead in the long run - as a nation - you have to sit back and keep your hands more or less off of how people elect to interact.
It's a denial of over 2,500 years of history to refute this concept. There are notable exceptions, but just letting people do whatever pretty much always wins.
cdg
On the general point, yeah, I agree. Based on some of your past comments I think we'd disagree about many details, but whatever.
As for state-driven initiatives, it seems it somewhat depends on how you define that. Government funding of science and engineering research has been wildly successful over the years, at least in the US (and I think the UK, too; I'm less sure of other places). I think the key is that even if they required a general area of research, it was often left open to the grant recipients to determine the specific solution, and in many cases the specific problem, even.
That seems to be increasingly in the past now, though. With more multitnational corporations, it'll be interesting to see the consequences on the balance of world power if that trend continues.
Better read this paper. Want to hear your opinion. Their views are ahead of our age.
The China Factor and the Overstretch of the US Hegemony
FIRST STORY
A view from an insider
George Zhibin Gu
CHINA IS BECOMING A GLOBAL THEATER
"A new power balance will emerge gradually and most likely indirectly"
STORY NUMBER TWO
A critical view from the center of the Global Power
Chalmers Johnson
CHINA REPLACED THE UNITED STATES AS THE TOP EXPORTER TO JAPAN
"The US is treading the same path followed by the former USSR"
THIRD STORY
A contrarian view from Europe
Andre Gunder Frank
RISING DRAGON
"We are witnessing the re-emergence of Asia"
...
http://www.gurusonline.tv/uk/conteudos/gu_report.asp