The Lee thesis

As a Singaporean I’m very well acquainted what Sen calls “the Lee thesis,” which broadly speaking says that freedom and rights tend to inhibit economic development. I’m not sure how many of you caught this, but Lee Kuan Yew passed away recently. It was a pretty big deal in Singapore, to put it mildly. Lee Kuan Yew towers over Singaporean history. I am fairly ambivalent about LKY, but I’d happily contend that he’s one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century. His life’s work has been to secure many of Sen’s multiform freedoms for Singaporeans. But he never believed much in democracy. 

This recent Atlantic article puts forward the Lee thesis quite succinctly:

The contrast between Singapore’s ranking in the first two categories, and the third, reminds us of a fundamental question of political philosophy: What is government for? Contemporary Western Europeans and Americans tend to answer that question by emphasizing political rights. But for Lee Kuan Yew, “the ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society establish conditions that improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.” As one of his fellow Singaporeans, Calvin Cheng, wrote this past week in The Independent, “Freedom is being able to walk on the streets unmolested in the wee hours in the morning, to be able to leave one’s door open and not fear that one would be burgled. Freedom is the woman who can ride buses and trains alone; freedom is not having to avoid certain subway stations after night falls.” Lee Kuan Yew always insisted that the proof is in the pudding: rising incomes for the broad middle class, health, security, economic opportunity.

I am personally on Sen’s side. I believe there is intrinsic value to democracy, and its instrumental and constructive impact on other freedoms is not to be neglected. But it surely cannot be prescribed indiscriminately for all societies (in all their disparate stages of development). Sen mentions that the strength of democracy is very much dependent on a society’s ability to seize it. A society must have civic virtue, there must be “vigor” in its multiparty politics, there has to be “dynamism of moral arguments” and “value formation.” This reminded me of Brettschneider’s value theory of democracy. Brettschneider outlined a few core constitutive values of democracy, but I do not remember him commenting on the constitution populace itself. This might be a fourth core value, then: it requires a people ready for it.