It was not that long ago that my mentors and colleagues would routinely say it sufficed to study how the US ran political and economic life, for right there was the model of universalist success. The only exceptions were too special and too small, and almost surely unsustainable.
We are now more than a quarter century after Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, more than two decades after Paul Krugman's The Myth of Asia's Miracle. Today, none of that universalism is obvious. Instead, today six years after the fall of self-proclaimed The Great Moderation in Western economies, we read the Economist newspaper reflecting how "The dysfunction in Brussels and Washington will be all the more noticeable because of (another) worry about Western democracy: there is now an Asian alternative."
Lee Kuan Yew, the original independent thinker who carved out that alternative, died today. He had provided the vision and political leadership to build out of an island tropical swamp a modern metropolis with a clean, small, efficient public sector; an average income higher than that in the US; and endowed Singapore with landscapes of political awareness, education, industry, and high technology unsurpassed in the world. He immeasurably improved the lives of millions of Singaporeans directly. Leaders from states far bigger than Singapore consistently sought out his views and advice.