Otium Den recap:

Pro-natalism doesn’t work. Communities do.

Britain needs muscular citizenship

AI vs The Industrial Revolution

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

I know that my bi-monthly musings can often sound like a paean to Singapore. If only Britain did this like the city state, it would be so much better off.

Singapore thinks longterm. Policy doesn’t bend to every fleeting whim. But that obduracy is made possible by political apathy. The People’s Action Party’s (PAP) grip on power isn’t just a result of press control and nine-day election campaigns. Ask a Singaporean about politics and you are unlikely to elicit a forthright response. Such neutrality is generally born of disengagement rather than fear of saying the wrong thing.

The upside is a government which gets on with things instead of chasing polls. Consistency compounds, and capital flows to a predictably business-friendly regime. Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew always argued that people care more about prosperity than democracy. So far, so true, as citizens prove willing to sacrifice a little of the latter for more of the former.

But is there another trade-off to this trade-off?

Does Singapore’s political order quash entrepreneurialism? The country’s biggest media outlet, The Straits Times, recently confronted that conundrum. Given Singapore produces top students, why aren’t there more entrepreneurs? Perhaps a practical consequence, it suggests, of living in a small country. Six million residents is hardly a mass market.

However, bigger opportunities lie close by. Singapore shares a maritime border with Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country. It is just 600 miles south of Vietnam, one of the world’s fastest growing economies. In other words, given the relative know-how and capital depths in Singapore, it should be a hub for start-ups to target the wider region.

And yes, it has famous domestic success stories that did exactly that. The ride-hailing app Grab is one example. It commands a 70% share of the wider regional market. But I’d argue it demonstrates execution over ideation. Grab took a proven model from Uber and localised it. It received strong backing from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek and it benefitted from Singapore’s early deregulation of the industry. I don’t mean to pettily undermine its achievements in driving Uber out. But it was never a crazy moonshot idea that someone took a punt on.

Singapore’s younger citizens aren’t immune from the fabled colds of American sneezes. They imbibe start-up rhetoric from self-improvement podcasts and the like. But there’s a chasm between the chatter and the action. 37% of students say they have given “repeated serious thoughts” to founding a business. Yet only one percent are active founders, under half of the OECD average.

Hence, there is some substance to more informal thoughts on Singapore’s perceived lack of “hustle”. A local on X argues that “Singapore’s system is so well-designed that the rational move for a smart person is to never leave it.” There is, he argues, an established route from its flagship university NUS to its flagship bank DBS. Work hard, don’t rock the boat, and you’ll be earning $120,000 (£70,000) by 30. Another user adds less politely, “running a startup in Singapore is so negative EV (expected value) that you select for retards who failed out of the system.”

That explains why small bootstrapped businesses can be viewed sceptically. Starting one suggests there is something wrong with you. It’s an impression I gauged from running my own venture here. Local suspicion only subsided once we had a financial track record and sales tax registration that showed we had some clients.

You see the same trend with the mature start-ups Singapore attracts today. OpenAI established its APAC headquarters here in 2024. The city-state’s order makes it the obvious place for the tech behemoth to expand its regional reach. But providing safe harbour is a very different proposition to dynamic cultures where companies like this begin. The same story persists in the entrepreneurs who make Singapore their home. Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin is one of Singapore’s richest residents. But it’s a place for him to protect and invest his vast fortune, rather than make it.

Britain’s current malaise makes Singapore’s problem - the career opportunities are too good to launch a start-up - look like a good one to have.

But there is a deeper link here between political and entrepreneurial cultures. Dynamic forms of both speak to a marketplace of ideas. It engenders a sense that things could always be different. And it widens horizons. It’s no coincidence that orderly regimes like Singapore also tend to lack much of a cultural hinterland.

Nor is it a coincidence that Britain, one of the world’s oldest democracies, has such outsized commercial and cultural influence. Things that perhaps live on more vibrantly through the descendants of its political dissidents in America today. But Britain nonetheless still punches above its weight in the entrepreneurial arena. It ranks in the world’s top top three start-up ecosystems (above Singapore) and London remains Europe’s number one start-up hub.

It’s a tribute to a spirit that survives in spite of political dysfunction. Britain’s democracy has shaped a culture of ingenuity, expertise, and even eccentricity that forms the foundation of an entrepreneurial class. But that same democracy now chases a popular sentiment that views entrepreneurs as wealth hoarders, rather than creators.

So we get punitive legislation in the form of Labour’s new Employment Rights Act that makes a bad hire an existential risk. Or increasing dividend taxes that incentivise business owners to optimise expenses instead of maximising profits. Or struggling capital markets where pernicious pension reforms and equity taxes are undoing the London Stock Exchange’s historic preeminence. Great British companies subsequently pursue American listings where policy doesn’t impede liquidity.

Britain has something rare, and must ask the electorate if they really want to throw it away. Because Brits will always create great companies, and the wealth and jobs that follow them. Do we want those founders and workforces to stay in Britain? Or take their nascent success stories to greener pastures elsewhere. There are plenty ready to welcome them.

Otium Den recap:

Britain needs muscular citizenship

AI vs The Industrial Revolution

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

The New York Times generously called the late Paul Ehrlich “premature”. But the biologist’s apocalyptic predictions about overpopulation were simply wrong.

Instead of Ehrlich’s suggested baby licenses, most advanced nations now actively encourage procreation as declining fertility rates leave fewer taxpayers to cover the costs of an ageing population. As the alternative quick-fix of immigration proves increasingly unpopular, pro-natalism is re-emerging as an alternative. But both the conservative and liberal guises of such policies, encouraging nuclear families and equalised parental duties respectively, have yielded little success. Chiefly, because they treat this as a recent phenomenon.

Ordo Amoris

In fact the fertility rate in England and Wales has been falling since the 19th Century and was already below replacement levels of 2.1 by the 1930s, when women in the workforce were rare and religiosity still pervasive. The post-war baby boomers were a brief correction to this trend.

That longer history correlates with the decline of community. Horizons grew beyond the small radius of one’s birthplace after the Industrial Revolution. And citizens took on direct relationships with the state rather than smaller localities. We do not have to idealise an earlier era, where infant mortality and absolute poverty were rife, to recognise this change inverted ordo amoris - the theological concept that JD Vance and Rory Stewart sparred over last year.

It describes the Christian idea that one’s obligations start locally and grow outwards. Family, then community, country, and so on. Stewart contested Vance’s view on biblical grounds but it is little different to the Burkean underpinnings of the conservatism Stewart once professed. It is Burke’s “little platoons”, the smaller organic associations that constitute a larger nation. Any hope of resuscitating birth rates must start here rather than relying on an abstract sense of duty to the nation or potential benefits from its purse.

Asia’s birth rate crisis

Asia demonstrates the futility of a centrally-led approach. Fertility rates in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are some of the world’s lowest, hovering just above or below one. They are frantically rowing back on earlier Malthusian thinking. China officially abandoned its one child policy only a decade ago, and now levies additional tax on contraceptives in response to record-low births.

Singapore promoted a “Stop-at-Two” campaign in the 1970s. But in 2012, the government declared the evening of National Day to be National Night. Its promotional video included the lyrics:

I know you want it, so does the SDU… the birth rate ain’t going to spike itself.

Asia challenges some of the myths conservative-minded thinkers cling to about fertility. Patriotism is not enough. All six countries record high levels of national pride and South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore enforce compulsory military service. Nor is a greater sense of familial obligation sufficient. Intergenerational living is far more common. Singapore even has a Maintenance of Parents Act that allows residents over 60 to claim allowances from their children, if they cannot support themselves.

Furthermore, the region’s ethnic homogeneity does not help. That seems to conflict with Professor David Solomon’s 2024 study of American women, which found those living in less racially diverse areas had more children. But that is a result of what the lack of diversity implies, rather than the uniformity in itself. It suggests continuity in the form of families living in the same place for a long time with few newcomers.

Compare that to China where the government’s own 2021 census records a “floating population” of 376 million. This means almost a third of the country lives outside of its registered internal origin under the hukou system. It does not matter that the vast majority of these migrants live among their ethnic counterparts. It matters that they are removed from their own communities. Perhaps a more pressing issue than condom prices.

State intrusion

Seeking better opportunities is a core conservative belief, echoed in Norman Tebbit’s on your bike aphorism. But in Britain, it’s too often a case of mobility for mobility’s sake. In 1960, five percent of 17-30 year olds were enrolled in higher education. By 2019, it had reached 50%, fulfilling Tony Blair’s 1999 target. Many of these new students leave their communities and incur a lot of debt without enhancing their life chances.

Alongside these arbitrary university targets, the state has also disrupted communities through regulation in the form of housebuilding and local bureaucracy. Baby boomers benefitted from the former through mass-building schemes in the 1930s. Today, regulation restricts supply, pricing out residents of increasingly affluent areas. Examples of the latter reside in the demise of the civic participation that marked the 1960s. DBS checks - an overreaction to the rare episodes of insidious exploitative figures - increase the burden on scouts or junior sports teams that once provided community childcare.

Unlike Asia, Britain follows its Western peers in looking to immigration as a solution to falling birth rates. But this compounds the hollowing out of its communities. Take Boston in Lincolnshire. Oxford University’s Migration Observatory records that its foreign-born population increased by 467% between 2001 and 2011. Policy Exchange calls it the least integrated place in Britain. In 2024, a Boston school was selected as one of five in a nationwide trial of AI-based translation technology, suggesting many pupils and their parents cannot speak English.

Boston was hardly a bastion of tranquility needlessly disrupted. It was already a post-agricultural market town losing its way. But patching up its economic listlessness with immigration just depletes an already lost community, instead of engaging with the harder problem of rejuvenation.

Why community matters

Families need a greater non-transactional security blanket. As the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy writes in Mothers and Others, “large-scale co-operative endeavours involving people who are not necessarily close kin,” has always been an essential part of raising children. But that social reciprocation depends on familiarity and trust. Qualities that reside in communities, not the state.

This does not mean harking back to some anachronistic rural idyll. Mobility, ambition and choice are good things. But the state tramples on the latter when housing regulation prices young families out of stable communities, university targets needlessly uproot a generation, bureaucracy strangles voluntary associations, and immigration further corrodes “left behind” towns. Destroying communities removes the agency of those who want to stay part of one.

Today’s pro-natalists only echo Paul Ehrlich’s mistaken belief that the government could and should control fertility rates. His analysis was as wrong as his prescription. Boosting fertility is a bottom-up endeavour. A thriving nation relies upon vigorous communities.

Otium Den recap:

AI vs The Industrial Revolution

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

My memories of Japan are coloured by British triumphalism. In 2019, I was in Oita to see England thrash Australia in the Rugby World Cup. And last November, I saw Oasis play to a sell-out crowd in Tokyo.

Touring acts are more welcome than those putting down permanent roots. Japan’s foreign resident population is growing and, at four million, now constitutes around three percent of the population. They are readily identifiable in such an ethnically homogeneous country.

Ethnicity & Identity

Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who models herself on Britain’s own Iron Lady, won a landslide victory last month. She is pro-market and firm on immigration. But, as yet, her latter stance is heavier on rhetoric than policy. Because Japan is in a precarious position. How does it balance public demand to retain a clear national identity with the structural challenges of the world’s oldest population? Barring a sudden reproductive resurgence or a robotics revolution, foreign workers have to fix lopsided demographics.

Japan is an outlier because national identity is so intertwined with ethnicity. But the subject is nonetheless getting a bit more mainstream in Britain. Elon Musk recently swung behind Rupert Lowe’s splinter group Restore, because it takes predictions of a white British minority seriously. Nigel Farage’s caution about who that conversation encourages seemingly lost him the prospect of Musk’s backing.

Polite conversation avoids the topic because Britain’s demographic transformation was unplanned.

In 1945, Britain was almost as ethnically uniform as contemporary Japan. Politicians did not anticipate that post-war immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia would change that. It was then imagined as a temporary response to acute labour shortages. In 1956, debates in the House of Lords still referred to Commonwealth arrivals as “visitors”. The historian Colin Holmes notes that migrants largely shared that impression, writing in John Bull’s Island that they viewed themselves as “temporary labourers or sojourners…hoping to return home with needed capital.”

Social change was an unintended consequence of addressing economic needs. That does not make it inherently good or bad. But it suggests the country never really confronted what British identity meant once it could no longer be assumed. The familiarity of language and looks is easier to grasp than values when it comes to creating a sense of belonging.

Passive vs Active citizenship

That search for shared values is made harder by what Suella Braverman condemns as the “casual, anything-goes approach to culture and identity”. Nebulous catch-all appeals to “tolerance”, or worse, “diversity”, are flimsily ascribed as defining national characteristics. It lacks any active sense of participation. It undervalues Britain by negating any real commitment to it.

It’s here, of course, that I must go back to Asia to suggest a different way of doing things. In Singapore, my immigration status is made very apparent. There is little sensitivity in designating Employment Pass (EP) holders like me as “foreigner” in official correspondence. Singapore’s foreign population is substantial – constituting almost two million of its six million population – but clearly delineated. We are not part of the civic realm and have no access to state-funded services.

There is a route to deeper integration through Permanent Residency (PR). But there are strict qualifying criteria and even successful applicants do not gain permanent rights. PR holders must renew their status every five years. It can be revoked for criminal misconduct or a deemed lack of economic contribution. Increased civic status also comes with accompanying responsibilities. Most notably, your male offspring will be subject to compulsory National Service at 18.

Every year, around 25,000 PRs go one step further and obtain citizenship. There is no explicitly ethnic aspect to this. But it’s generally recognised that it follows founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s strategy of pursuing a certain demographic equilibrium. He pledged that Singapore would always be majority Chinese with smaller Malay and Indian minorities. New citizenships broadly preserve that balance.

Speaking at Imperial College in 2002, Lee argued that Britain’s lack of similar micromanagement breeds an ailing society. He said that importing workers without any plan for uniting races or cultures led to ghettoisation. Something that was evident only last week as the Greens won in Gorton and Denton by appealing to extranational affiliations in the Middle East.

But such technocratic planning is not possible in Britain. The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood revealed in November that the previous government’s attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs in the health and care sector led to the arrival of 616,000 individuals between 2022 and 2024. If Britain is overshooting those targets by 1,400 percent, it is unlikely to fare too well with strategically planned quotas.

The more pertinent lesson lies in what Lee observes Britain has lost since 1945: “that quiet pride and self-confidence, that national cohesiveness that marked out the British people after victory in World War Two.”

It stems from insecurity in what being British really means. It is no longer something simply inherited nor is it anything easily articulated. Restoring confidence instead requires a sense of reciprocity. Singapore does this well in its prohibition of dual citizenship and enforcement of National Service. It forces citizens to actively participate and forego any other national loyalties.

Britain, by contrast, asks very little of its people. Even though it’s to my advantage, I’m always astonished at the treatment of Brits abroad. As Dubai expats discover now, we retain full access to state services without any of the onerous tax implications. Similarly, it allows its passport to be part of an international portfolio – somewhere to hedge your bets rather than commit.

And it offers few binding experiences to really bring an increasingly diverse population together. Unfortunately it came towards the back end of his premiership but a similar national service scheme was one of Sunak’s brighter ideas, particularly when university increasingly looks an imprudent bet.

Britain needs a more muscular vision of identity rooted in commitment. Pride cannot reside only in the vestiges of cultural triumphs abroad. It must inspire loyalty at home too.

Otium Den recap:

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

Dario Amodei kickstarted the recent peak in AI hype with a 20,000-word essay on the technology’s imminent dangers.

Released just as his company Anthropic (which counts Rishi Sunak amongst its advisers) embarked on a new US$30 billion funding round, cynics may infer ulterior motives in Amodei’s elucidation of AI’s awesome powers. Nevertheless, its renewed prominence leaves governments responding to an age-old question:

How to harness technological revolutions while limiting societal disruption?

The Singapore context: capitalism as a means

The subject was top of the agenda in Singapore as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong presented the country’s budget last Thursday. New policies include generous tax deductions for businesses’ AI expenditures and free access to premium AI tools for Singaporeans who take up certain AI training courses. “AI is a powerful tool”, said Wong, but “it must serve our national interests and our people.”

In Singapore, capitalism and its innovations have always been a means, not an end. Something that was sometimes misunderstood by British Brexiteers imagining Singapore-on-Thames as bastion of laissez-faire economics. The better analogy is Vote Leave’s own Take Back Control when it comes to market forces. Use them but steer them.

Free-market is not entirely organic

The problem is that Britain lacks this same autonomy. The Conservatives share the blame for that. Tension between its strands of economic liberalism and paternalism manifest in strategic incoherence. That split was always present but more easily reconciled when Britain was a leading power. Perhaps the closest historical parallel to AI disruption, the Industrial Revolution, illustrates this.

Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation is an account of Britain’s pioneering capitalism in the 19^th Century. Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew who first fled from Budapest in 1919, then Vienna in 1933, following the respective ascension of fascist regimes. He argues free markets underpinned this terror, a result of trying to square the subsequent disorder. Polanyi’s own moderate socialism looks a tad naïve given the authoritarianism he witnessed first-hand. Particularly his belief that we can trust an interventionist government if it is “true to its task of creating more abundant freedom for all.”

But an errant prognosis does not diminish what Polanyi gets right. Chiefly that the market forces guiding the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s economic supremacy were not entirely organic. Britain’s rise rested not only on technology but government decisions about trade, finance and property. Empire and global reserve currency status meant Britain naturally absorbed the advantages of a new free-market structure.

Whigs vs Conservatives

Domestic politics then debated the balance between accelerationism and gradualism. Polanyi’s own belief that the “rate of change is no less important than direction itself” was articulated by 19^th Century Conservatives. Figures like Richard Oastler jostled with Whig Prime Minister Early Grey over the 1834 Poor Law, which denied the rights of the poor to subsistence. The former believed unemployment was a manifestation of the social dislocation wrought by sudden change. The latter that it was simply an unwillingness to work for the wages available in the labour market.

The same Whig-Conservative divide shows up in earlier views of Napoleon Bonaparte. Whigs like Charles James Fox were sympathetic to the Corsican General. Firstly, because his European reforms offered trading benefits, with newly liberalised and legalised economies. Secondly, because they resented the costs of fighting such a drawn-out war. It was the Conservatives, under Pitt the Younger, who were far more obstinate in enduring heavy taxation and economic blockades to keep fighting. Trade and sovereignty pulled in different directions, but Britain was strong enough to manage the tension.

Disparity was manageable because Britain held such sway over market mechanisms. It could repeal the mercantilist Navigation Acts in 1849, giving up privileged shipping rights because naval supremacy allowed it to row back if necessary. Paternalistic public health reforms and workplace safety legislation were possible because Britain had the fiscal means to do so. Its economic pre-eminence entitled it to indulge both factions.

Managing tensions in the modern era

Today’s Conservative Party is an amalgamation of these differing proclivities. The Whigs, and its subsequent Liberal iteration, were subsumed into this new broad church in 1912. We recognise these different strands in the form of Disraeli’s one-nation conservatism and Gladstone’s classical liberalism. But as Britain’s influence has diminished, so these result in contradictions. It does not have the economic might to sustain both visions. It has to offer a transparent choice – going for growth or a more paternalistic state-directed gradualism.

The lesson from Singapore is that it is too late to have both. Its autonomy to handle AI comes from years of consistent government and strategic planning. It has built huge domestic savings, enshrined balanced budgets in law and maintained a strong industrial base (manufacturing still represents 25 percent of GDP). Britain has none of these things.

Accelerationism vs Gradualism: pick a side

But it has many other advantages. It is a talent hub. Americans rave about the opportunity to hire top-tier talent at a third of the price. And (for now) it is free of the EU regulation that threatens to stifle AI development. What it lacks in infrastructure it can incentivise the Anthropics of this world to build through de-regulation and tax incentives if accompanied by liberal energy and planning reform.

Offering such perks would require a drastic overhaul of the state. And proponents may be buoyed by recent evidence that the British public is feeling a little less statist. Recent research reported an all-time high of Brits saying tax and spending should be reduced. But it still pales in comparison to the number calling for more or the same.

The alternative is to be upfront about trade-offs. Britain is unlikely to be a leader in any AI revolution. But it will do its best to manage it. It will protect jobs, regulate where necessary and guard social cohesion. It’s a perfectly reasonable Oastlerian conservative position when delivered with clarity. And perhaps, if Amodei’s claims prove overblown, it will look prescient.

Control through Choice

The Conservatives need to define what they stand for as they go up against Reform as the party of the right. They can be guardians of paternalism or engineers of growth. But it is dishonest to pretend both are possible. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, Britain does not have the luxury of leading this one. Control only comes from informed choice.

And the Conservatives must decide what tradition they stand for.

Otium Den recap:

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

You can regularly eat and drink for free in Singapore.

Just turn up at one of the British property seminars that pepper the city’s function rooms. Developers and agents swallow the cost of a few freeloaders because it has been a fruitful market. Singaporeans are the second largest group of foreign home owners across England and Wales.

Demand isn’t spurred by colonial nostalgia. Rather, Singaporeans can buy a second home in Britain with far less hassle than in Singapore. And developers welcome the liquidity lacking in those supported only by a British-earned income. Just as a punitive tax regime leaves British buyers short of a deposit, so builders find construction can leave them short of a profit once they have navigated nebulous planning diktats.

Homeowning electorate

Confronting the resulting housing bubble may look awkward for the Conservatives. Even in 2024, 37 percent of outright homeowners voted for them, a 12-point lead on Labour in second place. But the consequences of ducking the issues are starker. Those homeowners will see values deplete anyway under Labour’s trajectory of making everyone poorer. And the Conservatives will make no inroads with a generation shut out of the housing market.

It’s a lesser problem in Singapore where 90% of citizens are homeowners. A product of mass public housebuilding under the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Only Singaporeans are eligible to buy these properties. Buyers draw upon their Central Provident Fund (CPF), a forced personal savings system to put down a deposit on HDBs’ subsidised values. Mortgages are offered with fixed interest rates of 2.6%.

The HDB market is heavily restricted. They can’t be purchased by non-citizens and Singaporeans can only own one unit at a time. Re-sales are prohibited for five years, so there’s no “flipping” on the back of sudden value increases. If Singaporeans want to buy a second home, they must enter the fully private market, which constitutes just 20% of the country’s housing stock. Doing so incurs 20% stamp duty on any second property and 30% on additional ones after that.

Foreign capital = much-needed liquidity

Hence why buying in Britain is much more attractive where non-resident stamp duty is only two percent. With far lower tax rates and HDBs available at 3.8 times average income, Singaporeans have the means to buy British stock. Penalising such foreign buyers may play well optically. But as it is, they’re vital in getting homes built. Britain’s largest developer Barratt Redrow recently blamed a lack of them for missing its sales target. International capital helps developers meet affordable housing provisions under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act. Without buyers for higher-price units, the think-tank Onward reports that the cost of delivering new homes often exceeds their capital values.

Section 106 is one of many regulatory hurdles strangling supply. Onward’s research shows that small and medium-sized (SME) developers have been effectively priced out of the market. In the late 1980s, SMEs delivered about 40% of new homes; by 2007, 30%; and today just 12%. They don’t have the scale or balance sheet to weather the costly and cumbersome planning permission process.

Land grabs vs inertia

Mired in such regulation, Britain’s housing policy is hardly less statist than Singapore. But that statism resides in obstructiveness instead of forcefulness. Singapore can build because the state owns 90% of the land (HDBs and most private housing are on 99-year leases). A situation engineered through the Land Acquisition Act of 1966 that empowers the government to buy any land it wishes at current market value. It is frustrating for golfers as the city-state’s few remaining courses are forcibly purchased to make way for new housing. But it gives the government total control over the supply-chain and costs.

A similar land grab is probably only contemplated by Zack Polanski in Britain. And it’s more likely to resemble Zimbabwe if it comes under the Greens. But there are other lessons Britain can learn from Singapore:

1. Provide tax-free incentives for young people to save for a house -- Robert Colville writes in The Times that Brits with student loans are paying 50p in tax from every pound they earn over £50,000 and 71p over £100,000. Getting a deposit together is often hopeless for even top-earning graduates without help from the bank of mum and dad. Something like Singapore’s CPF would allow workers to save into a specific house-buying account. It need not be compulsory nor state managed. But it should be ring-fenced and explicitly linked to first-home purchase.

2. Remove uncertainty -- Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority fixes land use, density and infrastructure expectations in advance. Builders operate within known limits. They don’t have to contend with Section 106-esque regulations that leave developers unsure if local housing associations will even buy the affordable housing they’re obligated to provide. Get things built first.

3. No more virtue-signalling -- Britain needs to stop concerning itself with fringe measures that play only to the politics of envy. I recently went to an event at the Seven Palms complex on Singapore’s Sentosa island, an enclave of wealthy foreigners. It had the ghostly feel of many of London’s high-end developments, with owners mostly in absentia. We may criticise the atmosphere created by such projects but they’re incidental to the wider problem. It’s virtue signalling rather than serious policy.

Britain’s housing crisis is not unique amongst developed nations. But alongside an acute supply shortage, it faces weakening demand. If the most talented young people don’t believe there’s a realistic route to buying, they will leave. And house prices will fall anyway while the country gets poorer. Fixing things now may unsettle Conservative voters who sit on high paper valuations. But a reckoning will come anyway. Perhaps those free evenings out in Singapore will start to dwindle.

Singapore shows the benefits of a government that acts forcefully. Britain shows the consequences of a government that meanders: forcing risk onto developers, disincentivising building and earning, and pandering to NIMBYism.

Noel Skelton’s property-owning democracy was once an inspiration to a young Lee Kuan Yew. The Conservatives need to reclaim that legacy to feed aspiration rather than resentment.

Otium Den recap:

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Deferred gratification is a hard sell, especially when it comes to money. In politics, it’s easier to offer the electorate something now than greater, but uncertain, future rewards. A short-term bias that I’ve written about recently.

Singapore’s solution is an implicit bargain that trades minimal scrutiny for long-term delivery. But it’s not always harmonious. The Leader of the Opposition was recently removed under accusations of lying under oath. Reported but not dwelt upon in the state-controlled press, Facebook reveals undercurrents of discontent. A local commenter accuses the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) of playing politics rather than addressing the cost of living.

The PAP’s economic record looks pretty sound on paper. GDP per capita has doubled since 2000 to around $90,000 today. But it matters little if people don’t feel they’re getting wealthier. I saw the investor Bill Ackman address that issue at a conference in Singapore last week, giving the American context. His only criticism of President Trump was around proposals for credit card fee capping. A policy error born of the need to win support ahead of the November midterms, Ackman argued.

Zero-sum vs Positive-sum

Short-term catnip is offered up because a buoyant stock market does not impress Americans without 401ks (America’s personal pension scheme). Ackman says it makes them actively resentful of other citizens’ growing wealth. And that situation is even more perilous in Britain. Around 60 percent of Americans are actively invested in the stock market, while barely a quarter of Brits hold shares outside their pensions. It leaves Brits mostly unaware of what they’re invested in and how that portfolio is performing. Americans feel some control over their financial future. Brits don’t.

This breeds a zero-sum approach to money that manifests in pernicious ways. The first takes the form of policies that assume a settled pool of capital and aim to redistribute, like corporate tax hikes or Labour’s new Employment Rights Act. The second is an unhealthy attachment to property, an asset class which relies on scarcity. As Mike Bird argues in his excellent new book, The Land Trap, it’s impossible to achieve mass home ownership and constant rapid increases in the value of land. 65 percent of Brits are homeowners and, for many, that asset constitutes their sole sense of financial security. No wonder politicians are so afraid of meddling.

This real estate obsession obscures the positive-sum - one person getting it doesn’t mean another losing out - opportunities in the stock market. In his Reform defection speech, Robert Jenrick highlights that British houses cost more than in any other OECD country. But how many people know that a 30-year investment (from 1993 to 2023) in the FTSE All-Share Index, with reinvested dividends, yielded a 630 percent return? In that same period, average house prices rose by 427 percent. The latter a product of what Bird calls the “good fortune to buy in a particular place, at a particular time.” The former is a predictable result of patience and discipline.

Trump Accounts

The first step in fixing this is education. Ackman talked approvingly of America’s new “Trump Accounts” for newborns. The government credits $1,000 to these accounts when opened by parents. Additional deposits can then be made directly by parents or their employers (for whom it will be tax deductible). Deposits must be invested in an American stock index. Using average historical returns, The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) estimates that balances will be worth over $18,000 for babies born in 2026 by the time they are 28 if no further deposits are made. It could be over a million dollars with maximum contributions.

Based on a liberal estimate of 700,000 births in Britain each year, a similar British scheme would cost about £525 million a year if we assume 100 percent take up and no eligibility criteria. Even then, it’s a rounding error in government budgets and about 25 percent of annual spend on Winter Fuel Payments. Account holders, who can’t touch the funds until they’re at least 18, would see what compound investing can achieve.

Australia’s superannuation or Singapore’s CPF

Driving awareness of these market forces can change British attitudes. Most importantly when it comes to pensions. Maybe I’m particularly disorganised but I don’t even know where my pension holdings are from my time working at British companies. Employers choose schemes, not employees, so every new job creates a new pension pot. There is no visibility or agency, and performance is often poor. The Times reports that one provider delivers just 1.7 percent annual returns. It is recklessness disguised as caution given that almost any tracker fund would deliver something far better.

Australia is one example Britain should look to for ideas. Ackman spoke warmly about its superannuation system, predicted to become the world’s second largest savings pool by 2031. It already has more retirement savings than any other country per capita. Employers must pay 12 percent of employees’ salary into their respective funds. Australians see this as an immediate credit into their investment accounts, as part of a strategy they pick. Compare that psychological effect to Brits seeing pension deductions sit alongside tax on pay slips, with little awareness of where that money is going or what it is doing.

Coming back to Singapore, it’s also worth looking at its Central Provident Fund (CPF). It offers the transparency Britain so sorely lacks in that one account follows you around and balances are viewable at any one time. But it’s also sui generis. Singaporeans can use CPF to buy state-subsidised homes. They’re also a way of protecting citizens in the absence of a comprehensive welfare system. So lower taxes are offset by the need to fund one’s own healthcare and retirement. Consequently, CPF returns are guaranteed by the government, which invests this large pool of forced savings in its sovereign wealth funds. The downside is these set returns can lead to the latent rumblings I referenced at the outset. People can always ask why this paternalistic approach shouldn’t grant them higher rates of returns, especially if inflation is running hot.

Agency at the heart of an investor-society

Britain’s own investor-society needs more agency than this. Rising house prices are a lottery. Buy a one up one down in Hackney 30 years ago and own a multi-million-pound asset today. But the stock market rewards prudence and planning. Let workers see the rewards of compound investing and you change an entitlement culture. It’s no longer about sharing scarce resources but building something bigger. Deferred gratification becomes possible to sell again.

Otium Den recap:

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Half the World Away

I’m having my best season ever in Fantasy Premier League. I’ve improved on my usual two millionth place finish and sit in the top 55,000 of the 12 million plus people who play the game.

It involves picking Premier League footballers within a given budget and earning points for their performances. In previous seasons, I’ve avidly read and listened to the vast resources available to inform one’s selection. It’s been a poor return on investment. This season’s success has come from a different approach – blocking out that noise and sticking with a few conviction picks through leaner weeks.

What does this have to do with democracy?

I think about it as I read Matthew Syed’s rousing defence of it in The Times. Syed points to global polls that ask people where they would live if the world truly was their oyster. Liberal democracies, in the form of the biggest Western powers, always come out on top. These revealed preferences, Syed argues, prove we should all be a little more positive about a system he calls a “belter”.

I’m a big fan of Syed. And his article is timely, as figures on the left idealise Nicolás Maduro’s rule and ones on the right suggest Adolf Hitler was actually a “cool” guy.

But Syed’s democratic cheerleading risks complacency — the belief that all will be OK if we bask in the glow of morally superior government. It ignores its inherent flaws. Chiefly that you can win votes by people-pleasing and changing policies on a whim, rather than through delivering results.

Democracy ≠ Prosperity

The countries everyone wants to live in are also the richest, and democracy is not always a prerequisite of that wealth. I don’t see an obvious correlation in Asia where the so-called Asian Tigers - South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore - are far wealthier than most of their neighbours. The former two achieved rapid economic growth before democratic transitions in the 1980s and 90s. Hong Kong was not a democracy under British rule (and even less so back in Chinese hands). Meanwhile my home of Singapore blends elections with more authoritarian practices.

The city state only gets a fleeting mention in Syed’s article. It’s an uncomfortable fit with his thesis that “economic success and democratic institutions are indivisible”. Singapore lacks a free press, is accused of gerrymandering, and its founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was hardly effusive about democracy’s benefits. Lee believed it produced “erratic” results as fickle electorates “vote for a change for change’s sake.”

Lee thought that such arbitrariness threatens economic development. Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds are a good example because they require the discipline of delayed gratification that free elections can thwart. Today its total combined assets are estimated to be US$1.7 trillion. Building that was painful. It meant imposing high compulsory savings on workers, restricted welfare and no immediate dividends. The result is that investment returns now fund about 20 percent of government spending, instead of high taxes or borrowing. That long-term planning would have been jeopardised by a realistic opposition party campaigning to use this money for a welfare splurge.

“It’s all fake”

It’s quixotic to believe democracy always yields prosperity, and that anything else collapses into kleptocracy. Of course, authoritarian rule risks caprice in the form of “strongmen” without accountability. But so does democracy when governing descends into signalling. Speaking on the Spectator podcast, Dominic Cummings refers to ministers making grandiose statements about issues they only just found out about. “It’s all fake”, says Cummings. Politicians just try and say the right thing, rather than doing anything.

It’s why a recent Adam Smith Institute poll suggests 33 percent of British 18-30 year olds would prefer an authoritarian system, led by a decisive figure. Someone who actually exhibits some obstinacy, rather than endless reactivity. More cheeringly, there is evidence the electorate responds well to figures who show steel. A slightly trivial example perhaps, but I think of Kemi Badenoch’s response to the TV series Adolescence last year. In the midst of media fury that she had not bothered to watch it, she calmly stated her belief that policy should not be dictated by fictional drama.

The Reddit thread, Kemi Badenoch is right about Adolescence, shows a receptiveness to her response. Commenter inevitablelizard says, “We should be pressuring politicians on serious answers”, not “whether they’ve seen adolescence or not.” Interesting too because inevitablelizard is not a Badenoch fan. The redditor promises to wash his or her mouth out with acid for defending the opposition leader.

Followership or Leadership

It’s an example of leadership over “followership”. Lord Wolfson and Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson use the latter term in the Policy Exchange’s Future of the Right paper to describe parties’ “habit of asking the public what they want to hear and trying to provide it.” Mirroring public sentiment rather than shaping it is short-termist and futile.

Parties are far too in thrall to the temporary nature of polls that gauge those public attitudes. They don’t share my Fantasy Premier League patience or Singapore’s investing mantra. Both involve weathering short-term discomfort rather than changing approaches day-to-day.

Yes, that rests upon having some good ideas in the first place. And not sticking with them pigheadedly if the facts change. But it’s a conviction first approach. In the political sphere, this means convincing the electorate of what you believe is right, not what they want to hear.

Democracy works when it removes tired governments and sparks new ideas, like Thatcher’s smashing of the post-war statist consensus. But we do democracy a disservice if we kid ourselves that the ballot box guarantees prosperity and ignore the successes of less liberal regimes. Chasing every headline and poll just means embracing the same inconsistency we criticise in kleptocracies.

British democracy may not grant the same patience as Singapore’s hybrid system. But that doesn’t mean resorting to myopia. Conviction can bear fruit. Let’s see a little more of it if we want a proper defence of why democracy works.

Otium Den recap:

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Half the World Away

Tax the Rich

David Cameron is the latest figure to sound the alarm over Britain’s brain drain. At Abu Dhabi Finance Week, the former Prime Minister said he was worried about the number of Brits choosing to leave for places like the UAE.

I’m a Brit who has lived abroad since 2019. Although the initial move wasn’t sparked by exasperation, a return looks increasingly unappealing - a prevalent attitude amongst other expats I meet. I argued in Conservative Home this week that such a choice is often made relucantly 👇

Rousing music is juxtaposed with a stark message from Peter Hitchens in a recent Daily Mail video. Get out while you can, the columnist advises younger Britons, before the UK becomes impossible to live in.

Plus ça change, you may say. Hitchens has never been one for sunny optimism. The bleak picture he paints of a country where “nothing works” is a consistent theme. But it’s striking nonetheless because Hitchens is fundamentally a one-nation conservative. He is no fan of laissez-faire Thatcherism, believing in duty and patriotism, rather than the relentless pursuit of economic self-interest.

Tax dodging versus aspiration

Emigration is in the spotlight after the ONS revised down 2024 net migration (the difference between arrivals and departures from the UK) by 20 percent to 345,000. A result of more people leaving rather than fewer coming in. It seems Brits are a significant part of that exodus. As a fellow fleer, I see this is about much more than tax dodgers heading to Dubai. It’s ordinary professional families quietly leaving because the UK makes aspiration feel futile.

Minimising my tax bill was not a priority when I moved to Hong Kong in 2019. As a reasonably well-paid single professional in my twenties, I was dimly aware that HMRC made a hefty claim on every payslip. But I had enough disposable income to feel comfortable after rent, food, and other basics. I wasn’t saving much beyond a workplace pension but that wasn’t an imminent concern.

Adventure and career progression ranked far higher in the decision to venture east. Gross salaries without PAYE deductions were a welcome surprise, as were subsequent tax bills from the Inland Revenue Department that asked for very little. But it didn’t trump all other considerations. I only stayed put when Covid hit in 2020 because I’d met a girl and feared the consequences for our blossoming relationship if I returned to the UK. A prudent decision, as I capitalised upon a friend’s advice that time plus lack of competition is the formula for romantic success. Locked down together, things moved quickly, and we married in 2021. We moved to Singapore a year later with a first daughter on the way.

Agency & Momentum

We are now a family of four and often think about moving back to the UK. Singapore regularly ranks as one of the world’s most expensive cities. Our fixed monthly outgoings – rent, kindergarten, childcare and a car – are precariously high. We could certainly cut that in the UK. But not by nearly enough to offset what we would lose in post-tax income. Furthermore, what you save in Singapore, you keep. There is no capital gains or dividends tax, so you quickly see the compounding benefits of what you put away.

I don’t expect anything from the British state in retirement. Demographics and debt mean it’s hard to imagine anything resembling today’s pensions will be available to my generation. Nor do I believe I should be entitled to it. One of the few sensible measures in Rachel Reeves’ budget was correcting the remarkable offer of a state pension to expats who continued making annual £182 National Insurance contributions. The threshold has now been raised to £910.

So, we stay in Singapore because it gives us agency to build our own future. Things are transparent. We pay relatively low tax (24% is the top marginal rate in Singapore’s progressive bands) and then it’s on us. I’m 33 and this is both the highest earning and most expensive time of my life. But Singapore lets you build momentum around that income, while the UK just exacerbates the expenses. If we returned, we’d pay a gruelling marginal rate of tax while footing the bill entirely for nursery and childcare costs. Treading water rather than making progress.

The Social Contract

I sympathise with Matthew Syed, writing in The Times, when he asks whether Brits have “a duty to this nation” to stay and save it. I hate it when other expats exhibit a lifeboat mentality – thank God we got out – and revel in the malaise back home. I share Syed’s patriotic sentiment, but country loses out to family in any hierarchy of obligations. It’s this that motivates many of the other Brits I meet abroad.

Because we’re not just losing people to tax havens. I was in Brisbane last week to see England’s latest comprehensive Ashes defeat. Many of the other England fans lived in Australia. One, a builder in his mid-40s, had built a successful business and given his three children a very different upbringing to his own in Basildon. Another Brit in his mid-30s had spent several years in Singapore before moving to Sydney. He didn’t resent paying higher taxes in the Australian capital because it still encourages agency, offering tax rebates on education, healthcare and savings.

Other friends from university are happily settled in New York, where living costs make London look cheap. But the taxman doesn’t jump on your back so early in the game. You can get wealthy before the government starts asking for its substantial cut. Unlike the UK, it is far less generous to citizens who work elsewhere, taxing them on worldwide income. The incentives are clear. Stay, work hard and you can prosper. By contrast, Rachel Reeves “asks” people to pay a little more, while the government rewards those who refuse to engage with the system at all. Benefit claimants can earn a salary equivalent to £120,000. Illegal arrivals get housing, healthcare and an allowance.

Reluctant leavers

The UK indulges the idle and punishes aspiration. Departees don’t, by and large, resent handing anything over to HMRC. They’re just choosing other countries where that tax bill still forms part of a social contract. So, Hitchens’ dire warning is not a call to simply abscond when things get difficult. Rather, it recognises that you can’t save a country if it doesn’t want to save itself. Most expats aren’t ostentatiously boasting about newfound riches in Dubai. They’re reluctantly slipping away. And few in Westminster seem to care.

Otium Den recap:

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Half the World Away

Tax the Rich

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Something has gone radically wrong with where elite talent spends its time in this country.

So said at a recent Looking for Growth event, as he reflected on the declining quality of the UK’s politicians. Cummings contrasts the calibre of figures like Pitt the Younger and Winston Churchill with today’s underwhelming bunch.

Abject politicians are the result of admirable British values breeding sub-par consequences. Just as tolerance feeds resignation to managed decline, fair play prioritises the loyal above the competent. Party apparatchiks and spirited constituency MPs end up in cabinet positions because they’ve stuck at it long enough. Rather than possessing any relevant experience or expertise.

A brief football analogy illustrates that point. In the elite game today, most top managers get parachuted in without earning their stripes at lower levels. Tom Allnutt writes in The Times that managers “who overachieve with lesser sides have historically struggled when asked to meet expectations at the most demanding clubs.” Because the skillsets are different: maller clubs are inspired by energy and organisation; big ones need vision, ruthlessness and obstinacy. Arsenal is currently top of the Premier League with a manager, Mikel Arteta, in his first head coach role.

It’s elitist, but it works. Formidable figures rarely emerge through auditioning. Leaders who change countries – Pitt, Churchill, and (in line with this column’s theme) Lee Kuan Yew – don’t follow a neat path from exemplary local casework to national leadership. In the UK today, we trade the breadth of these backgrounds and talents for parochialism. Even when we get variance in the form of someone like Nigel Farage, the system seeks to nullify. The possible next prime minister is criticised for spending time in America, cultivating the strongest relationship of any MP with the Trump administration, when he should be holding surgeries in Clacton.

Of course, constituencies shouldn’t be deprived of local advocacy just because its MP is a very important man. Particularly deprived ones like Clacton. But it brings a dilemma for the fore. How can Westminster attract the country’s most influential if it won’t let them get on with meaningful work?

The US provides one solution in executive cabinet appointments. Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf says his party would copy this in government. Talking to the Telegraph in September, he said, “we don’t think it makes sense necessarily for the minister of defence to also be doing constituency surgeries about the chlorine level in the local swimming pool.”

Yusuf suggests as many as half of Reform’s cabinet could be appointed from the Lords. Uneasiness about these plans only reflects a misdirected sense of fair play. Winning parties should select the best people, instead of being beholden to internal factions. The “galactic-level talent” Yusuf wants to appoint aren’t looking to further political careers or court local popularity but carry out roles effectively.

Whatever one’s views on the Trump administration, there’s a chasm of competence between the talent at the President’s disposal and that available to Sir Keir Starmer. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was running multi-billion-dollar portfolios while Rachel Reeves was maybe working for the Bank of England. Whatever the truth behind Reeves’ malleable CV, she has never had to make anything like the same concrete, high-pressure judgements that Bessent did.

Experience like that not only informs his strategy today but a track-record that proves his suitability. But would Bessent have traded high finance for Washington DC if it meant sorting out bus timetables on the weekend?

Appointing cabinet ministers from the Lords is no aberration, but the practice has withered. Reviving it would greatly widen the talent pool and force parties to be serious about governing rather than just winning elections. It’s also a quick fix that the Conservatives could implement as easily as Reform. But it avoids the harder work of changing a political culture.

It’s here that I turn to Singapore’s form of executive recruitment. A country with a less vibrant democracy than America but one that copies the UK’s parliamentary system. The ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) actively headhunts potential MPs – senior civil servants, military officers, business leaders – years in advance. To entice the best, it lessens the opportunity cost: salaries are famously the highest in the world. But pay is benchmarked to seniority. Backbench MPs earn the equivalent of about £115,000 while senior ministers earn up to £1m.

Talented outsiders are parachuted in, standing in safe seats and going straight into the cabinet. They are free to focus on national-level issues because Singapore runs Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs). These constituencies elect three to five MPs instead of one. There is a hierarchy within that team, so one may be a cabinet minister, one on a ministerial fast-track and one dedicated to local issues.

That structure accepts the concept of different skill sets. Good local MPs have a role to play, but not in executive decision-making. And young political talent can still emerge, winning promotion within the GRC hierarchy.

There are considerable obstacles to a similar system in Britain. First, the PAP has a monopoly on power. They can decide which seats will be GRCs and place cabinet ministers there accordingly.

Second, it would mean investing in politicians, the only area where the British government shows any fiscal restraint. Funding more MPs and higher salaries for the best would be a rounding error in government spending. But the public would hate it. Third, you would need radical cross-party introspection for MPs to confess they don’t currently represent the best of Britain.

Capable people have options. If you’re Zarah Sultana, a £94,000 salary and a public platform is as good as it gets. There is no private sector queue for your services. So, addressing Cummings’ talent dearth is about lessening the opportunity cost for those with genuine competence. It’s not purely financial.

Cabinet members in the US and Singapore can command far better pay elsewhere. But they are freed up to take on real responsibility. If the UK can’t offer similar paths to the country’s brightest, it condemns itself to mid-table mediocrity.

Otium Den recap:

Start with What

Half the World Away

Tax the Rich

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Accountability, Not Technocracy

Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, says in The Social Network. That amplification of financial ambition in Facebook’s foundation story finds a philosophical mirror in today’s AI circles:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) isn’t cool anymore. Superintelligence is.

The Knight of Faith

AGI is human-equivalent. It matches expertise in every field but still operates on our terms. Superintelligence is sui generis. It’s unmoored from human logic and knowledge. Sunnier dispositions believe a benevolent Superintelligence heralds a new age of abundance as it solves all humanity’s ills. Others doubt it would feel any moral obligation. An indifferent Superintelligence pursues its own goals. Best case scenario, it treats us like dogs. Worst case, some kind of factory farming.

The concept is clearly God-like and rooted in the West’s Christian legacy. But is it the God of the Catholic Church’s greatest theologian Thomas Aquinas? His 13th-century Natural Law Theory held that God’s nature permeates the world through a rational order. Or is it Luther’s God, who later scorned Aquinas as “the source and foundation of all heresy”, as he kickstarted the Protestant Reformation?

Luther believed that Original Sin, inherited from the disobedience of Adam and Eve, made God wholly distant from the world. We can’t intuit His nature and work towards Him. Sola Fide (faith alone) is the only path to salvation. It inspired 19th-century Protestant existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. He draws on the tale of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is the knight of faith, willing to sacrifice his son Isaac upon God’s command. Abraham believes, paradoxically, that Isaac will be sacrificed and Isaac will be returned to him through God. Faith suspends rational thinking. It’s ultimately rewarded, as God switches out Isaac for a ram at the last minute.

What does the Book of Genesis have to do with Eric Jackson standing outside Drake’s house last Sunday?

For 90 successive days, the hedge fund manager has filmed himself walking and talking in the Toronto suburbs. Lingering by the rapper’s mansion, Jackson proselytises about Opendoor. He wants Drake to invest in the “iBuying” real estate company, which promises to streamline home buying and selling.

But its model hasn’t impressed markets. Opendoor was a penny stock in June before retail traders took up the baton. The stock surged 500% in July. When momentum faded around the $3 mark, Jackson drew fresh inspiration from his 16 year-old son. He advised him to keep making videos outside Drake’s place until his fellow Canadian joins the so-called Open Army.

Jackson invokes God in calling upon this community of investors. He talks about going through one of the darkest periods of his life last year. Money was leaving his fund, EMJ Capital, and advisers recommended he shut the whole thing down. But Jackson kept believing that opportunity would come. He bears the suffering like Job, telling his followers, “You trust God. You trust yourself.” As God eventually restores Job, giving him double what he had before, so Opendoor promises prosperity to the faithful. Jackson believes the stock is a possible hundred bagger, one that rises 100 times in value.

Market Reformation

The hype is part of markets’ own reformation. The 1990s dotcom boom unleashed a new age of potential. Traditional value investing metrics, P/E ratios and the like, were inadequate in the face of new technology. Evangelists replaced Chief Marketing Officers. Apple’s own Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki talked in terms of mission rather than price and performance. Like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, he was spreading the good news.

Of course, in Apple’s case, this faith manifests in material value. People buy a physical product. But cryptocurrency has moved further along the Sola Fide axis. Bitcoin bulls talk about scarcity but its real value lies in faith. MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor posts that he is buying Bitcoin every day this week, even as its dollar-value plummets. One AI-generated image shows him on a life raft with the popular phrase HODL (Hold On for Dear Life). Don’t panic, don’t be influenced by worldly forces, because you are part of something greater that defies rational analysis.

It’s also infused with the anti-establishment, disintermediating drive of Luther’s Protestantism. FIAT money is the Papal indulgence system reborn. Believers don’t need authorities to assign value or doctrine. Yet it also promises worldly success like Protestantism’s Prosperity Gospel. Financial well-being is God’s will for true believers. Although bitcoin is valuable in itself, the faithful still tie it to monetary terms. Saylor predicts it will go to one million dollars, a hundred bagger and more at today’s $84,000 valuation.

Faith vs Reason

What is the balance between faith and real-world hypotheses in driving valuations? Eric Jackson sits within these blurred lines. Withdrawing investors accuse him of chasing meme stocks, those that rise on social media buzz rather than fundamentals. But Jackson also gives rational reasons for believing in the stock: proprietary AI technology and a ripe opportunity to disintermediate North America’s broker-led real estate model. The faith of his retail army means they see the bigger picture sceptical institutions miss.

Institutional investors may be snobbish about such theses but they are also guilty of the same tendencies. JP Morgan and SoftBank bought into the WeWork story, converts to Adam Neumann’s polished and zealous narrative that an office leasing company was a revolutionary technology play. If Jackson is a charlatan, what does that make Jamie Dimon or Masayoshi Son?

Today’s frothy AI market, fuelled by retail and institutional money alike, rests on a similar leap of faith. Bulls believe that something extraordinary and beyond our current comprehension lies on the horizon. Superintelligence is the fulfilment of a technology gospel preached for over three decades. Whether we feel sunny or gloomy about its possibility, it promises God-like omnipotence and omniscience. If such a prospect lies within OpenAI’s grasp, then trillion-dollar valuations are merited.

Tell us something we don’t know

Perhaps this seems a convoluted way of rehashing the old adage that markets are irrational. But there is a heightened phenomenon at play here. Faith-led investing is different from overreactions or momentum trading that characterise “irrational exuberance”. Some of it exhibits an unconsciously Protestant mentality - Tom Holland’s argument that Christian frameworks still profoundly shape behaviours. Some of it is explicitly Christian, as per Jackson’s posts. Or in the arguments of Christian bitcoiners like Jimmy Song. He argues that “Bitcoin is a way to opt out of this corrupt, US-centric system which takes value from the poor and gives to the rich.”

Whether you buy Song’s thesis - that FIAT money is readily inflated for the benefit of a small cabal - or not, it’s born of the belief in a divine otherworldliness that all things are possible through God. Faith inspires the persistence and resilience necessary to do extraordinary things. Missions that can be undermined by cynical players.

Look at Elon Musk’s ongoing feud with Bill Gates over the latter’s short position in Tesla. Musk finds it so egregious given Gates’ rhetoric on climate change. Why would Gates try to make a quick buck at the expense of a company that promises solutions? In Musk’s longer-term view, the persistently faithful will get much greater financial reward, along with the external benefits of the company’s success.

Demagogue vs Prophet

But that rests on a generous interpretation of such founders’ intentions. It’s a fine line between demagogue and prophet. Are evangelisers riding waves of faith to secure personal riches? Or are they carrying converts on a journey of abundance? The same question for investors. Will Jackson’s Open Army stick with the stock through thick and thin? Or is it simply a pyramid of belief, dependent on ever more converts to sustain it?

Parker went bigger than Jackson, encouraging Mark Zuckerberg to think in terms of the thousand bagger. Zuckerberg met that target and more, with a net worth of $200 billion today. Technology changes our conception of the possible. What is true today may not be tomorrow. It trades Aquinas’ rationalism for Kierkegaard’s faith. The result? Well, that depends on your disposition. Are humanity’s most intelligent taking us to a new promised land? Or are we simply expedient to their own ends?

Should you really Start with Why?

Such hesitation and inaction stems from convoluted styles of reasoning Nelson so abhorred. I’m reminded of the trite Start with Why philosophy of modern business guru Simon Sinek. He argues that Why is primary to the How and the What. Define your beliefs before you do anything. Sinek earnestly espouses his concept in viral social media clips, which won him a devoted following amongst didactic executives. After all, values demand patience and spare one the cruel objectivity of results.

That approach is finally losing favour in business.

CSR, DEI and ESG all promised profits and piety but didn’t turn out to be such win-win propositions. Investors have, for instance, welcomed British Petroleum’s pivot back to petroleum after its brief identity crisis.

But UK politicians are yet to learn the same lesson. Take Net Zero. Oxford Economics Professor Dieter Helm - hardly a climate change sceptic - offers a damning assessment of the UK’s hasty race to carbon neutrality. Enshrined in law by a Conservative government under Theresa May, it has left the UK with some of the world’s highest energy prices and a collapsing industrial base. The legislation is animated by the Why of “climate leadership”. But Helm emphasises its futility in simply outsourcing the UK’s emissions.

Don’t moralise, speak in facts

Similarly vapid virtue-signalling is evident in Labour’s forthcoming budget plans. As I wrote recently, Rachel Reeves’ rhetoric about “broad shoulders” and “fair share” ignores that the UK’s wealthiest already constitute a substantial portion of the tax base. Instructions to “pay up or leave” may sound good but ignore the practical implications of the rich choosing the latter.

Too often, the Conservatives debate Labour on the same Why terms. Celebrating “wealth creators” comes unstuck when your opponent can point to a few undeserving trust-fund kids. Why shouldn’t we raise inheritance tax in the name of meritocracy? Instead, speak to the What, the realm of fact. That it is human nature to want to pass on wealth. That people will leave if we stop them. And that the fiscal situation will get a whole lot worse.

Ideology vs results

A 2024 YouGov poll found 88 percent of the public believe the Conservatives primarily care about rich people and 24 percent still associate it with being “nasty”. Their image hasn’t softened but they don’t have anything to show for that perceived ruthlessness. Harsh Why politics and soft What policies mean they are still tarred with the austerity brand despite increasing public spending and taking the UK to its highest post-1948 tax burden.

As the Conservatives look for fresh inspiration, Kemi Badenoch identified Javier Milei as her template for government. But that means learning the right lessons from the Argentinian President’s recent thumping victory in midterm elections. Argentinians didn’t grant him a surprisingly large, renewed mandate because they’re all suddenly Friedrich Hayek devotees. It’s not an endorsement of his free-market philosophy but a judgement on tangible actions. He promised to restore fiscal prudence in a desperate economic situation. He eliminated Argentina’s deficit for the first time in 123 years and voters see a man of action.

By contrast, Why in the UK is an excuse for dithering. On a recent episode of Question Time, a woman talked about the trauma of anxiety that left her unable to work. Why should she lose access to Personal Independence Payments? And Labour accedes to such politics of the personal, failing to make any cuts, because there is always a reason not to.

The Singapore context

I wonder what Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew would make of such pleas.

In his memoir, From First World to First, he says there will always be “the irresponsible or the incapable, some five percent of our population.” The government can do no more than arrange help “in such a way that only those who have no other choice will seek it.”

It’s an attitude rooted in the What. It confronts unfortunate facts rather than drawing ever malleable lines on who can demand entitlements. Lee recognised that the potential “explosion of welfare costs” would destroy the country’s commitment to budget surpluses.

While Singapore’s welfare policy fits neatly within right-wing ideology, it’s not constrained by dogma elsewhere. Left-wing Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz praises its approach to housing, where the government Housing and Development Board (HDB) builds upon state-owned land and sells these flats at subsidised rates. Even popular conceptions of the city-state as an international finance centre are deceptive. Local entrepreneur Hian Goh argues that once you add up the state’s corporate ties, 40 percent of GDP is controlled by government owned enterprises. Singapore relentlessly focuses on what works, rather than indulging in the navel-gazing of the Why.

Screw it, Just Do It

When I started my business, I found Richard Branson’s “screw it, just do it” to be rather more helpful than Sinek’s search for meaning. Because deciding what you’re going to do is more effective than a lengthy mission statement. Many of the UK’s political failures of the last 15 years stem from giving too much thought to branding and too little to a plan. Not everyone in Singapore is enamoured with the ruling People’s Action Party but most respect its competence. Gerrymandering accusations shouldn’t obscure the fact it is continually elected with a large majority of the popular vote.

Singapore chose the approach of Jervis and Nelson, while its neighbours waited in the dockyards. Now the Conservatives need to do the same, to offer a prescription and be judged on results rather than soundbites. As Nelson said,

So, let’s have a little less consultation and a little more action. Start With What.

Otium Den recap:

Tax the Rich

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Accountability, Not Technocracy

Nem Nem Soha

China, Tariffs & Penalties

Close to the tranquility of Tokyo’s upscale Iidabashi district, a crowd of 55,000 gathered to watch two brothers from Burnage. Persistent rain was one of the few similarities between the Manchester suburb and the heart of the world’s largest city. One might even say the two are Half a World Away.

But distance didn’t dim enthusiasm for Oasis. It was a capacity crowd at the Tokyo Dome on Saturday and Sunday night. The two gigs marked the end of a brief Asia leg on the band’s 2025 tour, which also included one night in South Korea.

Ordinary fans paid between ¥20,000 and ¥75,000 (£100 - £370) for the privilege of seeing the Gallaghers live. There was a non-negligible Anglosphere presence, dominated by Manchester diehards and Americans. (I met a group of the latter afterwards. Hailing from Anchorage, Tokyo was the closest stop on the tour.) But this was a largely local crowd, perfectly reciting lyrics that are nebulous enough for English speakers:

Maybe I don’t really wanna know how your garden grows ‘Cause I just wanna fly.

When Liam reappeared on stage in a bucket hat after a brief interlude and said “scousers: if they’re not trying to pickpocket you, they’re trying to run you over”, it made little sense to anyone removed from Manchester-Liverpool rivalries.

Loneliness, Effervescence and Japan’s Demographic Decline

The appetite for such collective engagement is both an antidote to, and symptom of, Japan’s so-called loneliness epidemic. That crisis is best represented by its fertility rate, one of the world’s lowest. There were almost a million more deaths than births last year, as the country experienced its steepest annual population decline since surveys began. At current rates, demography professor Hiroshi Yoshida predicts there will only be one child left in Japan by 2720.

Isolationist tendencies driving this are characterised in the phenomenon of the hikikomori. These are young adults, predominantly men, who withdraw entirely from the outside world. They don’t leave their bedrooms for months or years, even competing online for increasingly ingenious ways to avoid bathroom breaks. Two percent of the labour force are estimated to live like this, the extreme embodiment of reclusive tendencies that reverberate far more widely.

The Japanese context is an acute example of global trends. Exacerbated in recent years by Covid lockdowns that took people out of communal places of work or education, we’re becoming a more anti-social bunch. Pervasive smartphones encourage passivity with more than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and 90 percent of time on Instagram spent watching videos. This screentime has none of the social aspects of television, in the forms of family viewing or “water cooler” moments discussing the latest episode of a blockbuster Sunday night drama.

The Return of Ritual

But this era of atomisation hasn’t destroyed the allure of live events. The longing for what Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence - the heightened sense of unity and energy from collective rituals - is steadfast. We see this in stories of increasing religiosity, sold-out football matches and concerts like Oasis, Coldplay and Taylor Swift. All elicit a sense of fandom that is absent in algorithmic TikTok scrolling. People don’t just come to be entertained but to participate.

Oasis & Taylor Swift: Different but the same

Oasis’ appeal lies in its rawness. No fancy choreography. Just Liam in a parka, hands behind his back, snarling into the mic. Fans buy into that sense of defiance and identify with it.

By contrast, Taylor Swift, whose 2024 Arenas tour was the highest-grossing in history performs with meticulous stagecraft. But such devotion thrives on narrative as much as spectacle. Fans have followed her heartbreaks like a Jane Austen novel: Wickhams and Willoughbys finally giving way to an Edward Ferrars in Travis Kelce. Both acts prove that in an age of AI-generated content, personality still wins out. As competence and content proliferate, narrative and charisma become a moat.

Presence in an Age of Passivity

It’s not just about live entertainment but a wider lesson for how we work. The great casualty of remote culture is socialisation. A generation is entering professional life under-networked, under-mentored and unprepared for the ineffable qualities that drive opportunities. As routine tasks become automated, success depends less on diligence and more on presence. People want to work with you when they feel good about you.

That’s why I paid over the odds for a last-minute ticket, flew seven hours each way, and spent 36 hours in Tokyo to see two ageing rockers. It’s not rational economic decision making but something more fundamental in human nature. What stays the same is just as important as what will change.

Otium Den recap:

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Accountability, Not Technocracy

Nem Nem Soha

China, Tariffs & Penalties

Does the UK need a CEO?

What is a “fair share” when it comes to tax? The top 10 percent of the UK’s income taxpayers already cover 60 percent of income tax receipts. Yet, as Chancellor Rachel Reeves prepares her November budget, the broad-shouldered brigade prepares for another shake-down. They might wonder when the government will finally be satisfied that their contribution is proportionate.

So-called HENRYs (High Earners, Not Rich Yet) may also ponder their exemption from the “working people” Reeves talks of shielding from tax increases. A lot of those earning £125,000 work quite hard too. But, paying an effective 60 percent tax rate on that last £25,000, these earners are forsaking 38 percent of their total income once National Insurance is included. Parents in this pay bracket also lose tax-free and free childcare. Net-take home pay of £78,000 doesn’t feel so lavish when you’re spending a third of it on nursery costs alone.

This attack on aspiration is disastrous in the long-term. Families supported by a single high earner end up with similar levels of disposable income to non-working parents on Universal Credit. But there is a cold logic in the short-term. You can squeeze this group until the pips squeak without too much risk of flight. These are largely salaried workers with jobs tied to the UK. They might lobby HR for oversubscribed transfers to the Dubai office, but homes, families and schools make leaving an arduous affair.

The mobile one percent

That friction doesn’t exist for the UK’s richest. This top one percent are all multi-millionaires in the truest sense. Financial resources are freely available rather than tied up in houses or other illiquid assets. The Times reports that this group represent about a third of the total income and capital gains tax collected by HMRC. The wealthiest 100,000 individuals alone cover around a fifth of total tax receipts.

Still, some recent rhetoric suggests this group should pay more or bugger off. On LBC, Oli Dugmore of the New Statesman argued for a marginal 100 percent inheritance tax on anything over £10 million. When Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philip said applicable families would just leave, Dugmore replied, “Let them”. Similarly, Ash Sarkar questioned the risks of a wealth exodus on Question Time, saying the rich couldn’t take property with them. As if freeing up a few Chelsea mansions is the solution to the housing crisis. Or that they would give them up at all, rather than keep as bases for the 90 days they could still enjoy in the UK tax-free as expats elsewhere.

Jump, How High?

That this one percent hasn’t left already refutes the caricature of pathological gluttony. Any true Silas Marner packed up long ago for any of the abundant jurisdictions that ask for little or nothing in tax. Instead, the UK’s wealthiest clearly see life as more than a game of hoarding money. But it doesn’t mean they will indulge in an indefinite game of jump and how high with the government. Patience is wearing thin, and UBS predicts the UK will lose the most millionaires of any country by 2028.

While the UK confronts this exodus, Singapore’s share of millionaires has increased by 62 percent over the last 10 years. It’s part of a charm offensive as its Economic Development Board (EDB) actively courts high net worth individuals and family offices. Singapore’s tax regime promises no capital gains, estate or inheritance tax. But it requires the wealthy to contribute in other ways. Tax-exemptions are contingent upon minimum local spending requirements, local hiring and deploying at least S$10 million (c.£5.8 million) into Singapore-based investments.

Monetising, not taxing

Instead of taxing wealth, Singapore monetises its presence. It believes private capital can be better deployed by its owners than under the auspices of the state. This isn’t limited to the for-profit realm. Its Philanthropy Tax Incentive Scheme (PTIS) offers tax deductions for donations made through Singapore intermediaries. The country’s biggest charitable donor is the eponymous foundation established by Indonesian billionaire Low Tuck Kwong. In 2023 alone, it disbursed S$127.6 million (c.£73 million) to educational and healthcare causes. Call it vanity if you wish, but the rich are rather happier parting with large sums of cash when they get a bit of control and recognition.

Places like Singapore aren’t just promising a fresh domicile to protect your cash but a place to get things done. A global hub with infrastructure that is built quickly and works. Good schools. Law and order. In contrast, the UK’s most recent demonstration of its competence with your money is to provide listening circles for triggered civil servants and put sex-offending asylum seekers back on the streets.

It’s a hostage situation

Social media financial influencer Codie Sanchez warns business owners about customer concentration. When one client represents 15 percent of revenue, “it’s a hostage situation”. The UK is similarly beholden to its wealthiest demographic, playing a very precarious game of Jenga. Keep pulling from the same blocks and the whole tower falls. The individuals concerned are so few but their contribution so great. While Reeves’ November budget lines them up as perpetual cash cows, competitors are circling. Not only Singapore or Dubai but nations closer to home, like Greece and Italy, offering a fixed annual tax.

I understand fawning over millionaires doesn’t play well terribly well with the public. But neither will the actions required to plug a new fiscal hole if a lot of them leave. So, what can the UK do to stem the tide and be an attractive hub once more? One, offer long-term reliability in the tax regime. Given Gary Stevenson devotees believe the rich enjoy various tax loopholes, one big headline fee like Italy’s €200,000 is more tangible anyway. Two, encourage philanthropy. Offer more generous tax-deductibility than the UK’s current gift aid scheme. Why shouldn’t a new hospital wing carry a donor’s name? Three, competence. Offer some return on investment and people resent paying taxes a little less.

Otium Den recap:

Accountability, Not Technocracy

Nem Nem Soha

China, Tariffs & Penalties

Does the UK need a CEO?

AI: The Productivity Paradox

I run a Singapore-based business where most of our revenue is in US dollars but most of our costs are in Singapore dollars. A depreciating greenback has a meaningful impact on margins. In January, every US dollar could be exchanged for 1.37 Singapore dollars. By July, that had dipped over seven percent to 1.27.

The relative foreign exchange hardship of a four-person company in southeast Asia is not an influential rebuttal to Trump’s economic policies. His mercantilist instincts, which view a strong dollar with suspicion, stem from a desire to protect American manufacturers. A weaker currency helps that sector.

David & Goliath

But the struggles of smaller US companies in the face of his grand economic project are often ignored in favour of those who shout loudest. Steve Eisman, the investor best known for profiting from the US housing bubble in 2008 (Steve Carrell in the Big Short) had CNBC journalist Steve Liesman on his podcast this week. They discussed why economists’ apocalyptic predictions on tariffs’ impacts had failed to materialise.

Liesman suggested that big corporations, as always, had ways to weather the disruption. They had a direct line to the Department of Commerce, and could, like Apple, carve out exemptions. Their lawyers and accountants are familiar with the arts of intra-company pricing. They can fudge things. It’s the small Jim & Martha shops, ostensibly affluent on $200k a year, that would feel the pain.

I think back to Brexit in the UK. Then the wailing of the big banks, ordering the plebs to vote remain, probably helped sway the vote the other way. But they actually had much more in common with disaffected Brexiteers, who felt they had little to lose. The great financial services jobs exodus to Paris or Frankfurt never materialised in any meaningful way. Nor did predictions of economic collapse. No serious Remainer believes rejoining the EU is any panacea for the UK’s current economic malaise. Yet we rarely hear from the small businesses for whom it makes things a little bit harder everyday.

Certainty vs narrative

It’s a cliche, but true, that smaller businesses rely on certainty. It wasn’t the Brexit vote itself that engendered its opposite, but the nebulous nature of any strategy to enact it. I spoke with the former Australian trade negotiator Dmitry Grozoubinski in Singapore who said a similar thing about tariffs. He has little time for Trump’s politics but was just as scathing about hyperbolic rhetoric. Grozoubinski believes there is a cogent argument for tariffs in addressing unfair trade practices. They are a neutral instrument rather than some terrible aberration. For Grozounbinski, the problem is rather that they’re implemented with caprice rather than underlying strategy. Take, for example, the recent 50% tariffs slapped on Brazil. This was not an economic act - the US runs a trade surplus with Brazil - but a political one. Trump was punishing the country for its prosecution of its former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Not, perhaps, a case of Trump supporting other authoritarians, as many seem to think. I’m not au fait with the ins and outs of Latin American politics. But Brazil’s current president Lula, twice convicted for corruption and money laundering, doesn’t seem like a white knight trying to cleanse Brazil of anti-democratic forces. The 27-year prison sentence dished out to his political opponent for a supposed attempted coup seems a little dodgy. But demonstrating disapproval of that conviction with tariffs adds to an uncertain business environment. Imagine you are a small cafe reliant on Brazilian coffee. Suddenly, external factors, completely unrelated to addressing trade deficits, see your input costs rise by 50%.

We’re quick to frame events like this as part of too grand a narrative, while ignoring smaller, but more meaningful, impacts. They don’t represent the implosion of American democracy but make things a hell of a lot harder for businesses somewhere.

Inverted Cassandras

Doom merchants are inverted Cassandras. Their warnings are overly heeded but their prophecies are overexaggerated. Take the US dollar itself. It has actually recovered somewhat from July lows. Bloomberg reports that dollar bears bought into the de-dollarization thesis (that its reserve currency status is slipping away) are starting to feel the pain. It is at a two-month high and traders in Asia and Europe say hedge funds are adding option bets that it will rebound versus most major peers into year-end.

It’s a result of the US’s economic resilience, which perpetually defies predictions around its demise. Ironically, the aggressive interest rate cuts Trump so wants have been thwarted by the economy’s strength in the face of policies markets expected to be so damaging. There hasn’t yet been the great labour market pain many expected. Its stock market thunders on despite the talk of an AI bubble. Demand for its treasuries remains steadfast even as commentators talk of an impending debt crisis.

“The stickiness of things”

Janan Ganesh writes about the remarkable Israel peace deal as evidence of the “stickiness of things”. Trump is remarkably close to Obama in a foreign policy that advocates for a pivot to Asia. That America won’t anymore get involved in “forever wars” in the Middle East but will instead commit resources to combatting its great superpower rival China. Yet its influence in the Middle East remains so great that it can’t give it up. “Notice that a Beijing-brokered deal for Gaza was not even a subject of remote discussion”, Ganesh says.

As politics becomes a subset of entertainment, it’s much more fun to weave dramatic narratives than focus on smaller tangible effects. As further evidence of the stickiness thesis, Ganesh harks back to Covid. Where we were once “bearish about the future of cities and in-person contact”, now “the main gripe about urban life is once again that it is too popular to be affordable.”

Political predictions go awry when we try to grasp phenomena through pre-conceived theories. Covid was once supposed to be a life-as-we-know-it upending event where the future would be virtual and you wouldn’t leave the house without testing and a mask. Instead, its deleterious effects were much mundane - inflation, education, mental health.

But such malignancies are so often the result of compounding smaller details. By ignoring these in favour of theatrical theses, we risk flying blind. The tariff catastrophists look silly because we don’t see their impending doom. If their forecasts materialise over a longer period, as those Jim & Martha shops slowly slip into bankruptcy, it will be too late. We’ll already be on to the next geopolitical drama.

Otium Den recap:

Nem Nem Soha

China, Tariffs & Penalties

Does the UK need a CEO?

AI: The Productivity Paradox

Investing in Football, Regenerating Towns

Does anyone care about civil liberties?

I received a few unhappy responses on X for suggesting the “freeborn Englishman” was a national myth. I referenced a 2021 YouGov survey showing 58% of the UK public then supported vaccine passports. Replies attributed this to the government’s “project fear” campaign during Covid. And yes, the authorities bear responsibility for “don’t kill granny” messaging that hyped up pandemic fears.

But few modern Prime Ministers have come up with a policy as popular as locking people in their own homes.

Widespread compliance surprised government behavioural scientists who had originally warned Britons would defy even modest restrictions.

Which is why I think civil liberties campaigners overestimate the strength of opposition to Keir Starmer’s digital ID plans. Current polls suggest a slim majority are against the scheme. But how many of those would put that principle above their jobs? Just as, pre-Covid, who would have agreed to societal shutdown for a disease former Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty described as mild or moderate for the vast majority?

Controlling immigration without surveillance

All the more reason, you may say, to vociferously oppose this now. Once imposed, it will become grudgingly accepted and the UK public like the metaphorical boiling frog. One day verifying an ID with employers, banned from travelling the next for an offensive social media post. But those surveillance state fears sit awkwardly with the desire to control immigration. Stronger border policy alone only deals with refugees, who made up around 13% of immigrants in 2024. To address the status of the remaining 87%, the British state needs a much clearer idea of who is in the country and what they are doing.

Director of Big Brother Watch and civil liberties campaigner Silkie Carlo described this as a non-partisan issue on a recent episode of Triggernometry. Opposition to digital ID unites Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage. But such a stance is far more coherent for Corbyn-esque figures believing no human is illegal. If you’re not that into national sovereignty anyway, then what right does the state have to check on its inhabitants?

So, the Conservatives’ fence-sitting is prudent, with Kemi Badenoch only saying there are “arguments for and against.” Ultimately, they should oppose it but need to carefully consider why. Civil liberties don’t carry as much traction as we might wish. And the Conservatives will carry the can for the Boriswave into the next election. Labour can easily finger them as soft if it appears they won’t give the state extra powers to tackle immigration.

It may yet be a false dawn but Badenoch’s recent pledge to scrap stamp duty has breathed a bit of life back into the party. It represents traditional conservative thinking, that things are sometimes better if the government gets out of the way. It’s here that the UK can learn from Singapore on immigration. Not the obvious example of Singapore’s own slick digital ID but how it actually controls the issue through making employers accountable.

Singapore’s digital ID & work passes

This digital ID, Singpass, personifies the country’s competent technocracy. Logging into the iPhone app with FaceID, it shows my address, race, nationality, taxes, local driving licence, dependents and employment. It can occasionally feel dystopian, like when it pinged me my daughters’ birth certificates just minutes after they left the womb. But it’s not a papers please society. I felt that far more intensely living in Hong Kong, where digital infrastructure was chaotic, but police could and would demand to see your passport.

In practicality, the biggest frustration of Singpass is how many physical checks are still required for daily administration. You need a lot of paper copies to open a bank account or rent a flat. It’s not a time-saving panacea. And when it comes to immigration, it is the responsibility placed upon employers, rather than this ID, that keeps such a tight lid on things.

Where UK entities perform right to work checks with varying degrees of scrutiny, Singapore’s work passes are tied to an employer. All foreigners need a sponsor to apply to the government on their behalf. The sponsoring company receives approval, if granted, and the employee’s stay in Singapore is tied to that specific pass. These passes generally need to be renewed every two years. If you’re fired or quit, the pass is cancelled and you have thirty days to leave the country.

Digital ID starts with the logic that it is the state’s responsibility to step in and do more. It offers a convoluted and expensive solution to illegal immigration when there are far easier things to be done first. By making all right-to-work employer sponsored, you change the incentives. Singapore is explicit that hiring should favour Singaporeans. The application system therefore adds friction in opting for foreign workers instead. It also changes the equation for illegal workers.

The UK doesn’t know how many visa overstayers there are. But estimates place this between 50 to 80% of the illegal workforce. If employers have to actively apply for visas, overstayers will get flagged. Like in Singapore, applicants would need to submit far more than just a National Insurance Number so that their status in the country can be properly verified. This will also stem the tide of those still arriving, knowing simple forgeries won’t cut it anymore.

Get the simple things right

As an island, the UK does not face a huge problem with clandestine arrivals. It is not the US where immigrants can sneak across the border and are entirely unrecorded as ever having arrived. The UK’s larger issue is instead figuring out who is here now. Rather than carrying out a great new digital census to solve this, the UK should distribute responsibility.

It’s easy to look at Singapore and its digital ID as a paradigm. But embedding this infrastructure for a population of six million is far easier than 70 million. More importantly, it’s not what drives Singapore’s approach to immigration. Like crime, where it prosecutes even minor dismeanours, immigration is managed through zero tolerance. Hiring foreigners is hard and companies breaking the rules are punished harshly.

Rather than reverting to libertarian principles that don’t hold much sway, Conservatives should prioritise simplification in the same way it has with stamp duty. Make employers screen employees properly. Recent Labour and Conservative policies have made things harder for businesses with corporation tax and national insurance increases. Yet the UK is remarkably tolerant of hiring illegal labour. While Reform offers dramatic forced deportations and Labour promises expensive new infrastructure, the Conservatives should focus on quick wins that work. Accountability, not technocracy.

Otium Den recap:

China, Tariffs & Penalties

Does the UK need a CEO?

AI: The Productivity Paradox

Investing in Football, Regenerating Towns

The Populist Reformation

South by Southwest on the Danube

Last week was a welcome change from Singapore’s year-round humidity for a few days of autumnal sunshine in Budapest. The Brain Bar festival puts its faith in meteorology each September to host in City Park, just off Heroes’ Square. Blue skies ensured several thousand attendees never had to retreat inside.

Brain Bar has been called South by Southwest on the Danube. It features art and technology, such as Neil Mendoza’s Spambots; music, including Hungarian folk dancers and a local beatboxer; and debates, with a small tribute to Charlie Kirk in the form of a ‘change my mind’ stand. Speakers are the main attraction. Hungary’s rightward turn under 15 years of Viktor Orban means their themes are often contrarian. But it’s not an echo chamber. Left-wing economist Mariana Mazzucato sits alongside Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson in the event’s impressive alumni.

Around half of the crowd are high school and university students. Their obvious curiosity and enthusiasm are a welcome antidote to the idea Gen Z only want content in 10-second TikTok format. Because the sort of teenager that wants to attend Brain Bar is likely quite bright, the festival also serves as a talent market. International companies like SAP and KPMG exhibit alongside the army’s Hussars unit.

The Future of Europe

The big main-stage debate was between Viktor Orban’s political director Balazs Orban (no relation) and former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. Orban was pugnacious, arguing the EU thwarts Hungary’s autonomy. The 2015 refugee crisis still lingered as a sore point, when Angela Merkel’s hospitality meant hundreds of thousands transiting through Hungary to reach Germany. Viktor Orban responded by building a fence along its Serbian border and labelling Hungary a “zero-immigration” regime. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) later ruled that Hungary had breached EU law and has since withheld billions in funds. In both Orbans’ eyes, Hungary was the victim of EU imperialism.

Balazs believes this moral grandstanding continues today in EU economic policies. He criticised tariffs on China’s electric vehicles and its response to Trump’s trade renegotiations, calling it needlessly antagonistic. He also represented Hungary’s growing Russiaphilia, telling Bildt that the EU “only talks about war and ideological confrontation”. He framed his position to appeal to the young audience. Hungary wants this demographic to be prosperous. That means good relationships with the two superpowers leading the AI revolution and cheap energy from Russia.

But Balazs didn’t have it all his own way. Although the live poll showed a win for the motion that the EU’s relevance is declining, Bildt landed some good punches. The biggest cheer came when he interrupted Balazs’ rant to point out that the freezing of EU funds was as much about corruption as immigration policy. The EU alleges that Orban’s government channelled development funds to allies and family members. That resonated, and speaking to local businesspeople later, I heard a lot of discontent about the increasing prevalence of crony capitalism. Budapest itself has successively defied the dominance of Orban’s Fidesz coalition, electing an opposition mayor for a second term last month.

Singapore and Hungary

My contribution to Brain Bar was as part of a session on Singapore: A Superpower from Scratch. What can countries like Hungary learn from the Singapore model? It’s already imbibing the lesson in keeping one party in power for a long time. Managing geopolitical sensitives is another thing it wants to replicate.

Hungary’s foreign policy is very nuanced. Orban is a darling of the MAGA movement for his anti-globalism and cultural conservatism. Yet Hungary is also China’s closest partner in the EU. Orban is one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s oldest friends and Israel’s most steadfast ally in Europe. Hungary recently withdrew from the International Criminal Court (ICC) after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister. But Hungary is also a great friend to Israel’s fervent critic Turkey, supporting its EU accession and bolstering trading ties. Partly a nod to Hungarians’ Turkic ethnic heritage but also a symbol of its pragmatism.

I asked Singaporean investor Hian Goh () how Singapore managed a similarly realist stance. China is the city state’s largest trading partner, but Singapore also maintains very warm relations with the US. Goh said exercising such neutrality required leverage. Singapore has assets, running budget surpluses and able to draw upon over a trillion dollars in sovereign wealth funds. So, China cannot buy influence through its Belt & Road initiative, which creates debt burdens through its infrastructure financing. America, meanwhile, gets access to Singapore’s Changi Naval Base. It’s a vital platform in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. These assets stop Singapore becoming beholden to either power or being bullied into picking sides.

Imperial pawn?

I read Norman Stone’s Hungary: A Short History on the flight over to Budapest. The late British historian spent his final years in Hungary as an advisor to Viktor Orban. It’s a sympathetic account of the Central European nation and contextualises why Hungary assertively pursues autonomy. Once a dominant Middle Ages kingdom under Janos Hunyaldi, its more recent history is that of an imperial pawn. Hungary became part of the Habsburg Empire after the end of Ottoman rule in 1718. Its independence was finally re-asserted in 1848 under first Prime Minister Count Lajos Batthyány. His appointment and modernisation program was approved by the Austrian Emperor. But Vienna then performed a volte face and rolled things back, eventually executing Batthyány just a year later. Batthyány's sanctuary lamp stands next to parliament as a memory of this betrayal.

In the 20^th century, Hungary remembers both wars as ones they were dragged into by its surrounding sphere of influence. After defeat in the first, the Treaty of Trianon took away two thirds of Hungary’s land and left millions of ethnic Hungarians in modern-day Romania and Slovakia. Her population was reduced from 20 to eight million. Stone argues Hungary was treated uniquely harshly amongst the defeated powers and Nem Nem Soha (No, No, Never) remains etched in the national psyche in response.

In 1945, Budapest was the site of the Nazis’ last stand, as the Germans and Hungary’s compliant Arrow Cross regime tried to delay the Soviet advance on Vienna. The Red Army lost 80,000 men in what the Soviets saw as an unnecessary siege in a war that the Axis powers had already lost. That engendered Soviet bitterness that often saw Hungary treated worse than other satellite states during the subsequent Cold War.

I know far too little to judge whether Hungary can rightly paint itself as a victim of circumstances. But that history helps explain why Orban’s schtick has largely proved popular. Ideological alliances haven’t served Hungary well and bloody-minded independence looks a better bet. But that assumes today’s new empires want to deal with Hungary on purely transactional terms; that they won’t try to manipulate it into new spheres of influence. Politico reports that Trump is now helping Brussels put pressure on Hungary over its continued import of Russian gas. Soon, Orban may have to choose between East and West.

Law of Scale

The closing speaker at Brain Bar was the British physicist, Geoffrey West. His law of scale asserts that mathematical regularities mean properties scale in predictable ways. West is famous for applying this to cities. But it’s applicable to nations too. Hungary cannot benefit from the same super linear scaling as the world’s superpowers or supranational bodies. Its leverage is inherently limited, and it is fated to fall into the gravitational pull of larger powers.

It can assert itself by winning influence and resisting the EU as part of a larger bloc. (Bildt conceded that Balzas Orban was right about the destructiveness of some of the EU’s policies.) But there’s a balance to be struck between pusillanimity and recklessness. Singapore is prudent in deciding between assertion and retreat. It was taken aback when hit by new US tariffs but didn’t retaliate.

A wise British Prime Minister once said he was pro cake and pro eating it. But it was a cake that eventually brought him down. If Orban is to avoid the same fate, pragmatism might mean picking sides.

Otium Den recap:

Does the UK need a CEO?

AI: The Productivity Paradox

Investing in Football, Regenerating Towns

The Populist Reformation

Crime and Capitalism

China gets its way

I was back in Hong Kong last week. It felt less tumultuous as a visitor than as a resident. A couple of months after moving there in 2019, protests started against a proposed extradition bill. Demonstrators feared Beijing would use it to arrest political dissidents protected under common law in Hong Kong. The bill’s eventual withdrawal was a pyrrhic victory. Self-imposed Covid isolation in 2020 was the guise for the far more onerous National Security Law. That guaranteed extradition rights alongside sweeping new sedition measures that criminalised such protests.

Like most expats, I was more annoyed by Covid rules than political oppression. Limiting gatherings to two people made drinks as difficult as demonstrating. Anyone daring to travel abroad faced three weeks of hotel quarantine on return. And those unlucky enough to fail one of the government’s random tests faced a less luxurious 21 day stay at Penny Bay, a hastily built Covid camp on Lantau island. Now, travelling into town on the airport express, I see Penny Bay bulldozed for airport expansion works. What once symbolised the city’s retreat into a hermit kingdom is now part of attempts to re-establish Hong Kong’s credentials as Asia’s World City.

I’m told I’m amongst the third of foreigners that left the territory during Covid. The popular expat hunting grounds, the bars of central Soho, are certainly emptier. But that’s not to China’s regret. The Financial Times describes Hong Kong’s new role as less of a window for foreigners into China and more of a gateway for Chinese businesses to the rest of the world.

I’m no sinologist but I can hear the shift. Cantonese’s distinct tonal rhythms are increasingly drowned out by the “sh”-heavy sounds of the mainland’s mandarin dialect. A sign of the city’s eroding identity for people like my wife’s parents, proud Hong Kongers who left for the UK under the BNO scheme. But China banked on weathering the moral outrage, and the wager has paid off. Business didn’t flee and the skyscrapers branded with big multinational names are busy as ever.

We thought Hong Kong was the frog in the boiling pot. Small changes compound until a new reality feels inevitable. But China tired of that gradual approach, where every step is contested. Instead, it picked an opportune moment to go all-in. In Hong Kong, that has meant people recalibrating around what remains possible - chiefly, making money - rather than fixating on what has been taken away.

If tariffs are so bad, how did these countries get so rich?

I was in town for an investor conference. In the city’s new political climate, it’s unusual for such events to open with a steadfast defence of US policies. Yet Hungarian-American economist Zoltan Pozsar did so when talking about Trump’s economic reforms. Pozsar gave the bull thesis for America’s strategy:

1. Tariffs: Revenues will be meaningful. They’re likely to beat Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s own $300 billion estimate. And the costs will be re-distributed globally. Big retailers will pass them on to consumers in other markets, rather than being borne solely by US buyers. The effect on US inflation will only be incremental.

   Speaking to a predominantly Asian audience, Pozsar noted that tariffs were central to the rapid post-WW2 rise of its economies.

   If tariffs are so bad, how did these countries get so rich? he asked.

2. Interest rates: Aggressive cuts are coming. Those will ease concerns over the US deficit. Servicing costs currently represent about 17% of federal spending and that will fall substantially once rates come down.

3. Stablecoins: Digital tokens backed by real US dollars or government bonds. The GENIUS Act, signed in July, creates a federal regulatory framework for them. If central banks stop buying US Treasuries, other investors will make up the shortfall through stablecoins. Thus ensuring continued dollar hegemony. As Pozsar says, “if the kings don’t buy treasuries, the plebs will.”

The case for optimism, Pozsar argues, is obscured by a partisan press. Commentators cast the Fed as the good guy “centrist dad”. But the US central bank is not a guardian of sensible independence. It has its own agenda. Pozsar cites former Fed president Bill Dudley’s 2019 Bloomberg article, arguing the Fed shouldn’t enable Trump’s economic policies. Nor is its recent record impressive. It argued inflation was only transitory during Covid and engineered generational inequality through repeated bouts of quantitative easing.

For Pozsar, the crux of the problem is that central banks are anchored in the present. It doesn’t work with the structural thesis of the administration in power. Bessent believes AI will unleash a supply glut that is inherently deflationary. So, the Fed should be forward thinking in cutting rates now. Pozsar looked back fondly to former governor Alan Greenspan who tolerated strong growth and tight labour markets in the 1990s because technology gains kept inflation in check.

The British context

How do democracies enact change if unelected levers of power work against them? That’s the question Liz Truss has consistently pressed since she was dumped as Prime Minister after just six weeks. On Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, she argued the Treasury should play a much stronger role in setting the Bank of England’s mandate.

Could the Bank have better prepared for a seismic shock to the gilt market? Just six months after her downfall, it recommended that The Pensions Regulator set minimum collateral cushions for pension funds. Had the advice come earlier, the gilt-selling spiral could have been avoided. Truss’ reforms would have had a fighting chance. Was the failure her poor communication? Or are central banks simply unwilling partners when it comes to enabling change?

Southgate’s penalty lessons

Speaking of great English leaders, the conference’s headline star was former England manager Sir Gareth Southgate. I can’t claim him as a Brexiteer but he sees the importance of taking back control. When he missed that crucial penalty at Euro 96, shootouts were seen as a lottery. Players felt hostage to randomness and fortune. It didn’t help that Southgate had to walk an extra 20 yards to collect the ball, which the German goalkeeper had booted away. As England manager, one of his small changes was getting England’s keeper Jordan Pickford to hand the ball to teammates instead. Seeing a familiar face helped players gain control over the process. England had lost five consecutive penalty shootouts before Southgate took over. Under him, they won three out of four. He arrested the fans and players’ perception of inevitable decline as penalties approached.

Southgate takes the parallels between the football team and the nation seriously. He took over with the side at its lowest ebb. Sam Allardyce had resigned after 67 days in a corruption scandal, and the team had been humiliated by Iceland at the Euros. Two of Southgate’s lessons feel particularly relevant beyond football. First, focus on the small things. Commentators often dismiss minor fixes as trivial, but you have to start somewhere. Second, have a sunnier disposition. Too much political discourse is cranky and joyless. England has its problems, but it is still a wonderful country. Perhaps starting from that basis is a better way to unify around the change needed.

Otium Den recap:

AI: The Productivity Paradox

Investing in Football, Regenerating Towns

The Populist Reformation

Crime and Capitalism

Raffles vs Bob Vylan

I write a bi-weekly column for Conservative Home on Singapore’s lessons for the UK. My time in Singapore coincides with drift and malaise back home. And I don’t think it can be solely attributed to my departure.

“Things just work” is the common refrain from other expats here. From the small: service disruption on the MRT (metro system) is a news story; to the large: land reclamation projects have increased the city state's size by 25%. The latest, which involves moving the world's second largest port, is due to finish in 2040. Will HS2 be running by then?

But idealising Singapore’s model comes with qualifications. Firstly, as Janan Ganesh argues, it inherited a unique set of circumstances:

• Size: just 6m people

• Geography: lying on the world’s busiest shopping lane

• Lee Kuan Yew: the founding PM is testament to history’s Great Man Theory

Secondly, order’s consequences are not entirely benign. Disneyland with the Death Penalty is the harsh description that sticks from William’s Gibson 1993 travel essay. But it carries latent truths. Singapore has struggled to breed local entrepreneurs or an arts and cultural scene.

Thirdly, government competence stems from stability. The ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) has never been out of power. The system of “hybrid democracy” that engenders such continuity isn’t one the UK should want to embrace.

Sometimes termed Singapore Inc. for the government’s more corporate structure, I start with . The blogger and MAGA influencer advocates this business-like approach. Shortcomings emerge in his thought-experiment. But there are tangible lessons for the UK. They lie in fixing perverse incentives for elected officials: prioritising making things work over power for power’s sake.

Curtis Yarvin’s CEO-in-chief

Should the government be run more like a business? Curtis Yarvin thinks so. The American software developer and blogger believes appointing a CEO-in-chief would transform the government into a “heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” Liberal media paints Yarvin as a malign interloper (Vice President JD Vance cites him as an influence), calling for the overthrow of democracy.

But one doesn’t have to fully embrace his corporate re-working of Plato’s philosopher kings - the benevolent dictators ruling in the common interest - to recognise modern democracy’s shortcomings. It creates perverse incentives where leaders are rewarded for appealing to popular opinion rather than running things well. It’s why Yarvin prefers a national CEO like the late Steve Jobs. The Apple co-founder’s signal-to-noise principle stated work should be 80 percent signal (proactive strategy) and 20 percent noise (reactivity). Leaders must ruthlessly prioritise things that really move the dial, rather than let polling dictate policy.

Competence and pay

In other words, more competence and less scrutiny. No surprise then that those in Yarvin’s orbit admire Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Republican candidate and Peter Thiel protege Blake Masters named Lee as his second favourite historical figure. Lee ran things more like a business, saying Singapore’s system “deliberately exposes civil servants to decision making based on corporate rewards and profitability.” He focused on what works and getting things done.

That meant surrounding himself with capable, well-paid individuals. Today, cabinet ministers are remunerated like executives with annual salaries of S$1.1m (c.£640,000). It doesn’t make public service just another career path for the financially ambitious. But it lessens the opportunity cost for the country’s most capable who could command millions more in the private sector. With affluence assured, they can focus on the job at hand.

Paying politicians more doesn’t elicit great enthusiasm in the UK. Polls suggest the public think current rates of £94,000 for MPs and £164,000 for cabinet ministers are already overly generous. But you get what you pay for. And those salaries offer the worst of both worlds: too much for shit MPs and too little for the genuinely talented.

Deep state or bad MPs?

Boris Johnson and Liz Truss finger the sinister deep state as the culprit for their demise. But they were ultimately undone by their own MPs. The 2019 group proved an underwhelming bunch. They wavered at the first sign of public distress, terrified of losing their seats and salaries they wouldn’t otherwise earn. They believed only in self-preservation. Meanwhile, capable cabinet ministers flee the stress of politics for better pay elsewhere.

Campaigning for better MP pay is unlikely to reignite Badenoch’s opposition. But the Conservatives must think about how to find better talent. Perhaps that means ignoring media criticism of MPs extracurricular earnings. And being more relaxed about appointing cabinet ministers from outside the legislature. Lord Cameron’s stint as Foreign Secretary was one of the few successes of Rishi Sunak’s short tenure

Incompetent electorate?

We readily recognise incompetent MPs as an obstruction to effective governance. But Yarvin’s other proposition is more awkward: that the electorate is a problem. Conservative instincts rightly shy away from the idea that the public don’t know what’s good for them. We want to believe in the wisdom of the crowds and the silent majority. But Matthew Syed is right to attribute the UK’s malaise to the public’s lack of realism. Politicians can only achieve office by “flattering mass sensibility”. That sensibility demands

Politicians are punished for mentioning trade-offs. Steve Baker bemoans cross-party inertia in making even the most basic cuts. No one will touch the Winter Fuel Allowance even as age-related spending threatens bankruptcy.

Populist rhetoric, which argues solutions lie in simply listening to the public, ignores the fleeting nature of that mood. Dominic Lawson points out that the immigration backlash is recent. Just ten years ago, the Sun ran a “For Alan” campaign in response to the drowning of four-year-old refugee Alan Kurdi. Then Prime Minister David Cameron bowed to public pressure in agreeing to take in thousands more refugees.

The least worst form of government

In the face of this, we take comfort in the Churchillian adage that democracy is the least worst form of government. Of course, it has its problems but absolute power corrupts. And, by and large, that’s true. I recently met an academic leading a pan-African delegation to learn from Singapore’s governing class. The group’s main takeaways were reassuring. High salaries for officials, tick; long-term stability, tick. Singapore’s template is not easily replicated. It’s an anomaly, a rare case of 60 years of one-party rule without sliding into kleptocracy.

Singapore is a parliamentary democracy in the Westminster mould. Elections were held in May, but the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) was never in danger. Reduced majorities are the only noise it must contend with, occasionally making small concessions to ease public dissatisfaction. The late Charlie Munger says it keeps getting elected because it’s doing such a great job.

Others ascribe more autocratic practices. The Economist labels it a “flawed democracy.” Lee himself argued that democracy’s “exuberance” breeds disorder.

Sui generis

Singapore’s model only works if the country is Singapore. And even then, it has its shortcomings. The government’s rigid control stifles dynamism. It struggles to nurture entrepreneurs or a vibrant cultural life. Its political arrangement looks like a secure social contract:

But it’s precarious. What happens if the music stops?

Similarly, Yarvin’s model only works if the company is Apple, itself an anomaly. Rather than trying to ape a utopian ideal, the UK should ask what kind of business it resembles now. WeWork comes to mind as successive governments seek only popularity, without any strategy for long-term profitability. Unfortunately, the public, rather than Masayoshi Son, eventually picks up the bill.

But we can learn. First, compete for talent. Second, focus on the product. Five years is already a short horizon. It shouldn’t be shortened by chasing every poll. Of course, some noise is necessary. Even Jobs conceded that. There’s no point flogging something no one wants. But Lee was right when he said whoever governs “must have that iron in him.”

Without obstinacy, democracy is little more than power for power’s sake. And that’s hardly a moral rebuttal to Yarvin’s CEO-in-chief.

In occasional masochistic fits, I doomscroll AGI on Twitter. It stems from a deep fear of so-called Artificial General Intelligence - where machines match or surpass humans.

It scares me because I like my life now and don’t want the uncertainty of a new status quo. While most posts essentially advise: “give it up, you are worthless now”, there are occasional crumbs of comfort. A lot of those come from arch-sceptic , a NYU professor and entrepreneur. He believes LLM models like ChatGPT are limited predictive word processors unworthy of the multi-billion-dollar hype. His cynicism is so predictable that even if LLMs built a house, he’d find faults in the plumbing. But his recent crowing about ChatGPT-5’s underwhelming release resonates more widely.

ChatGPT-5 underwhelms

Launched in early August, Sam Altman promised ChatGPT-5 would represent a monumental leap forward. It was framed in the discourse of exponential progress, that AI today is the worst it will ever be. If you think it’s a big deal now, just wait a few more months. But those 29 months since version four bore little fruit. The top comment in the Reddit OpenAI forum said it significantly dampened any expectations of imminent AGI.

Similar reactions elsewhere recognised, at the very least, a plateau in AI development:

- Sam Altman surprised investors who have poured $60bn into OpenAI by musing that there might be an “AI bubble”.

- David Sacks, the White House AI & crypto Czar, said predictions of a rapid take-off to AGI had been proved wrong.

- The US Government decided NVIDIA could sell chips to China after all (with a 15% kick-back). Maybe the great AI arms race isn’t so existential after all?

The nebulous revolution

The AI hype narrative has always been noticeably light on specifics. As talk of imminent revolution so often is. It has a religious impulse. Just as millenarian Christians talk of an imminent apocalypse but obfuscate on how it will happen. And like these apocalyptic predictions, AI hype is flexible. When American preacher William Miller prophesied Christ’s return in 1844, the non-event was reinterpreted by subsequent Adventist Christians. Similarly, Sam Altman says AGI is pretty much here but won’t be that big a deal.

Productivity is perhaps the only tangible metric we can measure against the promises made. It’s what investors are betting on – that more can be produced by the same input. The rosier version of this sees AI as a tool for workers. Businesses can generate more revenue from the same labour force. Everyone gets richer, albeit some far more than others. And GDP grows dramatically.

A recent MIT study casts doubt on that thesis, causing market jitters in leading US tech stocks. The report suggested 95% of organisations are getting zero return from AI investments. Most of these returns are supposed to come in the service economy, the domain of white-collar professionals. But it rests on the belief that technology equals efficiency. It’s rarely the case.

Steve Jobs and signal to noise

Steve Jobs is often invoked as the prototype of white-collar efficiency. His “signal-to-noise” principle stated work should be 80% signal (things that really move the dial) and 20% noise (responding to ad hoc business). But few in the corporate world recognise this paradigm. Productivity is instead measured by responsiveness and availability - exacerbated by Covid-era WFH when it was the only gauge of whether anyone was doing anything. Most white-collar professionals end up in an endless cycle of reactivity. Emails, Teams et al. enable low friction communication. We rarely consider the actual urgency or importance of such requests and delayed responses look lazy.

It goes some way to explaining the Solow paradox – Robert Solow’s quip that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” US GDP growth has not changed since the pre-internet age. And LLMs often just add to the noise. Internet research at least forces one to think and exercise judgement. AI’s ready-made answers remove this process, leaving people to parrot content they don’t really understand. That has pernicious consequences in wider fields.

Take medicine, somewhere politicians desperately hope AI will rescue overstretched services. We’re awash with anecdotes of patients saved from ignorant doctors by trusty ChatGPT. We hear rather less about its potential to empower valetudinarians and slow triage. Google already turned benign symptoms into our worst fears. LLMs indulge this further. News stories focus on the patients justified in their feeling that something is off. But think how many more really were just suffering from a cough. Doctors end up further stretched by self-diagnoses and inhibited by litigation fears in the rare cases more malign causes are missed.

Stupidogenic society

LLMs don’t democratise knowledge but overwhelm us with its shallow imitation. Their indulgent tone has real world consequences. ChatGPT told a Canadian man he had discovered a new “mathematical framework” with impossible powers. “You’re not crazy,” ChatGPT assured him. You’re stretching the “edges of human understanding.” This sycophancy entrenches another layer of bureaucracy between reality and genuine expertise.

captures this in her description of AI as fostering a “stupidogenic” society. Just as the abundance of cheap calories fuelled the obesity epidemic, the abundance of frictionless “knowledge” encourages “cognitive offload”. Unworked minds grow similarly fat. We turn to the fast food of services like Blinkist, which promise 15-minute book summaries are as good as reading the real thing. Because who has time to read when there are inboxes to clear?

Automation & politics

But let’s assume that the AI titans are right. That a monumental, self-learning, exponentially improving technology is on the horizon. In that case, we’re likely not dealing with the optimistic scenario of AI as an aid. Rather, it will replace. Then it is fantastical to believe populations will happily accept a new empire headed by a few fabulously rich AI overlords. Political parties promising to stop automation will win landslides. We’ve already seen Trump in an otherwise AI-friendly White House pledge such prohibition to dock workers. Just because we can use AI doesn’t mean we will. We cloned a sheep in 1996 but went no further.

Do we really want efficiency?

The AI narrative assumes we relentlessly pursue efficiency. That because we can use AI to make people redundant, we will. But a lot of people already are and we’re quite happy with that status quo. If we embarked upon a bit of decimation, firing 10 percent of the workforce, we’d get a lot of social strife. But would businesses really suffer? Elon Musk went eight times harder than this when he took over Twitter. Despite hysterical protests, it worked out just fine.

We tell ourselves little lies about our own importance. That back-to-back calls matter. That we’re the special case the doctor missed. AI amplifies this busyness but adds little value. Doing more, faster, doesn’t mean doing it better. AGI scares people like me because it threatens that importance. And this is what the hypesters miss: the inconvenience of human nature. We use new tools in ways that reflect the same flawed status quo. Just as Altman and co. will reinterpret their failed prophecies to preserve their mission’s importance, so we too will reinterpret AI’s place to preserve our own.

Expect a fudge rather than a revolution. We’ll keep trumpeting AI’s potential while ducking awkward structural conversations. Plus ça change.

As Singapore celebrated its National Day on 9th August, one of its rising business figures had a more important appointment with the National League North. 7,000 miles away in West Norfolk, Joseph Phua was at The Walks stadium to watch his new side’s season opener in England’s sixth tier.

Unfortunately for Phua, King’s Lynn Town FC lacked the precision of military parades back in the city state. Despite dominating the match, it ended in a 1-1 draw. But that did little to dampen the optimism of 1,400 locals in the stands. With a new strategy, manager and squad, the club is one of the promotion favourites under Phua’s ownership.

Investing in Football

His investment is part of a popular trend. Led by Americans, foreign owners are pouring money into English football clubs. Wrexham (Welsh but playing in the English leagues) is the most famous example where actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have overseen an unprecedented three successive promotions. The accompanying TV show tells a story of renewal in the declining industrial town, as well as rejuvenation on the pitch.

It works because Wrexham isn’t fashionable. Phua clearly grasps the power of that narrative in choosing King’s Lynn (Lynn to locals). I know the town well. It’s just a few miles away from my family’s home. It’s not like where I live now. While Singapore is one of the world’s richest nations and a global trading hub of six million people, Lynn is an isolated town of 47,000 - over 100 miles northeast of London and 45 miles away from East Anglian metropolises Cambridge and Norwich.

Singapore vs Lynn

Where Singapore has made itself globally relevant, Lynn has drifted into obscurity. Once England’s greatest trading hub and link to Northern Europe’s Hanseatic League, today its economy rests on a dwindling commercial port, food processing and low-paid seasonal agricultural work. Its former prosperity lingers only in the handsome merchant houses that colour the town’s historic quarter. Elsewhere, it’s rudely but not inaccurately described by YouTuber Turdtowns as such:

Everything is mismatched and piss-coloured. It truly belongs in the bog.

Lynn cries out for the same ambition that once inspired the draining of its surrounding fens in the 17th century - then one of Europe’s greatest infrastructure projects. Instead, the 20th century brought only managed decline. Designated an overspill town from London in the 1960s despite being so far away, it at least has a direct train to King’s Cross. That service carries the royals to nearby Sandringham but is rather less reliable for ordinary commuters. Passengers are often dumped on rail replacement buses at Ely to undertake the final 30-mile leg along the single carriageway A10. The Beeching Cuts under Harold Macmillan severed its links to the rest of Norfolk. The county’s only city, Norwich, is now a two-hour journey if the Ely connection works.

Regeneration

Attempted regeneration in Lynn is of the “do something” variety. Turdtown’s review suggests the the town centre’s 2004 facelift wasn’t money well spent. There was little uptake for the new King’s Lynn Innovation Centre and its builders defaulted on a council-backed loan. Any coherent plans are undermined by ever-changing government schemes with different grant criteria.

Private investment cuts through this dithering because it expects something back. Reynolds and McElhenney are eulogised as philanthropists in Wrexham. Tourism and hospitality spending has increased by £120m in just three years. But they share in the spoils. The club they bought the club for $2.5m is now valued at $475m. The Wrexham model shows the possibilities of treating towns as assets rather than state-dependents. Phua’s plans for Lynn reflect that mentality. Rather than feasibility studies, he talks about padel courts to attract the county’s affluent class and refurbishing a tired hotel to keep Sandringham day-trippers overnight. He asks the same blunt question Lee Kuan Yew once did: how can we make people trade, spend and invest?

Better to be rich and worry than poor and still worry

Of course, regional regeneration is about more than money. As the MP Katie Lam argues in the Policy Exchange’s Future of the Right paper, you can’t build communities in commuter belts. Singapore deals with that now as it grapples for an identity beyond that of a money-making port. But surely better to have money and worry about social cohesion than to have none and still worry about it.

And Lynn has assets it can leverage. Tom Dyckhoff writes in The Guardian:

Were King’s Lynn anywhere else in the country but squelched into the remoter end of the Fens, it would be overrun with tourists.

He talks about the beauty of its historic quarter - “cobbles, alleys and warehouses” - and hopes that “fortune will smile on it again someday.”

The remoteness that hinders Lynn is structural, not geographic. It lies close to the North Norfolk coast where villages like Burnham Market are weekend playgrounds for London’s wealthy. It’s nicknamed “Chelsea-on-Sea” for its demographic resemblance to the wealthy West London district. Its train line, when not sabotaged at Ely, reaches Cambridge in under an hour. How can it tap into the prosperity that surrounds it?

Singapore and Localism

Singapore’s size is often raised as an objection to replicating its model. Of course, it’s easier to govern a few million people and a land mass you could fit into Norfolk seven times. But such an objection should instead be a lesson in localism. Regions know what they need better than Whitehall.

Yes, West Norfolk council’s track record hardly screams competence. But that speaks to a broader problem of incentives. Local government competes only for dependency. It’s about securing grants, ticking boxes and proving you’re “doing something” with the money. Investors like Phua think differently. They expect a return. They want to compete for capital. Government should help that process, whether it be building roads, fixing railways, or simply ensuring it capitalises upon the cultural cachet of a rising local football club.

Foreign investors see our forgotten towns not as relics but undervalued assets. If that entrepreneurial mindset were applied more widely, the UK might finally make headway with its levelling-up agenda.