Telescopic Philanthropy

There are many ways to hate the tiny island nation of Singapore, but faulting it for overdevelopment is perhaps the cruelest. And when the New York Times makes the criticism, the cruelty slides into absurdity: a newspaper in America’s largest city is accusing Singapore of having too many buildings? Earlier this year, Seth Mydans filed a report for the Times about Singapore’s redevelopment of its last village, a “secret Eden . . . hidden in trees among the massed apartment blocks, where a fresh breeze rustles the coconut palms and tropical birds whoop and whistle.” The village was “Singapore’s last rural hamlet, a forgotten straggler in the rush to modernize this high-rise, high-tech city-state,” wrote Mydans. “When it is gone, one of the world’s most extreme national makeovers will be complete.” …

… The economic historian Joseph Schumpeter made this point back in the 1940s, warning of a fundamental contradiction in many thinkers’ opposition to capitalism. Because economic rationalism destroyed most of the underpinnings of civil society—village, clan, craft guild—and did not replace them with any similar organic enterprise, more and more people would eventually yearn for a kind of moral authority that capitalism could not provide, Schumpeter predicted. With little direct responsibility for practical affairs, intellectuals would be especially prone to this tendency; they could support vague moral or cultural ideas with few of the tradeoffs that ordinary people face. As a result, the bourgeoisie would underwrite its own gravediggers, subsidizing an intellectual class hostile to itself. Capitalism’s long-run benefits were very much worth fighting for, Schumpeter argued: for those outside the system, they provided a path in, and for everyone else, a constant improvement in living standards through innovation. But capitalism’s negative consequences—constant volatility and income disparity, to name two—would remain stark, and intelligent people would often fail to grasp its redeeming values. Defending capitalism, even in the best of times, would always be an uphill battle.

There’s much truth to this. After all, not only Seth Mydans, but countless other Singaporeans, have romanticized that stupid village. They’re welcome to enjoy the pre-industrial world—provided they choose to live in it. Many such places still exist in neighboring Malaysia, and rents, I hear, are cheap.