your armchair philophizing of the day
The New Industrial State is a pretty bad description of post-financialization USA; shareholders have re-asserted control over the capital they own. But it does strike me as a pretty good description of any country politically dominated by conglomerates, e.g., Japan. With some modifications, elements of the idea could apply to Singapore.
Moving across countries and cultures loses many of the details, but the basic intuition that someone has to carry out a nontrivial amount of conscious design in an industrialized economy - that the invisible hand is, to a nontrivial degree, actually visible. Much is negotiated outside the price mechanism; if the price mechanism were the most efficient, the biggest organizations should be one person large. Since complicated plans entail some assumptions on infrastructure, available labor, acquiescence of employees and customers, etc., plans by different entities can affect these assumptions and cause expensive conflicts. Thus in any state where such planners (for whatever reason) enjoy stable and entrenched positions, there will be an incentive for state and said entrenched private planners to cooperate, responding to the same broad combination of economic and political pressures, rather than state planners responding to politics and private planners responding to economics separately. Cue Japanese welfare-by-unusual-corporate-generosity.
Singapore, of course, does not have conglomerates; it has one conglomerate, Singapore Inc., with one technostructure, helpfully melded by social ties. Economic sensibilities are restrained by deep integration with the international economy and there Singapore Inc. has no say; it must take international markets as given. Thus Singapore Inc. behaves like a Galbraithian firm embedded in a non-Galbraithian world, with no conscious state actor with which to negotiate. Within Singapore, planning rules supreme. Here, have an extract from a summary:
[...] In the planning sector, ownership and control are divorced. The owners of the giant firms are the millions of holders of common stock who have no actual control over the operation of the corporation. Instead, control is exercised by the technostructure - a professional elite consisting of executives, managers, engineers, scientists, product planners, market researchers, marketing personnel, and so on. The disgruntled stockholder who does not like the performance of a particular firm does not have the option of firing the management. The usual recourse is to sell the shares of the company and to buy shares of another company. It is naive, said Galbraith, to assume that the technostructure has an incentive to maximize the return to the millions of anonymous stockholders. The technostructure pursues much more complex purposes, which he categorized as protective and affirmative.
The central protective purpose of the firm is survival, which translates into the need to earn a profit sufficient to keep most stockholders relatively happy and to provide sufficient retained earning for investment and growth. One way that this less-than-maximum profit can be assured is by taking product price out of competition [...] [ed: which is irrelevant in Singapore's case; there are of course other ways to keep shareholders happy]
The major affirmative purpose of the firm is corporate growth. Growth of output, sales, and revenues produce greater employment security and financial rewards to the members of the technostructure. In the orthodox theory of the firm, oligopolists restrict their production in order to boost their prices and enhance their profits: "No point is better accepted by the neoclassical model than that the monopoly price is higher and the output smaller than is socially ideal. The public is the victim. Because of such exploitation, oligopoly is wicked." In Galbraith's theory, oligopolists fix prices at low levels - ones that achieve a minimum profit and permit expansion of total output and sales. Huge advertising outlays, campaigns to gain market share, unprofitable mergers between competitive and noncompetitive firms, and so forth, all make perfect sense if the goal is growth. According to Galbraith, "The neoclassical model describes an ill that does not exist [high oligopolistic prices and restricted output] because it assumes a purpose that is not pursued [profit maximization]. "
Thus the curious situation of a technocracy managing a somewhat transient population; this does not imply anything bad about the performance of said technocracy. By the metric of generating prodigious growth per capita, this is a government which has done extraordinarily well. It is always the case that voters in every country have limited say over the character and priorities of the civil service; it is by historical accident that Singapore has so evolved to have a technocratic civil service and a deferential (or, at least, resigned) population and thus emulates a corporation-based model well. The point is that this thus correlates, to a remarkable extent, with the priorities of the resulting ideology of pragmatism; with what the technocracy consciously plans toward achieving.
Moving across countries and cultures loses many of the details, but the basic intuition that someone has to carry out a nontrivial amount of conscious design in an industrialized economy - that the invisible hand is, to a nontrivial degree, actually visible. Much is negotiated outside the price mechanism; if the price mechanism were the most efficient, the biggest organizations should be one person large. Since complicated plans entail some assumptions on infrastructure, available labor, acquiescence of employees and customers, etc., plans by different entities can affect these assumptions and cause expensive conflicts. Thus in any state where such planners (for whatever reason) enjoy stable and entrenched positions, there will be an incentive for state and said entrenched private planners to cooperate, responding to the same broad combination of economic and political pressures, rather than state planners responding to politics and private planners responding to economics separately. Cue Japanese welfare-by-unusual-corporate-generosity.
Singapore, of course, does not have conglomerates; it has one conglomerate, Singapore Inc., with one technostructure, helpfully melded by social ties. Economic sensibilities are restrained by deep integration with the international economy and there Singapore Inc. has no say; it must take international markets as given. Thus Singapore Inc. behaves like a Galbraithian firm embedded in a non-Galbraithian world, with no conscious state actor with which to negotiate. Within Singapore, planning rules supreme. Here, have an extract from a summary:
[...] In the planning sector, ownership and control are divorced. The owners of the giant firms are the millions of holders of common stock who have no actual control over the operation of the corporation. Instead, control is exercised by the technostructure - a professional elite consisting of executives, managers, engineers, scientists, product planners, market researchers, marketing personnel, and so on. The disgruntled stockholder who does not like the performance of a particular firm does not have the option of firing the management. The usual recourse is to sell the shares of the company and to buy shares of another company. It is naive, said Galbraith, to assume that the technostructure has an incentive to maximize the return to the millions of anonymous stockholders. The technostructure pursues much more complex purposes, which he categorized as protective and affirmative.
The central protective purpose of the firm is survival, which translates into the need to earn a profit sufficient to keep most stockholders relatively happy and to provide sufficient retained earning for investment and growth. One way that this less-than-maximum profit can be assured is by taking product price out of competition [...] [ed: which is irrelevant in Singapore's case; there are of course other ways to keep shareholders happy]
The major affirmative purpose of the firm is corporate growth. Growth of output, sales, and revenues produce greater employment security and financial rewards to the members of the technostructure. In the orthodox theory of the firm, oligopolists restrict their production in order to boost their prices and enhance their profits: "No point is better accepted by the neoclassical model than that the monopoly price is higher and the output smaller than is socially ideal. The public is the victim. Because of such exploitation, oligopoly is wicked." In Galbraith's theory, oligopolists fix prices at low levels - ones that achieve a minimum profit and permit expansion of total output and sales. Huge advertising outlays, campaigns to gain market share, unprofitable mergers between competitive and noncompetitive firms, and so forth, all make perfect sense if the goal is growth. According to Galbraith, "The neoclassical model describes an ill that does not exist [high oligopolistic prices and restricted output] because it assumes a purpose that is not pursued [profit maximization]. "
Thus the curious situation of a technocracy managing a somewhat transient population; this does not imply anything bad about the performance of said technocracy. By the metric of generating prodigious growth per capita, this is a government which has done extraordinarily well. It is always the case that voters in every country have limited say over the character and priorities of the civil service; it is by historical accident that Singapore has so evolved to have a technocratic civil service and a deferential (or, at least, resigned) population and thus emulates a corporation-based model well. The point is that this thus correlates, to a remarkable extent, with the priorities of the resulting ideology of pragmatism; with what the technocracy consciously plans toward achieving.