Chapter 3 - Practicable Economics

Summary

Practitioners need to be innovative in grappling with tasks of a third world economy. The book of rules tells you very little, and precedents borrowed from advanced countries have a nasty habit of coming apart in your hands.

— Goh Keng Swee, 6 June 1977

Arranging Goh Keng Swee's works in a chronological fashion as I have done in Section One allows for an easy contextualization of his thoughts and his works within his life experiences and within the general history of Malaya and Singapore.

From here onwards, the presentation of his writings has to take a new form. To the extent possible, I rely on a thematic arrangement and the included works are chosen for their substance, their representativeness of his thoughts and their significance in helping us understand the man and his ideas.

Although his speeches given as a minister, either of Finance, Defence or Education, or as Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore (which he was from 1980 to 1984), were formal affairs in a sense, a surprising number of his writings after 1959 are so substantial in content that they make the job of filtering his thoughts quite a daunting task. The three collections of his speeches and writings which were published between 1972 and 1995 are without much accompanying analysis, either by him or by editors.

The wealth of information and solid reasoning found in Goh's speeches and talks after 1959 is a powerful testimony to the depth of his participation in, and the breadth of his influence on, Singapore's nation building. In that important sense, his life and thoughts amount to a rare study of post-colonial reality in Southeast Asia and the Third World.

One shortcoming in the chosen approach of analysing Goh's own words is that the social being is not properly captured. Quotes about him are therefore provided here and there, as has been done in Section One. The following two citations, for example, grant a glimpse of the civil servant turned national visionary. The first is from one who worked under him and the other from one who worked with him.