travel insurance singapore

This In Asia he often looked like a toned down "I used to think the same things as everyone else," economist Bryan Caplan said in a recent podcast, "and then I started reading economics."

I too was a pretty conventional thinker once upon a time, and then I began following provocative economics blogs by the likes of Tyler Cowen, Will Wilkinson, and Chris Blattman (all three Gadling interviewees-- really, click the links!)

One of my new favorite bloggers, Bryan Caplan recently visited the unusual city-state of Singapore and wrote about some of the most interesting aspects of his trip at his blog, EconLog (see here, here, and here, for starters).

Bryan and I recently chatted about Singapore's rather unconventional policies, some misconceptions that are often shared about the country, and why travel memories are the most valuable to those who live longest....

Singapore is often thought of as an authoritarian dictatorship and it's strict laws are well-known-- corporal punishment is still employed, drug trafficking is punishable by death. But at the same time, it seems to be undergoing a period of liberalization. Why, in your view, is this happening?

Well, I think it's not true that it's a dictatorship. It's a British parliamentary system and by the accounts of international observers the elections are not corrupt. Really what you have is just the ruling party has managed to win up to 60% of the vote in every election for the last 40 years. Which I'll admit is strange, but I was thinking about it more upon getting back, and I realized that when you think about Singapore as a city rather than a country, there are lots of cities where one party has been in power for 40 years in the United States. For example, the Democrats have been in charge in San Francisco for longer than a single party has been in charge in Singapore.

So it's not true to say that it's not a democracy. You could make a case that it's not a liberal democracy-- you've got corporal punishment and a wider use of the death penalty. But in terms of liberalization, my main guess would be that it's modernizing like other Asian countries, and as countries modernize they become more Western, and the attitudes of the population become more similar to those of other developed countries.

And the Internet has a lot to do with it. On the one hand, the standard media are quite dull, but they have a very active blogosphere that the government doesn't censor, and that's where a lot of intellectually alive people are getting their information. The only Internet censorship they have is that they have a token list of about 100 porn sites that they block, but that doesn't make much difference because there are a lot more than 100 out there.

What policies has Singapore adopted that have allowed it to flourish?

There's a lot going on in Singapore, but what is unique about it is that its government is much more willing to follow policies that economists think of as economically efficient. They're much more willing to use incentives, and they're one of the few really free trade countries.