There is a thought that occurs, from time to time, to everyone who reads a lot about policy. The thought goes: if they just put me in charge, I would simply do the good things and not do the bad things, explain clearly to everyone why the good things were good, and be rewarded with a booming economy and eternal electoral gratitude. The anonymous author of one of the finalists in Astral Codex Ten’s 2026 book review contest — Scott Alexander is posting one finalist a week, with reader voting to follow — writes that every good rationalist has had this thought, the fantasy that they would “pass the good policies and not the bad ones,” and that everyone knows it couldn’t actually work. Real policy is hard and messy; Reality resists.
Except that Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore and “rationalist folk hero,” appears to have done exactly that, and his two-volume memoir — The Singapore Story, covering his rise, and Third World to First, covering his 25 years running the place after independence — is the reviewer’s exhibit. Pass reasonable, economically optimal policies; watch the economy boom; win massive supermajorities for decades. When a race riot nearly erupts over Malay recruits being turned away from the army during high unemployment, Lee shows up with a megaphone, explains that it is all a misunderstanding — there is no policy against employing Malays in the army, everyone will be processed and get jobs tomorrow — and everyone understands how reasonable he is being and sorts it out the next day. When Chinese-Malay tensions run hot, the reviewer says, he handles it by delivering “an epic Scott-length blog post” of a speech to the Malaysian parliament about abandoning zero-sum culture wars for pragmatic economic policy, and even the die-hard Malays stand and clap.
So how? The review’s implicit answer is almost insulting in its simplicity: just be consistently brilliant, charismatic, incredibly detail-oriented, honest, hardworking and pragmatic, continuously, for decades, while also having your share of good luck.
Sure.
First, the other genres
Before the power fantasy, the memoirs pass through several other genres, the reviewer notes. There is a coming-of-age story: born in 1923 into a middle-class colonial Singapore family, known as Harry Lee until he dropped the Harry in the late 1950s (except with British contacts), unimpressed by a father he considered weak, learning his principles from his mother and maternal grandfather. The period detail is vivid and occasionally startling. Of his mother, married in 1922 at the age of 15, Lee writes: “She even brought with her, as part of her dowry, a little slave girl whose duty, among other things, was to help bathe her, wash her feet and put on and take off her shoes.”
Then a school drama. Lee filters upward through British-run schools to Raffles College, chases the Queen’s Scholarship to Oxbridge — awarded to one or two students a year — and is repeatedly outscored, maddeningly, by a girl a year above him named Choo. The student-council politics are, in the reviewer’s phrase, absurdly consequential: Lee ends up arguing the Chinese students’ side of a dispute with the Malay students, and everyone involved in that college quarrel reappears twenty years later as a senior official or public intellectual negotiating the fate of Southeast Asia. Imagine your student union, except it future-casts the entire cabinet.
The empire, seen losing
Then a war story. Lee watches the supposedly invincible British Empire lose Malaya in two months to a Japanese force half its size, with 130,000 British soldiers captured, and watches Singapore fall almost without a fight. The reviewer pauses here, deliberately: the British didn’t just lose, they were seen to lose, in a way that looked selfish and cowardly and weak. Lee does not forget this. Neither, the book suggests, does anyone else.
The occupation chapters include the book’s most harrowing passage. Lee is rounded up with most of Singapore’s young Chinese men and held in a stadium for three days. Told to exit through one gate, he gets a bad feeling, claims he forgot his coat, slips back into the crowd, and walks out a different gate the next day unchallenged. The men who went through the first gate were taken to the beach, lined up and shot — the Sook Ching massacre, in which the Japanese killed tens of thousands of young Chinese men across Singapore and Malaya to “suppress anti-Japanese resistance.”
And here is the detail the reviewer holds up against all that. As Prime Minister, decades later, Lee did a lot of business with the Japanese — invited them to build factories in Singapore, spoke warmly in the second volume of their organization and intelligence. During the occupation he’d been struck, grimly, by their pragmatism: they set up a brothel of camp followers within days of arriving, and, Lee tells the reader, “As a result, rapes were infrequent.” He files this next to what he considered British squeamishness about soldiers’ needs. “That he does this after living through this story,” the reviewer writes of the later dealings, “tells us something about him.” What it tells us is left as an exercise, but it rhymes with everything else: the man ran on pragmatism the way other people run on spite, and apparently could not afford spite.
Meanwhile, wartime civilian life: odd jobs, scraping by, and — in the review’s favourite low-stakes subplot — starting a glue-making business with the brother of Choo, the girl who kept beating his grades. “You can probably guess how that story ends.”
After the atomic bombs, the Japanese withdrew and the British swept back in unchallenged, ruling Singapore like before. But things weren’t the same after that, and the reviewer treats this as the book’s second, half-hidden subject: power, like the Queen’s Scholarship, turns out to be partly about being seen. The empire lost the scholarship in 1942, in front of everyone, and no amount of showing up afterwards with a megaphone could quite explain it away.