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Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus . By Donald Low and Sudhir Vadaketh eds. Singapore : NUS Press , 2014. 272 pp. $24 (Paper).
Book Reviews
Singapore and its often-referenced "exceptionalism" have long drawn attention from social scientists, if not for the country's ostensible developmental success, then for its "policy lab" approach to addressing social, political, and economic challenges. Both the death of founding statesman Lee Kuan Yew and the celebration of fifty years of independence, in 2015, have reinvigorated interest in questions of its successes, its policies, and its future.
Despite this general interest, few recent book-length scholarly works have been dedicated to critically assessing the nuances of Singapore's policy environment. Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, edited by Donald Low and Sudhir Vadaketh, does just this, with a collection of fifteen chapters that cover a wide spectrum of territory related to the country's development. The policy backgrounds of both editors are reflected in the stated aims of the volume: to compile and examine an array of practical alternatives to the current political model, and to inject dynamism into policy debates, which the editors see as stunted by the binary framing often favored by the country's ruling People's Action Party (PAP) government.
The book is divided into three sections. The...