Lee Kuan Yew and his followers, which most of the time included most of the people of Singapore, have showed the world that economic self-improvement has to have public policies grounded in best-practice, real-world pragmatism rather than ideological schematics. It also has to have hard-working citizens sharing the vision. Whether your political system is argumentative-parliamentarian, messy-direct democracy or shut-up authoritarian, the people have to be brought along and made to believe in the leader's way of moving forward if they were to give it their best.

LKY (as he used to sign his notes) convinced people that his way - hard work, scientific public policy, political-party monopoly, clean government, and media as ally, not as smarty-pants second-guesser - would work. And it did. In his own phraseology, Singapore went from "Third World" to "First World" in a generation's time, never stopping for a rest, much less to entertain a second guess or tolerate second-guessers.

I once offered him the formulation of the late Isaiah Berlin, the great Oxford don who imagined political genius in the manner of Leo Tolstoy. The great ones were either "hedgehogs" or "foxes". Their political sense was either multi-faceted (the ultra-alert fox who knew a thousand ways to survive) or the one-big-idea porcupine (with but a single survival move - yet it was a doozey!). The wartime Winston Churchill with all his many tricks was a fox; Albert Einstein, who could barely cross a street without help, was nonetheless the hedgehog with his one world-changing idea.