Economic growth, he believes, depends upon what the people do with their lives. The government's role is to foster economic growth by creating a setting in which people can live happily and succeed and express themselves. The East, he admits, had an advantage over the West in industrializing because it could look to what the West had accomplished over many decades, copy it, and grow faster. In the future growth will be more difficult for the East to achieve because there will be nobody to copy. The East will have to guard against the tradition there of strict discipline, no talking back to teachers, and rote learning so that these characteristics do not interfere with the search for new technologies and products.
Progress demands that societies adapt.
However, he believes in the integration of useful attributes into a culture, rather than assimilation. Singapore's stock and property markets exhibit the classic symptoms of bubble markets that will inevitably collapse. At the first whiff of stagnation, the regime's legitimacy will disappear. But that was yesterday. While pervasive corruption blocks rapid adjustment in many East Asian economies, an inherent conservatism also impedes necessary responses.