an interesting piece from singabloodypore:
The author of The J Curve, Ian Bremmer was recently on The Daily
Show and seemed to be talking alot of sense so it might be a timely
read for the likes of Lee Hsien Loong...
With this timely book, political risk consultant Bremmer aims to
"describe the political and economic forces that revitalize some
states and push others toward collapse." His simple premise is that
if one were to graph a nation's stability as a function of its
openness, the result would be a "J curve," suggesting that as
nations become more open, they become less stable until they
eventually surpass their initial levels of stability. In other
words, a closed society like Cuba is relatively stable; a more open
society like Saudi Arabia is less so; and an extremely open society
like the United States is extremely stable. Bremmer expertly
distills decades—sometimes centuries—of history as he analyzes 10
countries at different positions on the J curve. North Korea is
perhaps the most disturbing example of the left side of the curve,
where a closed authoritarian regime produces effective stability;
on the right of the curve sit stable countries like Turkey, Israel
and India. This leads Bremmer to conclude that political isolation
and sanctions often work against their intended results and that
globalization is the key to opening closed authoritarian states.
Bremmer persuasively illustrates his core thesis without eliding
the complexities of global or national politics.