A couple of days before the 12th edition of the Forum Ilmuwan Malaysia Madani with Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, I was having coffee — well, iced chocolate for me — with one of the panellists, an economist buddy of mine, Allen Ng, who is lead economist at the Asean+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO).
Conversations with Allen, whom I regard as one of Malaysia’s finest economists, can go on for a very long time on a wide variety of topics — economics ideas primarily, but also science fiction, The Lord of the Rings, computer games and so on.
On that day, among the things we discussed were some ideas that he planned to raise at the forum. One, which Allen posted on LinkedIn, was that “… to attract more capital, Malaysia must first export more capital. The next phase of Malaysia’s economic development depends on this internationalisation of our firms”.
I agree completely — beyond just snagging international revenues, it would be great if Malaysian firms could be multinational corporations in their own right.
Another point that Allen raised was that, given today’s global uncertainty, national resilience has become a key aspect of national competitiveness. A country’s ability to generate sound economic performance in spite of volatility — sometimes at the expense of pure efficiency — is an important marker of competitiveness.
I agree completely as well (this is sometimes an issue in conversations with Allen — we are in violent agreement far too often). The question I would ask next is, “While we can agree that we need to be resilient, what does it mean to be resilient and how do we embed resilience in an economy?”
There are plenty of reasonable (and also unreasonable — see my article, “What not to do in a crisis”, Issue 1620, March 30) answers to this. For instance, thinking of supply chain diversification in manufacturing, in food, in energy, in medical supplies and so on. One might also think of things like water security or electricity generation, among others. But, at the risk of going a bit meta (small “m”, not Meta, the technology company), I think there is also an argument for a diversification of philosophical approaches to public policy. Let me explain.
A few days after I met Allen, I was listening to Philosophers in Space, a podcast that uses science fiction materials (books, movies, television series) as a motivating tool for philosophical discussions on those works. In short, the kind of podcast I wish I had started. The particular episode I was listening to was on the television series Foundation, based of the series by Isaac Asimov, and the philosophical perspective of long-termism. The hosts were discussing a particular perspective of long-termism which, incidentally, they had heard on an Ezra Klein podcast with Holden Karnofsky, then CEO of Open Philanthropy.
According to Karnofsky’s view, it is not always obvious which moral framework or “worldview” is best when it comes to philanthropy. As such, what we should do, instead of funding a host of initiatives around one worldview, is to allocate resources across several plausible worldviews. A portfolio of worldviews, as it were.
I think this is a really intriguing meta view. Before going into what it means for national resilience, I want to first define what I think “worldview” means in Karnofsky’s context. In the Ezra Klein podcast, examples of worldviews include global health utilitarianism (for the greater good), animal ethics, long-termism (future generations mattering enormously) and evidence-first empiricism (only interventions with strong prior evidence should get funding). How I read it, then, is that Karnofsky takes a “worldview” to be a kind of moral framework that determines how we make decisions on what we consider to be important.
To give an (admittedly extreme) example, consider the following. We know that the sun will become too hot to support life on earth in approximately one billion years. Thus, assuming humanity is still around — and that, given everything that is going on today, is a really strong assumption — it stands to reason that we will have to go out in space to continue existing.
Now, suppose I have a pot of money. Should I fund space exploration in preparation for a billion years from now, or should I fund actions to combat the climate crisis, extending our stay on the only habitat we have ever known and the habitat in which we have all evolved? If I practised extreme long-termism, I may decide to allocate precious funds to space exploration instead of, say, climate adaptation, which is more relevant to the here and now.
Applying that “worldview” to public policy and therefore, to ideas of resilience, the appropriate definition of “worldview” is a theory of change of how societies or nations coordinate resources, solve collective problems and, ultimately, generate societal welfare. This may include moral philosophies, developmental theories, institutional preferences and more. One theory of change, which I think most fits Malaysia at present, is that state intervention is often necessary to generate good, however defined, societal outcomes. This is why the state is active in nearly every aspect of society, from regulating prices of petrol and allowing offtake purchases for independent power producers, to creating a national fund of funds for venture capital, and more.
Some of these interventions are necessary, certainly, but it can sometimes feel like we (and I include the citizens in here — how often do we not blame the government for things going wrong?) seem to have a single worldview, namely that it is the government that should fix everything in society.
Now, there are lots of debates on this particular worldview of an interventionist or a developmental state, including in this newspaper. Cards on the table, I personally do see the value of a developmental state in some circumstances. But maybe we have been taking the wrong approach after all. Instead of debating which worldview is “right”, we should instead be considering a portfolio of worldviews or theories of change in the event that any single worldview may turn out to be wrong. And if worldviews are a product of cultural evolution, as I believe, it’s good to recall the words of British evolutionary biologist, Leslie Orgel: “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”
In the context of public policy, different worldviews may include the degree of state intervention, the extent of market fundamentalism, the prioritisation of certain sectors over another (for instance, I am partial towards manufacturing over services — this is one instance where Allen and I have slight disagreements!), social democratic universalism (think free public healthcare for all versus private providers of healthcare), long-term versus short-term horizons, deals versus rules in the structural reforms of institutions and more. Furthermore, different worldviews may have different implicit objectives. For instance, social democracy looks to generate societal equality while, say, market fundamentalists seek out efficiency and growth.
There are many worldviews to public policy; not every one is equally true. But what if some are more right than others, and what if we happen to be more wrong than right in our choice of worldviews? Thus, I think the argument for a portfolio of worldviews or theories of change is compelling. But how do we decide on that portfolio construction?
In my next article, I will take a deep dive into this portfolio construction question with the following guiding principle: horses for courses. In essence, while we can build a portfolio of multiple worldviews, even within that portfolio, we can attempt to match particular worldviews with particular situations. This, then, becomes a national resilience framework on which the construction of that framework — experimental in nature, built on a form of evolutionary principles — is, itself, resilient.