Categories
Books & printed materials Economics Politics & government Society

[3010] Reviewing Abundance and thinking about the abundance agenda

One of the central themes of The End of the Nineteen-Nineties (by yours truly) is that a robust and widely shared economic growth is a prerequisite to Malaysia’s civic nationalism that comes in the form of Bangsa Malaysia. I argue that the loss of growth momentum caused by the late 1990s Asian Financial Crisis is the primary reason behind why civic nationalism is struggling to have itself centered in Malaysian politics. If you sympathize with the argument, then it is natural to buy into the overall abundance agenda.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are two champions that have popularized the idea of abundance through their recent 2025 book Abundance.

However, Abundance is a US-centric work. Some parts of the book sound like a boosterism for the Biden agenda: build, build, build. The support for the CHIPS Act is apparent throughout the book.

If you are living and working in Asia, problems raised by Klein and Thompson such as reluctance to building more housing, slow progress in renewable energy progress and the general weakness in infrastructure spending might sound like an alien concept. In this part of the world, infrastructure spending is something we have taken for granted. Oversupply and overcapacity are more the buzzwords than scarcity is.

Nothing highlights this more by the differing reactions to a recent clip of the US President convoy driving along a Malaysian highway during the recently concluded Asean Summit in Kuala Lumpur: US audience were amazed by various aspects of the highway while the Malaysian reactions included pride (thank you for noticing!), indifference (what’s the so special about the stretch road?) and smugness (welcome to the first world…). And this is just Malaysia, not China with its ultramodern out-of-this-world infrastructure and industrial might that is just hitting the ball out of the park.

Yet, the implications of Abundance have relevance to this part of the world too.

For one, policy priorities do change but change does not come easy. The authors go some length to explain why it is hard to build in the US: there was a time during the 1960s-1980s when development went too far that other concerns such as pollution, health and road safety were ignored. Since then, public pressures and court cases have put in place various legislations and bureaucracies to address these issues. Except by these restrictions are now in the way of addressing new challenges. Example includes laws that used to restrict pollutions are not preventing progress towards clean energy deployment that is necessary to combat climate change.

The lesson is policy momentum can (and often) come in the way of new challenges and this can be true for Malaysia too in multiple areas. One area I can think of is Malaysia’s set of incentives, which a majority of them are geared towards the industries of the 1990s but not of the 2020s. Many of these incentives are now irrelevant but continued to be given by the government for various reasons. Another policy is simply the petrol subsidy: we would like to push the country towards greater electrification by the subsidy is clearly in the way of it.

Another important lesson is that scarcity, oftentimes, is a choice. Sure, the physical world can only serves us so much but policies in many cases are the cause behind scarcity. Bringing the idea closer to home in Malaysia, our collective reluctance to raise taxes is the reason behind capacity and quality challenges we face in the health and education sector. We choose the scarcity, and then we fight among ourselves to win stupid prize in that stupid games we created.

But perhaps, the greatest lesson is this: growth is not the only thing that matters but do ever take it for granted. In fact, to put it more strongly, degrowth is not the way. This should be obvious with the various social pressures caused by deindustrialization faced by not just the US, but also Europe. In Malaysia, for those still holding on to the idea of Bangsa Malaysia, growth is a must.

Categories
Books & printed materials History & heritage Politics & government Science & technology Society

[3009] Reviewing The Peasant Robbers of Kedah 1900-1929 and then a modern thought

Central to Cheah Boon Kheng’s 1988 book The Peasant Robbers of Kedah 1900-1929: Historical and Folk Perceptions is the idea of theft as an informal wealth redistribution mechanism during a time of distress in rural Kedah. The thefts are framed as a guarantee for some kind of minimum welfare standard for the rural folks in general and in important specific cases, as a response by the weak against those in authority.

The result of 12 years of research and writing actively influenced by James C. Scott (the author of Weapons of the Weak), Cheah (who died in 2015) painted a picture of petty crimes being a constant concern in the 20th century rural Kedah. The historian reconstructed the conditions of Kedahan kampongs through interviews where written records failed. Written records are wholly inadequate because the Kedah Sultanate, both under first Siamese and later British influence, had limited effective control beyond major towns: the state elites had worries other than recording the lived experience of peasants, at least until they began to exert greater control throughout the state.

In that reconstructed picture, I get the idea that almost everybody engaged in petty crimes. Chickens reared regularly disappeared without a trace. The prevalence of theft however did not mean the lack of shame. In one page, the author wrote that the offending party would quickly slaughter the birds they had stolen, had it cooked immediately and then consumed as soon as possible so to not get caught. Proving such crime was next to impossible while reporting it to the authority was such a hassle that it was not worth the effort to do so. In a rural setting where the jungle was nearby, everybody was a suspect, policing was absent, the state was non-existent and the border was porous, the criminals might as well be a snake or a ghost with an appetite for white meat. The spread and frequency of petty crime worsened during difficult economic periods as distressed households resorted to pilfering for survival. Or as Cheah put it, it was a system of self-help.

Crucially, all this was an intraclass conflict. The rich lived far away from the kampongs in towns and protected by law and order. But the rural normality of crime set the stage for organized banditry at the state level and soon, interclass conflict.

The rising banditry was fueled by a weak state capacity, a changing power structure (from distributed native power to colonial centralized control) and general corruption among rural leaders.

Kedah then was more a mandala than the state we know today: strongest at the capital center but its influence dropped disproportionately fast the farther away a person traveled into the jungles. But even in that weak state structure, Kedah still had representatives in the form of village heads or similar positions. As the British expanded its bureaucratic reach outward beyond towns and centralized all authorities in the state capital Alor Setar, these local rural actors lost power and wealth.

To preserve their influence amid a feudal society, they resorted to criminal activities. They fought the erosion of their power by recruiting local thugs who carried out theft in a bigger way. In this way, the rural elites amassed muscles and capital.

But the local elites needed the local thugs as much as the latter needed the former. The thugs needed the local elites as a shield from Alor Setar, or at least some kind of legitimacy within a feudalist framework.

Here, the idea of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor becomes tenuous as the local rich preyed upon the poor even as the rural elites did this in rebellion against growing colonial authority (and it should be mentioned, against the sultan too).

As events would have it, the alliance between the rural elites and the thugs employed and protected would not last. Quarrels happened for whatever reasons and the latter turned against the former, stealing for rural and urban elites alike. The victimized peasants celebrated this and this is what Eric Hobsbawm called social banditry: actions taken as illegal by the law but carried out by the oppressed groups as a form of resistance. Some in fact shared their spoiled with poor, making them as Cheah Boon Kheng called them as the Robin Hood of Malaya. Such appears to be the case with the peasant robber Panglima Nayan (and several others) who was eventually killed by the British-Kedah authorities.

But not all cases (in fact most cases) could be labelled cleanly as Robin Hood kind. Stories about these individuals are contradictory and there are forgotten aspects about their cruelty to their own, with their benevolence exaggerated. It is a complicated truth, unlike popular folk tales told in Kedah.

Cheah the historian understood this but still came out to defend his thesis: it does not matter what the truth is. What matters is the perception of the peasants. That perception and stories from the peasants told are their way of rebelling against the authorities. These stories are the weapons of the weak.

Cheah’s defense of the thesis is acceptable and solid in fact. But I am troubled with the brushing off facts in favor of perceptions, if we transport this lens to analyze contemporary issues. Here, I am referring to social media which has inundated everybody with information (regardless of truth) so much that everything become perceptions with increasingly no bearing to facts. Would the employment of perceptions regardless of truth by fringe extremist groups (by definition non-mainstream and so… ignored/oppressed/suppressed/disenfranchised?) qualify as weapons of the weak?

I have not read Weapons of the Weak and I will try to read it soon with that specific question in mind.

Categories
Books & printed materials

[3008] About those coconut trees in Kam Raslan’s Malayan Spy

Travelling is a great way to learn about the world, but it is not the only one. Conversations, books, radio, television and the internet could teach us that too. The ease of access and richness of information today allow us to create accurate mental images of foreign places. Nothing beats being there but apps like Google Earth or simply image searches will show us how places like London or Nairobi or Lima look like. This is something we take for granted.

I am reminded so upon reading a striking paragraph in Kam Raslan’s Malayan Spy. The context: it is the early 1950s. The protagonist of the novel, Hamid, is a Malay student living in London and he is on his way to visit a friend in rural England. He has read about that version of England before but up to that point, he has only experienced the country as London the metropole and Malaya the colony. He has never seen the English kampongs. Not even a picture or a drawing it seems.

Malayan Spy by Kam Raslan

He has to rely on words to picture it in his mind. To create a mental image of English ruralness, he imports his home environs—tropical trees, Malayan motifs—into spaces left undescribed by proses written in pages of books he has read of England.

As the train leaves the city behind and enters a different England, Hamid is surprised to find that England does not look at all the way he had imagined it to be. He thought his had a good mental image to rely on, with had coconut trees swaying over meadows and farms, towering among oak trees.

Imagine expecting to see coconut trees in the cold and dreary rural England. It sounds ridiculous but the whole thing fits well into the general idea that Hamid is a silly Malay boy. Malayan Spy after all is a work of comedy.

But is it really silly of him to import Malayan motifs to imagine the English kampongs? In absence of information, we rely on things we know best. If we were in his shoes without the modern communication convenience and knowledge, I bet most modern Malaysians would do the same: imagining coconut trees swaying by an open field of lalangs.

Categories
Economics

[3007] Finance would be the Dutch disease in a 14-state Malaysia

It is August coming into September. It is a month of feverish nationalism across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. For the latter two, history is so intertwined that it is almost impossible to celebrate each other national day (days in case of Malaysia) independently and without dishing out minor insults across the Causeway. Over BFM just the other day, the hosts and guests were talking out loud how grateful they were to be Malaysians because of the food… which is better than Singapore’s. Some Singaporeans regularly express how grateful that Singapore is no longer part of Malaysia.

Beyond these banters, there are discussions of what-if. What if Singapore were still the 14th state of Malaysia? Would Malaysia be more prosperous than it is now?

I am in the opinion that the separation is for the best. A what-if Malaysia with Singapore in it would likely be worse for both parties: both Malaysia and Singapore would not be as prosperous as they are now. Both would pull each other back.

From an economic standpoint, the what-if Malaysia would be a Malaysia suffering from a kind of Dutch disease. We are accustomed to the Dutch disease through by overreliance on petroleum. But the Dutch disease can really be generalized into a sector that gobbles up so much resources that it raises cost across the economy, which in turn causes other sectors—especially manufacturing—to be uncompetitive.

In our what-if scenario, that sector would be finance (on top of petroleum).[0]

A strong and big financial sector works in the usual Dutch disease way: higher-than-average wages, which sucks talent away from other sectors. It would also suck other resources and reallocate capital towards short-term profitability instead of enabling greater investment that things like manufacturing usually need.

The well-being of the financial sector does not necessarily align with that of the economy (and within the context of industrialization, manufacturing). In How Asia Works, author Joe Studwell suggests that the financial sector must be put on a short leash to make industrialization works. In clearer terms, that means forcing banks to lend cheaply to manufacturers and having the financial sector bears more risks that it is willing to shoulder. There are other ways to counterbalance the influence of finance but an influential financial sector will make that harder if not impossible to do.

Finance was and is a big part of the Singaporean economy. While it is difficult to obtain clear data from the mid-20th century, as far as reliable and comparable records are concerned, financial services as a share of GDP in Singapore has been higher than it is in Malaysia since 1980.

Some rights reserved. By Hafiz Noor Shams.

The trend possibly began much earlier if we consider Singapore’s role as the financial and trading hub of colonial Malaya: the 1960s Singapore was not the swampy kampong some would claim it to be. In 1905, Singapore already operated a network of electric trams, which is shown below (in fact, Singapore had had steam trams as early as the 1880s):[1]

Koh Seow Chuan Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

So, if Singapore was still a Malaysian state and the growing finance GDP share trend held up as it did in the 1980s and all the way to the 2020s, I would think other sectors would be competing in a losing battle for resources. This is also part of the reason (in the real world) why some Singaporean more industrial firms have been relocating to Johor: it is too expansive for more and more industries to operate on the island state.

Additionally, the difference in the make-up of the Singapore economy and that of the Peninsula, and even more of the Bornean states, means economic interest and policy would diverge in a world where Singapore remains as a member state. In 1966, Singapore’s GNI per capita was already almost twice as large than that of Malaysia’s.

A concrete example of diverging interest could be seen from 1963 until 1965, there was major disagreement between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore over developmental funding: KL wanted Singapore to contribute more to support development not just in the Peninsula but also in Sabah and Sarawak, while Singapore thought it was being bullied into doing so. In fact, financial disagreement and questions regarding customs union between the federal Finance Minister Tan Siew Sin and Singapore’s Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee over the financial arrangement between Singapore and the Federation had played a role in the separation.

The divergence in policy could also be rationalized through monetary policy. The different stages of development between the member states means each component would need different policy treatment. The Peninsula, Sabah and Sarawak in the 1960s would likely need looser monetary policy relative to Singapore. A monetary authority trying to juggle the needs of such diverse economies would have a headache. Imagine the European Central Bank during the European debt crisis, where they had to satisfy the inflation-phobic German authorities while trying to save the Greece and other southern European economies. European authorities in the end resorted to painful internal devaluation for the already troubled economies.

Similarly for a what-if Malaysia, the benchmark rate would likely be too low for Singapore but to high for everybody else. In this case, the what-if Malaysia would grow slower than real-life Malaysia (making industrialization process harder than it should be) while a Singapore in Malaysia would likely face greater financial stabilities than real-world Singapore.

The fact that Singapore’s monetary policy regime today is so different from Malaysia’s just shows how difficult to run monetary policy in the what-if Malaysia.

And so, as far as development is concerned, separation was likely the best outcome we could hope for.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedHafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[0] — On Dutch disease, it is impossible to not mention oil & gas in real-world Malaysia. But I think Malaysia did well in managing petroleum resources due to other strong sectors such as agriculture and also due to strong effort to diversify and industrialize (that is industrialization in spite of petroleum but there are signs of petroleum crowding out other sectors there in Terengganu, Sabah and Sarawak). This is evident from the falling oil & gas since it peaked in the mid-1980s, in contrast to the rising prominence of finance in Singapore today. But the relevant point is, imagine having to deal with two sectors that would suck resources away from manufacturing. Would that Malaysia able to deal with two cost-rising sectors all at once? 

[1] — Electric tram at Collyer Quay, Singapore. Following the failure of steam trams in Singapore, electric trams were introduced in 1905 but eventually phased out by trolley buses in 1925-1927. [COLLYER QUAY, SINGAPORE. Seow Chuan Koh. National Archives Singapore. Extracted August 30 2025]

Categories
Books & printed materials

[3006] Reading Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies and being transported to Kuala Kangsar

I am generally attracted to paragraphs describing places. These descriptors make me feels a little bit like taking a vacation mentally.

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is primarily about the Spanish Civil War, but its pages are filled with place descriptors that I now would like to visit. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is set in Paris during the inter bellum period and that gives me an idea how the city looked like long ago, which I could compare to my own experience of visiting the city when I was younger.

I love Kaouther Adimi’s A Bookshop in Algiers and Alice Zeniter’s The Art of Losing incredibly for their depiction of Algiers specifically, and Algeria more generally. It has been some time since I have finished reading The Art of Losing, but a scene from the book where Algiers is observed by the protagonist from the sea still lingers in my head. I have never been to Algiers but that is now my primary idea of the city: a city of whitewashed buildings with a casbah on top of a hill, unmissable from the Mediterranean.

I think that (the feeling of taking a vacation) is the reason I enjoyed reading Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies. When the place Lubok Sayong first came up in the novel, I immediately searched for it online and on the map. Nothing came up, which immediately told me it is a fictional place.

Yet, some aspects of the place feel familiar. It could have been just the village of Sayong, across the Perak River from Kuala Kangsar. The suspicion only grew stronger as I went deeper into the story, which pulls in events of the 2000s into its narrative: the character YB Datuk Seri Minister most definitely satirizes Rafidah Aziz, who was a long-time Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar. The Sum of Our Follies was first published in 2014.

Kuala Kangsar itself plays a central role in setting the story’s background. Having lived in the town for a few years as a teenager and having visited the place several times after although not recently, the story’s progression sometimes was accompanied by vivid images in my head. It was almost as if the characters were living in a set projected out of my memory of the place. The vividness is almost as if I was watching TV.

Or it was as if I was there observing the characters personally. Away, somewhere, in Kuala Kangsar.