Yet, the idea of the country is a startup idea. It is a startup idea in the sense that it is a recent spark in the arc of human history.1 And it is also a startup idea in the sense that some countries actually began as start-up companies.

In fact, there is a company—it still exists today—that is a precursor to two of the most powerful countries on Earth.

It stands as a Titan—not just influentially, but also symbolically. Just as Titans were the progenitors of the Greek gods, this company also birthed countries. It predates the United States by 106 years; Canada, by 197 years.2 At its peak, it was the largest landowner globally, its dominion stretching across 15% of North America’s landmass and 40% of modern-day Canada.3 4

The Hudson’s Bay Company mixed company and country. As a quasi-sovereign, it minted its own currency,5 built forts, and even maintained gunboats and a militia.6 The Hudson’s Bay Company did not merely operate—it governed.7

What if the countries of tomorrow began as startups today?

And who would fund them?

1. Don’t just fear inflation, prepare for deflation as a possibility.

2. The Great Deflation of 1870-90 holds clues for organizing and adapting society in an Industrial Revolution.

3. Save money.

4. Brace for massive 10x productivity leaps; 20-30% compounded annual productivity growth is plausible.

5. A reversal of the inflationary paradigm upends our debt-based economic system.

   ---

Horsepower, horsepower

All this Polo on, I got horsepower.

— 2Chainz, Mercy

I. The Biggest Thing Since “Fire”

While many worry about inflation, we may be on the verge of multi-decade hyperdeflation.

The world is changing in ways that haven’t happened in our lifetimes, but have happened many times in history.1 Let’s take a look the Great Deflation of 1870-90, a period of transformative technological progress driven by the Second Industrial Revolution.

Prices fell by 1/3 over two decades,2 yet real incomes actually increased!3

The steam engine—inanimate power—was the base-layer innovation that drove productivity up and prices down (“deflation”).

Before, progress was shackled to muscle; today, progress is shackled to intelligence. And GPT-N may replace our brainpower as the “steam” that once replaced our muscle power.4

II. The Inflationary Regime May Be Over

We may already be experiencing disinflation. And on this precipice, GPT-driven progress can lead to a dramatic drawdown into deflation for decades.

Inflation may already be over

The last CPI headline print was 6%. The rise in shelter costs drove 70% of that annualized rise despite only being ~34% of the overall basket.

However, if we replace the CPI shelter basket with a more realtime shelter index, inflation runs at about 2.5% annualized, not far from a 2% target:

We can triangulate the CPI with a different inflation index, Truflation, which reports inflation under 4% and is trending down rapidly:

Also, if we do experience a banking crisis, it should lead to lower demand as credit shrinks, which is disinflationary:

Against this backdrop, the Fed has hiked at the fastest rate in history:

Yet, per Friedman, “monetary actions affect economic conditions only after a lag that is both long and variable”—and Raphael Bostic notes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta that it could take “18 months to two years or more for tighter monetary policy to materially affect inflation.”

Even though the full effects of the Fed’s unprecedented rate hikes have not yet been felt, excessive inflation may be old news.

And all this is before GPT-4.

Deflation, Good and Bad

“Good” deflation refers to productivity increases so dramatic that prices fall. Bad deflation refers to the rapid decline of demand.

The deflation starting in the 1870s was good deflation. Indeed, 90% of deflationary episodes did not have depression.5 Productivity advances in chemistry, electricity, transportation, and the production of new materials drove prices down6:

According to Bill Gates, advances like GPT-4 in AI will push productivity up in areas like health and education. These happen to be the most egregious drivers of inflation over the past couple decades:

Marc Andreessen notes that artificial constriction of supply due to regulation drove prices up in healthcare and education. GPT-4 floods these supply-constrained markets with an instant glut of highly qualified, essentially zero-cost professionals in healthcare in education, reversing the secular support to inflation over the past several decades and dropping the floor out from under the price index.

And perhaps quality could even go up. GPT-4 has already saved a dog’s life where a veterinarian couldn’t:

In economics, growth in total-factor productivity conceptually is growth in technology, or how we can produce more with less.7

For example, fire (as a technological advancement) increased TFP by allowing humans to derive more benefits from the same inputs (food/materials and time). Fire can be used to caramelize a crème brûlée, but also to smelt aluminum.

GPT, as technological fire, enables us to produce more with less: it can unlock cheaper energy and save lives, but also serve as an infinitely patient and infinitely knowledgeable professor to billions of people simultaneously.

What might the magnitude of TFP gains be? As an example, steam was a boon to TFP, deflating production costs by 2% per year for decades. With GPT-4, I am already noticing significant time savings on research, communication, and software engineering; my estimate is gains north of 50%.

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And all the while, progress is accelerating. Plugins give GPT digital arms. And GPT-5 could finish training in December. These efficiency gains could compound for years.

To ballpark, the Great Deflation of 1870-1890 lasted for about 20 years, but annual deflation only ran at about 2%; if this Revolution lasts 20 years and increases factor productivity by about 25% (just an estimate), we could expect:

• A $50,000 car today to cost $160 post-Reversal.8

• A $1299 computer today to cost $4 post-Reversal.

• A $5 latte today to cost $0.02 post-Reversal.9

III. The Reversal: Infinite Wealth, No Taxes, and Worldcoin UBI

The inflationary regime today is like a constant in a program we never thought would turn into a variable. The reversal of this core assumption leads to non-obvious consequences:

• The end of taxes: As governments face the challenge of maintaining demand in a deflationary environment, they will likely turn to redistributive policies, cutting taxes to stimulate aggregate demand.

• The Tipping Point: There is a tipping point of a small amount of money today that, because of compounded real growth, ensures you never need to work again. My rough estimate is $20k.10

• Crypto-UBI: To prevent widespread unemployment and unrest, initiatives like Worldcoin, co-founded by Sam Altman, could provide a universal basic income, ensuring financial stability for all.

OpenAI LP and WorldCoin

The greatest risk is massive, widespread unemployment.

Large-scale structural unemployment leads to violence. In the Industrial Revolution, the original Luddites rebelled violently against loss of their ways to make a living:

The protest also blossomed into violence as it grew in size. In addition to smashing machines, Luddites set mills ablaze and exchanged gunfire with guards and authorities dispatched to protect factories.

Four Luddites were shot dead in April 1812 after breaking down the doors of the Rawfolds Mill outside Huddersfield.11

Fortunately, the man spearheading the AI revolution, Sam Altman, also co-founded the best chance we have to actually distribute a universal basic income to prevent widespread chaos and destruction. Worldcoin recently passed more than one million signups.

Worldcoin obtains Sybil-resistant proof-of-humanity and proof-of-uniqueness by scanning your eyeball and associating it with a crypto address. One address, one person. It is extremely difficult to verify humanity in a world dominated by AI, and Worldcoin would be perhaps the only payment rail that could guarantee proof-of-unique-human.

If we were to use Worldcoin to distribute a global dividend, where would the money come from? Perhaps OpenAI Nonprofit.

OpenAI is a capped-profit company that is owned by a nonprofit; after the cap, the value captured accrues to the nonprofit:

My hope—and it is just a hope—is that OpenAI Nonprofit distributes excess profits through Worldcoin so we can avoid chaos from structural unemployment.

I believe it is existentially important that a capped-profit company like OpenAI LP is currently leading the race, versus an uncapped for-profit enterprise.

Without Worldcoin, we wouldn’t be able to ensure proof-of-humanity in an AI-dominated world. Without the capped profit structure, OpenAI would not be incentivized to distribute to Worldcoin. And without crypto, Worldcoin would likely be impossible.

Print To Worldcoin?

Inflation is good for debtors because it reduces the real value of debts, making them easier to pay off. And Uncle Sam is an enormous debtor, to the tune of thirty-one trillion dollars:

There are only a few levers available to avoid debt deflation. Even Alan Greenspan, in The Age of Turbulence, was unsettled by deflation: the obvious lever of just “start[ing] up the printing presses and creat[ing] as many dollars as would be necessary” did not seem to work in Japan.

To prevent the real value of debt from growing due to deflation, governments will need to spur aggregate demand and pursue unconventional monetary policies, like massive QE, yield curve control, and helicopter money. And perhaps distribute newly printed money through Worldcoin.

IV. Conclusion

Fire, steam, intelligence: AI is the base layer disruptor.

GPT is poised to revolutionize every industry, paving the way for an age of abundance. However, the path to this future is uncertain, and the risks lie in uneven hyperdeflation.

The challenge lies in ensuring that humanity enjoys the massive wealth creation brought by AI, rather than locking it away for a select few. The solution may lie in the hands of the same people creating the risks.

Will Prometheus share the flame?

Thank you to Ale from Jur and Chris from Frens Capital for reading and providing feedback on an early draft!

2

Less Than Zero by George Selgin, p.49

3

Beckworth (2007).

4

The Unbound Prometheus, by David Landes:

5

Deflation and Depression, Is There An Empirical Link? (link)

The "efficient frontier" in finance is the set of portfolios with the highest return per unit of risk. The other “dominated” portfolios on the interior have less expected return, but the same cost (less bang for your buck); these suboptimal outcomes are called “interior points.”

If we find ourselves on an interior point, somewhere along the line, we made a bad decision.

In the clean world of modern portfolio theory, you know when you are on the efficient frontier.1 But how do we know if our cities, states, and governments are on the efficient frontier, or just an interior point?

II. The Problem

We think the answer is simple. If your city is unsafe, you’re on an interior point. If your city is dirty, you’re on an interior point. If people in your city can barely afford subsistence food, water, and shelter, you’re on an interior point.

Poverty, crime, and unhealthiness are clear results of bad decisions.

For most people, the only reliable safe spaces are their own homes, which itself is subject to home invasion crimes (of which over one and a half million occur each year in the USA). Thus, those who can afford it are leaving crime-ridden cities for quieter locales, and better ones.

III. The Shape of the Solution

Though it’s common to extrapolate the recent past, each decade is not like the last. Chris Dixon looked back and identified the “best product” of each decade, excerpted below:

2000s: PCs & Broadband

2010s: Mobile Phones

We think the next shoe to drop is:

2020s: Safety & Trust

Against a backdrop of secularly increasing crime, violence, and distrust, those who can will seek out communities where they and their families can feel safe.

Some safe spaces exist in the most unlikely places: residents in poor villages in Tamil Nadu may not have material wealth, but do have such social wealth and trust that houses are often left unlocked.

Tech campuses like those of Google and Facebook are also safe spaces; people can leave their belongings out in the open without fear of theft. Through a reasonable screening process, the folks on campus are selected for stability and by association, a lower probability of committing acts of random violence, thus making the environment safer for all.

But can this scale to countries?

We already have an existence proof: Singapore. Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world. I live there now and it's idyllic; it may be the first post-scarcity society we've seen.2 A combination of strong border control, engineered societal norms, technology, and clear consequences keep this city safe. Hey, nobody said building one of the best countries in the world was going to be easy!

Ultimately, we want to feel safe. We want secure homes. We want to walk down the street without the burden of random violence. And we have the ability to make this happen--all the technology already exists. We're just aren’t making good decisions.

We’re on an interior point.

IV. Building a safe, lush, abundant worlds for a thousand people

We want to build for a billion, but let’s start with a thousand. Learning from what already works, we need four components: a combination of strong borders, strong values, strong incentives, and a complete graph.

Strong borders. Just like nation-states have immigration control for people entering, or tech companies check in visitors, we’ll have friendly attendants at the borders to welcome you and introduce you to the values of our society. Members must vouch for any visitor and antisocial behavior from a visitor will penalize the member.

Strong values. A valueless society is an apartment building. Living together means building on the same moral base. Thus, everybody must know what our society stands for: safety, trust, abundance.

Strong incentives. Generous rewards for prosocial behavior, and clear and severe punishments for antisocial behavior.

Complete graph. In computer science, a graph is “complete” if there is a path between any two nodes. In a city, this looks like a dense social graph, where everybody knows everybody else, or at least somebody who knows somebody who knows you. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, but we propose weekly chats with a previously-unknown person in the community.

With these in place, we can start to build the physical environment, which we envision as a combination of beauty, verdancy, and seamlessness.

Beauty. Nick Smoot of Innovation Collective has done a gorgeous renovation of a 120-year old building (above). It’s functional, yet beautiful.

Verdancy. Singapore is a Garden City not by accident but by the will of the great Lee Kuan Yew; the “greenery and lush verdant landscapes were essential in a city to ‘calm the spirit and to make people feel relaxed.’”3

Seamlessness. Culdesac has pioneered car-free cities that reclaim much-needed urban space. Let’s take what works.

V. Abundance

What are the truths you hold self-evident? Is one of them that you need to work to survive?

Working to survive is not a law of physics; those laws are actually on our side. We have enough technology to feed and clothe the world. We are just on an interior point.

How do we move to the frontier?

1. Aggressively deflate living costs.

2. Start a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) on day one.

3. Cover the now-smaller living costs with yield from the SWF.

Aggressively deflate living costs

Balaji Srinivasan makes the point that you can increase your income 5x or drop your expenses 5x; which is easier? Individuals now engage in cost-of-living arbitrages across countries. But there are tools that we as a society aren’t using that can get us there.

For example, Land Value Taxes disincentivize rent-seeking behaviour and deflate housing costs which deflate all costs (isn’t it weird, Georgists say, that when you make more one year, your rent goes up roughly to match?). This is important for all of society because rent and taxes are the huge expenses for individuals and businesses (and thus gets baked into the cost of goods and services for those individuals and businesses). If we deflate housing costs, it has a multiplicative effect on the total bearing of all costs; thus, people need to work less to cover the basics.

Other levels to pull are automation and better energy infrastructure. But why do we want to aggressively deflate living costs in the first place?

The goal is to create a society that’s not just safe and trustworthy, but also one where the basics of Maslow’s hierarchy are covered.

Start a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) on day one

Sovereign wealth funds are sophisticated investors with long time horizons; they are stewards of a nation’s wealth. Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, returned 8% per annum over the last 20 years.

Sovereign wealth funds can afford to hire the best managers and invest globally across asset classes for high return.

Cover the now-smaller living costs with yield from the SWF

Assuming we can drive costs down by a factor of 3 from that of the USA, which clocks in at roughly $40k a year for a single person, how much would we need to cover a ~$14k average cost of living?

If sovereign wealth fund distributions will hover at a relatively conservative 5% net of operating expenses, we can assume a $280,000 chunk invested per person as a starting point (14,000/0.05)4.

(The citizen doesn’t necessarily need to fund the full ~$300k out of pocket; the city may be able to partially fund the fund through equity or token sales.)

Thus, the Dividend from the Fund should be able to fund each citizen’s living costs in perpetuity, because those living costs have been thoughtfully engineered to be as low as possible. Citizens are free to do whatever they want—paint, cook, write crypto protocols. And ideally the Fund has a right to invest capital at a pre-agreed-upon cap in any venture started in the city, with preferably zero income/cap-gains taxes to boot (remember, we have LVTs!).

VI. Building

Life is not about building perfect systems, it’s about building real ones. Better ones.

Singapore is successful because it tried many solutions and only kept what worked. The path to a safe, lush, abundant society is somewhere on the map; we just need to find it.

Abundance is within our grasp. We must not content ourselves with streets rife with crime and poverty. We must think harder, build smarter until we get there.

Build with us. Come to the frontier.

It is time to build, as Andreessen notes; the question is what do you build? A housing company? A manufacturing company?

What if you could innovate on the substrate beneath all companies?

What if you could build a new city?

From Producing Rice to Producing Billions of Dollars

Jiaolong Company may be the most interesting company you’ve never heard of. Jiaolong is a private enterprise that has built a phenomenally successful private city in China from scratch in just a few years.

Here are some quick hits, from papers, interviews, and information from the Chinese internet:

• Jiaolong produces $3.2 billion annually in GDP (¥20 billion)2

• 120,000 citizens live in Jiaolong3

• Jiaolong builds and operates infrastructure (e.g. sewage, roads), schools, and public services (e.g. police, hospitals)—even malls and hotels—that American cities struggle to build

How does it work?

Dual Concessions

Jiaolong was founded in 2004 by way of a contract with the Shuangliu County government.

In return for investing in the requisite infrastructure, Jiaolong Co. was granted two key concessions by the government:

1. Planning rights, which covers land use, and

2. Tax sharing, which aligns the incentives of Jiaolong Co. and the county government.

Planning Rights are Shared Sovereignty

Zoning and land use are restrictions the government places on land use. By acquiring planning rights from the government, Jiaolong Co. becomes a limited sovereign within their territorial demarcation, thus cutting down on the friction needed to capitalize on opportunities and deliver the results expected of it.

Professor Qian Lu notes an example below. As Jiaolong drew in additional residents, it invested in services and entertainment as it saw fit, and successfully at that:

Contrast this with the onerous California’s ADU restrictions handbook4 and the NIMBY-ism5 that makes “it’s time to build” into “building takes too much time,” if building is at all permissible. The government owns planning rights by default.

But by conceding planning rights to Jiaolong, it has exacted an enormous gain for startup societies at large. In return for unsexy, difficult, and expensive investments in infrastructure, private companies share sovereignty with public governments:

Sovereignty is a continuum. As the entrepreneur’s circle of competence grows, and the government’s competence goes down the drain,6 more of the state’s functions get eaten by entities like Jiaolong Co. and network states. (For clarity of reading, I will elide “Jiaolong Co. and network states” when talking about sovereignty in the rest of this essay, and only refer to “network states”.)

In return for responsibility and results, network states get land, partial sovereignty, and revenue.

Jiaolong blazes the trail for this shift: not only does it have planning rights, but it has built a private school,7 a hospital, a police station, and roads.

In other words, as a private company, Jiaolong Co. has eaten the state’s role in:

• education

• healthcare

• rule of law

• transportation infrastructure

These are state functions that were once held dear; indeed, some would argue operation of these functions is what defines a state. Of course, Jiaolong needs to be compensated for these responsibilities, just as the state is compensated for providing (and also not providing) basic services: in taxes.

No Taxation Without Wealth Creation

Where planning rights enabled innovation and building, an innovative tax-sharing plan makes the arrangement sustainable.

The tax-sharing agreement is tiered and incentivized:

• If Jiaolong Co. achieves a ¥100 per square meter tax rate, then it can take 25% of taxes produced;

• If Jiaolong Co. achieves ¥80 per square meter tax rate, then it can take only 20% of taxes produced.8

To incentivize companies to hit these tax goals, Jiaolong Co.:

1. Requires firms doing business in Jiaolong to pay an additional payment if under a specified tax target

2. Incentivizes good performance and payment with tax rebates if above a target;

3. Also waives tuition for the children of entrepreneurs to attend Jiaolong’s private school.

Not only does Jiaolong have the responsibility of a state (albeit at a small scale), it also gets paid like a state.

The credit cannot all go to Jiaolong (and its founder, Yujiao Huang). The state makes all of this possible. Indeed, the Chinese state is uniquely competent, with strict KPI-equivalents scored by unbiased evaluators.9

However, even a competent state cannot beat out a motivated and resourceful entrepreneur. Jiaolong’s population density is 3.5x that of the surrounding county; its taxation per unit area is 4x and its employment per unit area is 23x (!) a nearby state-managed special economic zone (Xihanggang Economic Development Zone, also in Shuangliu).10

The Hegelian dialectic is one way to think through a potential evolution of governance:

• Thesis: the government should manage all affairs of the state, as smart and competent officials.

  • Result: rare competent cases (PRC), myriad competence-limited cases (USA, UK)

• Antithesis: the government should manage as little of the state as possible, and cede control to great individuals.

  • Result: tragedy of the commons

• Synthesis: the government should conduct scoped shared-sovereignty experiments with talented entrepreneurs.

Jiaolong is but one result of the synthesis of shared sovereignty.

How much is Jiaolong worth?

I’ve pulled out relevant data from Professor Qian Lu’s paper and Jiaolong’s website, and done some rough calculations. There are limitations here given Jiaolong is a private company, not a public one, and thus not subject to the strict regulatory filings of a public company.

All errors are mine, and this is not intended to be investment advice.

Here is the table:

A few notes here to help walk through the table:

• The salient elements below for the calculation of revenue in USD (second row from the bottom) are:

  • Annual tax

  • Area, in square meters

  • Average CNY/USD exchange rate for the relevant years

• The reason we need the area in square meters is Jiaolong’s revenue is based on the aforementioned incentivized tiered schedule. If Jiaolong posts more than 100 yuan per square meter, it can take 25% of taxes collected, which was the case in 2022 (but not in 2014).

• The revenue seems small in absolute terms, but also keep in mind this city only has 100,000 people (about the size of San Mateo, CA11) and is still growing (at about 8.5%).

  • We can triangulate the revenue with ARPUs (Average Revenue Per User; credit to The Network State team I work with for the idea, esp. Balaji, Xen, and Jake).

    • Twitter’s ARPU is roughly $2012

    • Jiaolong’s ARPR (Average Revenue Per Resident) is roughly $200

  • The implication is that, for network states, “revenue parity” with existing social networks can be achieved with an order of magnitude fewer people than such social networks.

    • Credit to Xen for this insight.

  • One further note: Jiaolong is located in China, whose GDP per capita is 18% vs that of the USA.

    • If we adjust for this—not for Jiaolong’s purposes, but for mocking out a Jiaolong clone in a developed, high-income country—we get a GDP per capita-adjusted ARPU of  $1,060.

    • This roughly checks out, because tax is based on income; this GDP adjustment is an income adjustment, and taxes should also increase proportionally.

Calling out an important implication for the last point:

Assuming a 10x revenue multiple, you would only need 100k people living in a first-world network state to achieve a billion-dollar valuation.

This is squarely within the realm of possibility. Jiaolong has hit 100k+ residents already. To triangulate from another angle, NFT communities—often tight-knit, financially incentivized, and socially prominent—are already hitting a similar order of magnitude: Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)13 and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC)14 together command almost 20,000 holders (not including ApeCoin); Meebits by Larva Labs (creator of CryptoPunks) has a theoretical max community size of 20,000 (assuming one NFT per person, which is an assumption that can be broken with fractionalized NFTs)15; Axie Infinity has 125k players live right now, at the time of writing.16

Billion-dollar network states are coming, and they only need a hundred thousand people each.

Valuation as a Perpetuity

I’ll include a couple other quick checks on Jiaolong’s private valuation given publicly available information.

A quick perpetuity/dividend discount growth rate model based on a comparable net profit margin from CFLD (a Chinese private city operator) and the current yield for 10-year tenor BBB-rated Asian corporates, according to Fitch:

Obviously, this valuation of Jiaolong as a perpetuity is sensitive to growth rates. Some notes below:

• Three values are included to outline the sensitivity of Jiaolong to rates

• 2% is a base-case developed country growth rate

• 3.70% is modeled as the bear case for a growth rate for China in the next decade17

• 4.20% is provided as a more optimistic case, under the assumed 4.6% estimate

  • The growth rate for the resident country is the top-case growth rate for the terminal value in perpetuity

To square with recent performance, Jiaolong has posted 8%+ CAGR the past 7 years.

Valuation as Discounted Cash Flows

Again, this valuation is done on somewhat of a time and data budget: Jiaolong is a private company and its financials have to be somewhat inferred; we don’t know what their cost of capital is; and we don’t know how their expenses are structured between fixed/variable costs. All of these can affect projections significantly.

To offset this somewhat, I’ve included another point of triangulation below, which takes the comparable net margin from CFLD and discounts the cash flows at the aforementioned BBB-rated Asian corporate yield.

The actual discounting of the cash flows is relatively straightforward, using most of the same numbers as above. “PV” stands for Present Value, and “CF” stands for Cash Flow.

Because the terminal value is such a whopper, I triangulated it between a conservative liquidation value (infrastructure cost), the breakeven investment made, and three more perpetuity-based valuations of the final cash flows in year ten.

I include each Total on the bottom, as well as an average of all five totals ($700mm).

Valuation Implications for Population

As mentioned above, a developed-world network state at a 10x revenue multiple could hit sovereign unicorn status at 100k people.

Valued alternatively (DCF above), a non-developed-world network state would need roughly 170k people to hit a billion-dollar valuation.18

Regardless, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people coming together for a grand experiment in sovereignty and governance—simultaneously a massive, yet achievable scale. The first sovereign unicorn need not be a million-person state—a hundred thousand is enough.

Conclusion

Technology has allowed us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. But can we use it to create new cities, or even new countries?

Balaji Srinivasan, How to Start a New Country

Is Jiaolong a network state? Certainly not: it has no moral innovation, nor diplomatic recognition, nor other major components of a network state.19

But it can chart a path forward for the 23+ aspiring network states out there. It provides the financial and logistical precedent where there was none before. It pioneers a shared-sovereignty model where the state and entrepreneurs are not pitted together, but work in tandem to create new cities, and eventually, new countries.

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And if you’d like a 12,000-page PDF of speeches, rallies, and writings by Lee Kuan Yew, father of Singapore, scraped from the Singapore National Archives, check it out here:

Zane Austen

The Comprehensive Lee Kuan Yew Anthology

The PDF is at the bottom. Enjoy…

Read more

4 years ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Zane Austen

The PDF is at the bottom. Enjoy!

Why LKY?

Lee Kuan Yew is highly controversial, for example:

1. Strong advocate for hanging drug traffickers: “If we could kill them 100 times, we would.”

2. Rejecting American media norms by suing journalists, and winning.

3. Governing and speaking on cultural and racial differences.

But also highly successful:

And responsible for inspiring China’s dramatic reform under Deng Xiaoping, indirectly lifting 800 million people out of poverty.

Obviously, Singapore is a successful country. But it’s had to reinvent itself many times: from basic manufacturing, to skilled manufacturing, to a financial and technology hub, and now advanced manufacturing.

How did he defeat the Communists, deal with the involuntary ejection of Singapore from Malaysia, and defuse the fanged criticisms of Western journalists along the way? We can read his books, but only by reading the primary sources can we transport ourselves back in time.

The Code

I scraped the data with Mathematica from the National Archives of Singapore and collated them with Ghostscript.

In a little more detail: browsing the National Archives of Singapore website, I found an interesting PDF of an LKY speech. Looking a little further, I noticed I could search and filter by Lee Kuan Yew’s works. And a little further, by inspecting the JS attached to the click handler of the “next” button, I realized the archives were navigable with a URL parameter. From there, it was simple to construct the page URLs, import all hyperlinks within them, filter for the actual PDF, and download them (with some interval to not get silently rate-limited).

Here’s the code:

Lee Kuan Yew Scraping

21.3KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Just a few lines! Love Mathematica.

The PDF

No paywall. Here you go!

Follow @zane1729 if you’d like.

Subscribe now

(FYI for users on mobile: it’s 200MB.) Click:

Or, alternatively, and thank you to @zachcaceres for the OCR to make this searchable:

The Comprehensive Lee Kuan Yew Anthology

209MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Share

If you do any interesting things with the PDF (train GPT-3 with it, for example), please share it with me on Twitter @zane1729!

Hope you enjoy.