Comment on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014

DanB
Sun, 22 Jun 2014 14:13:30 GMT

To be clear, I am definitely not advocating large scale military invasion and occupation. The external power would take over a tiny bit of land - say 1000 km2 - to set up a city.

Let's do a quick comparison between Yemen and Singapore:

Land area (Km2): Yemen 5e5, Singapore 7e2

Population: Yemen 2.4e7, Singapore 5.4e6

Population density (person/km2): Yemen 4.4e1, Singapore 7.5e3

GDP (nominal $) : Yemen 3.6e10, Singapore 3.3e11

The point is that Singaporean institutions are vastly more efficient at turning land area (an intrinsically scarce commodity) into liveable and economically viable polity.

One way to formulate the goal of political development is to attempt to maximize the number of people living under good, efficient, non-corrupt governments. The thalassocracy concept is a way of implementing that goal without major political upheaval (e.g. revolution, war, massive immigration, etc).

Discuss