The nature of human progress to modern prosperity is that such processes of action take place in forms of industry.
In the opening series of evening lectures to mark the inauguration of The HEAD Foundation more than a decade ago, the theme was addressed of why some societies made better progress than others. Was there a formula that applied across the prosperous economies? And was it related to how they managed their human and social capital? For this organisation the special interest has always been in the human capital dimension, and especially in the contribution brought by education as a powerful societal catalyst. Much of the subsequent learning went into the 2019 Oxford Handbook of Higher Education Systems and University Management, which acknowledged the stimulus and support of The HEAD Foundation.
The location in Singapore of such a focus of interest was not accidental, and I was reminded of that when, in 2015, I was invited to convene and chair a panel at Fitzwilliam College Cambridge in a conference to honour the life of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, an alumnus of the college. On that occasion I made the following remarks in introducing the speakers:
The dynamos that switch on are the two great catalysts: cooperativeness beyond the personal links; and innovativeness as a natural expression of individual mental independence.
“When societies begin the process of moving themselves forward to improve the lives of their people, they enter a new world not previously known to them. It is a world in which three great influences have to be kept in balance: the forces of politics, of the economy, and of culture.
The politics usually have to shift from unelected autocracy to elected government based on performance and empowerment. The economy has to shift from the extraction of the surplus by the elite, to the deserved distribution of that surplus. And the culture has to shift from the sedation of the masses, to the releasing of individual energies and creativity, inside a still moral envelope.
The dynamos that switch on, when the process is working, are the two great catalysts: cooperativeness beyond the personal links; and innovativeness as a natural expression of individual mental independence, and so, for our present topic, the foundation of its scientific future.
This journey has been taken by about six types of society. There are differences in the detail as to how, but certain universals are visible across the successful cases. Most relevant to us in this session is the universal that says the evolving society must leave its doors open, and its society curious to foster learning and exchange with all the outside world. Such learning usually produces hybrids, and (like children from mixed marriages) these are often outstanding for their rare qualities.
Our speakers today are distinguished witnesses to the openness, and the capacity to exchange and blend, that is such a fundamental feature of the Singaporean trajectory of societal progress. They will explain their own distinct experiences in that arena.
We are honoured to have with us: Baron Oxburgh of Liverpool, Sir Richard Friend, And Mr Jonathan Rose.
Lord Oxburgh is a geophysicist, a powerful advocate of renewable energy, and a person accustomed to the highest level of policymaking in government, academia and business. His government work has been with national scientific advisory councils in the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. His academic work has included being President of Queens’ College here at Cambridge, and Rector of Imperial College in London. He has also served as non-executive chairman of Shell. He is an honorary citizen of Singapore, and has been working for some time with the Singapore government on water supply policy.
Sir Richard Friend is Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge, and for a time was also Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at NUS. His work is in nanotechnology and conductivity. In Singapore he has been associated with the evolution of long-term policies for university research.
Jonathan Rose is Principal, Design and Planning, for AECOM, a Fortune 500 company with clients in 150 countries. Their field is master-planning, and they have the commission for the Northwest Cambridge Development, having also been recently responsible for Singapore’s giant new sports hub at Kallang.”
The reason for recalling this occasion now is that it includes a brief summary of the ideas about societal progress that were earlier made public at The HEAD Foundation; but more significantly to illustrate an aspect of the stellar performance of Singapore over many decades in displaying those principles, and especially that of cooperativeness within a framework of respected moral government. Such cooperativeness is not easily achieved in a competitive world. So too the criticality of innovativeness, and a new survey from the World Economic Forum has just judged Singapore among the world’s top ten countries in the innovation index, alongside seven in Europe, the US, and only one other in Asia – South Korea.
Now in an updated review of the sources of progress, Adrian Wooldridge – a key intellect in the editorial team of The Economist – has just published The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. 1 Its summary of world patterns ends with a chapter that opens by saying, “Singapore is the closest thing the world has produced to a meritocracy.” Wooldridge sees the Singapore phenomenon as capable of description from two perspectives: from the West ‘a high-tech version of Plato’s Republic’; and from the East ‘a high-tech version of the Confucian mandarin state’. It is of course both, as the hybridising links just referred to indicate, and that is why it is so fascinating. The question of societal progress that I address here – in outline terms only – is informed by much new literature. This updates how such hybrid social systems come to be worthy examples for others to follow. Other papers will appear in a series to examine particular aspects of the larger explanation now introduced.
I begin with the issue of rising complexity, and then present an overall picture of the core societal processes that have so far supported societal progress. The ideas are presented in straightforward terms rather than in the academic research formats published elsewhere. 2
NEW LEVELS OF COMPLEXITY
Complexity is insidious. While life appears to be getting more simple in that the modern world brings more support to sustain your health, safety, travel options, available food, and so on, there is nevertheless a faster pace to everything: more techniques to master, more information to drown in, more choices, and more different people, languages, currencies, styles, ideals and opinions.
Things also happen faster. In the world of business regulations, options, competitors, formulae for doing things, ways of connecting, ways of selling and controlling, all seem to rise exponentially in complexity. The manager who ten years ago would find ten issues on his desk now finds twice as many and each more elaborate in their effects.
Behind this trend is another significant change. What happens when a society gets involved in the modern pace of life, and of the economy, and of new learning, is that it seeks and finds ways of reducing the complexity down to manageable proportions. So a business investor needing to compare the performances of many companies can penetrate the complexity quickly and accurately – at least as a first cut – by looking at the daily newspaper’s financial pages and reading the hundreds of performance data such as price, yield, price-to-earnings ratio and 12-month high and low. In a different arena – that of the person out shopping in an equally complex market for clothes, or electrical goods or food – there is a remarkably simple answer to understanding that different complexity: the consumer price. This reduces all the complex transactions of sourcing the materials, hiring and training labour, making the product, transporting it from anywhere in the world, warehousing and distributing it to your nearby shop, and crucially being able to compare it with similar goods: by simply taking the price as representing all those processes. The catch here is that price only works effectively as a reliable indicator if the market is genuinely competitive, free and informed. Those are the conditions on which free-market capitalism became so powerfully productive: once a host society learned how to ensure the economy plays by those rules.
If the complexity can be coped with by shorthand methods of summarising it, it can then keep on expanding. then what?... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The problem then of course is that – if the complexity can be coped with by shorthand methods of summarising it, it can then keep on expanding. Then what? Were the US elections rigged out of sight? Who controls the media moguls? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
There is then also an obvious requirement: the information system must be clean of biases; the game on a level playing field; no favouritism; no special interests; the same rules for all; as long as the rules permit the game to be played productively. This latter condition carries with it a crucial condition: the players of the game (people of business, lawyers, accountants, surveyors and so on) have to be involved in designing the rules if they are to work. This then becomes the basis for the great professions. They are given the licence to write the rules because they can be trusted to behave in the public interest, not their own, otherwise they will lose that right. Over centuries in certain parts of the world these processes of slowly accumulating self-sustaining reliable order became the frameworks that support modern complexity. But the job of keeping it working never stops because new threats keep growing. How does the traditional financial system deal with Bitcoin? How do banks deal with internet fraud? How do purveyors of news stay neutral in the face of temptations? How do information monopolies act as responsible civic bodies? How far and how deep goes an overriding sense of primary duty to the public good?
MAKING SENSE OF THE COMPLEXITY
For a society to learn how it might progress better it needs to be able to compare itself with others and to amend itself by using what it might learn from those comparisons. The most obvious mechanism that begins that process is education, and especially higher education. This is because it injects learning from the wider world, technical, political, social, artistic and humanitarian. Even a brilliant mathematician, away in another country, cannot avoid absorbing new ideas as well as maths: friends of different culture, foods, principles of conduct, clothing, music, landscapes, humour, and – significantly for many – freedoms of speech and of thought. Such other worlds can become subtle catalysts of change back at home, and societies need to be always ready to adjust if they are to remain valid in a changing world. Alongside traditional education that is what think tanks are for.
So, if comparison becomes crucial in helping a society to adjust and advance, what is it that is being compared? I propose here that it is the way a society moves itself forward in improving the quality of life of its people. But how does one think about that?
It is possible to find in a huge literature all sorts of answers to that question. What I propose here is to distil out of that literature certain widely agreed conclusions. An important condition of using them is to accept that they exist at two levels. At the level of principles they can be stated as applicable everywhere across the range of human societies as they all struggle with progress. But separately at the level of day-to-day reality each society will find its own way of interpreting them into its own forms of practice. In other words, they will get to the same fundamental conditions (if they can) but will do so in their own way. And their own way currently may be slowing some of them down.
What the young people want
An Ipsos survey in partnership with the Social Progress Imperative conducted in 2020 indicates that over half (53%) of the respondents across countries hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic believe social progress should remain the priority over economic growth even after the pandemic subsides. The survey found that the youngest respondents were the most likely to report prioritising social progress. Photo: Daniel Carpio / Alamy Stock Photo
THREE ‘WHATS’ AND EIGHT ‘HOWS’
Entire libraries of books and research theories on societal progress contain conclusions that can be distilled down to three core lessons of social history. These are the three ‘whats’ that any society needs to be able to display if it wants to make progress. What in other words can a society present as its accomplishments so far? They may be interpreted and acted out differently between societies but still remain definable as conditions within which a society can make progress. They are:
- A morally-based system of authority that provides benevolent encouragement for the expression of people’s creativity and inventiveness while also giving priority to the public good. The outcome of this condition is to INSPIRE.
- The society contains cooperative processes that foster its constant adjustment to change, again for the societal good. The outcome of this condition is to TRANSFORM.
- There is enough freedom of initiative, thought, ownership, and spontaneous new ordering, to encourage people to proceed with their intentions. The outcome of this condition is ACTION.
The total effect of these three conditions flowing together, when achieved, is morally-inspired cooperative action for societal betterment.
Those are the ‘whats’. Let us now turn to the ‘hows’.
Inside each of these conditions (the ‘whats’) it is possible to identify in more detail how each comes to be achieved. Although the world of research on such matters is full of measurable features such as values, ideals, institutions, structures, laws and so on, all of which play a part in a complex total, it is helpful at this broad introductory stage to find a way of seeing how a society has achieved these three conditions. They evolve from the flowing together of the elements that make them. This can be termed simply ‘process’ for the reason that the contributing components on their own are not ‘alive’, but become so by their flowing together and interacting. Because of their ‘live’ nature this then makes the comparison of them between societies so valuable in finding out why they work better in some places than in others. It is then more revealing to ask why German industrial skills are so effective, or why innovation works so well in places like Silicon Valley, or why respect for and cooperation with the government is so high in Singapore. It is because in those cases the many contributing elements flow together balanced as in great music in a symphony concert. The society has harmonised what it has to work with. It has learned to eliminate discord and to release creativity.
A leader with love on full display
New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has earned worldwide praise for her response to the pandemic. Her leadership style, focused on empathy, captures people's hearts, and her capability in putting the country on track for success against COVID-19 proves her a highly effective leader who inspires. Photo: Dan Freeman / Unsplash
A system of morality penetrates throughout in such a way that it encourages a sense of public duty, or ‘civicness’, but allows that to be shaped by widespread participation.
This now takes us to the processes within the three ‘whats’, in other words the ‘hows’. As suggested, two of these combine to INSPIRE a society. Three others combine to TRANSFORM it. And three others combine to support ACTION in it. Again let me stress that these clusters are all supported (using different terms) within a wide literature on the overall topic and I have simply summarised the contributions of many specialised accounts into these categories so as to make an overall argument – in more formal discourse, a theory. I will now explain what the eight ‘hows’ processes are, and how they work to deliver the three ‘whats’.
INSPIRING A SOCIETY
A society can reach a condition of being ‘inspiring’ under two processes that are interlocked but work differently. They are (a) benevolent authority that fosters empowerment, and (b) freely-reasoned and informed critical thinking and discourse. This latter is associated with the widely-discussed issue of ‘empowerment’. As Immanuel Kant once said, enlightenment is reached when people are well-enough informed to make up their own minds without the guidance of another. The essential effect that is brought by their combination is the release of the society’s brain-power for use in improving the shared total benefits available. A key additional assumption is that a system of morality penetrates throughout in such a way that it encourages a sense of public duty, or ‘civicness’, but allows that to be shaped by widespread participation.
Progress at what cost?
The 2021 Social Progress Index data demonstrates that sustainability does not have to come at the cost of social progress – at every level of development, there are countries that have been highly effective at improving living standards and quality of life while emitting more modest levels. Photo: Jason Blackeye / Unsplash
The effect of these processes is summed up in Thomas Piketty’s 3 monumental historical studies of societal progress when he says “ideas and ideologies count in history… Broadly speaking political processes that led to a reduction of inequality proved to be immensely successful. From them came our most precious institutions – those that have made human progress a reality.”
Studies that focus on more specific aspects of this inspiring context have stressed the way in which self-respect can accumulate on the basis of publicly-assigned judgments of individual merit. These become significant symbols of morality at work, as with public awards for good citizenship like the Legion d’Honneur in France. Last year I had the pleasure of nominating the security manager of the building where I lived in London for a civic award of Freedom of the Borough by the local council, for 21 years of devoted night-time service in keeping the building and surrounding area safe. He was immensely pleased with the honour and, at the ceremony conducted by the mayor, so were all the friends who attended. What this said was that public service is noble and appreciated.
Analysing a parallel aspect of the same process of benevolent authority, Deidre McCloskey has shown from extensive global studies how the “bourgeois virtues” hold together many economic systems. In other words business is run by people who are seen as behaving in ways that deserve respect. Wealth can then be seen as merited, and accorded for moral decency, on talent and learning, as well as on prosperity.
The second of the two processes contributing to an inspiring society – that of critical thinking – is the one that releases the power of debate so as to permit widespread involvement in shaping the society’s evolution. The psychology of such freedom of speech is complex and challenging, as it brings with it risks of breaking a community into competing interests. As we will note below this is perhaps the most crucial arena in which the balance of forces needs to be orchestrated. People can express informed opinions but can still see them as contributing to overall shared good instead of benefitting only a section of the total. Achieving such inspiration is identified with the highest standards of leadership at any level, from the small firm to the politics of a nation. Favouritism and corruption will inevitably undermine it.
In the practical world, history shows us that the most effective forms of free speech for a society evolve in serious discussions about new knowledge. These occur in discussion groups, round-tables, scientific societies, philosophical societies, and more formally in universities and the think tanks that link the academic and the societal. The proper cultivation of intellectual curiosity comes from the mixing of ideas and discoveries with the world of their application.
The power of rationality to guide moral progress matches its power to guide material progress and wise choices. It will rest on impartial principles that transcend our local experience.
TRANSFORMING A SOCIETY
The most significant challenge faced in a society’s attempt to make progress is that, as earlier suggested, the world becomes increasingly complex. To deal with this becomes a necessity. As one of the deeper studies of this concluded, “the adaptive possibility of societies is the main source allowing them to survive in the long term, to innovate of themselves, and to produce originality.”4 More recently the word ‘resilience’ has crept into the strategy literature to reflect the same concern.
Studies of a society’s ‘transformative capacity’ can be distilled into three themes, in my terms ‘processes’ or ‘hows’. Following the earlier hows of (a) benevolent authority and (b) critical thinking, these next three are labelled (c) innovativeness and adaptiveness, (d) cooperativeness, and (e) the balancing of interests. How these three processes evolve will largely govern a society’s ability to adapt to a changing world. They are interlinked in reality and each society will achieve its own capacity for dealing with them.
When a society faces the challenge of enhancing its innovativeness and adaptiveness it is commonly meeting a normal feature of growth. As new complexities change the rules, and as traditional resources get used up, there may be decreasing marginal returns. Studies of this by the Santa Fe Institute 5 – a think tank dedicated to societal complexity issues – reveal certain natural laws at work that reduce the dynamism possible beyond the scale of a successful city or hi-tech ‘valley’. A clear indication of the effect of this is the widely-observed ‘middle-income trap’ met by developing countries as they reach a level of prosperity around USD15,000 per capita and then level off. Put very simply a city-state like Singapore cannot be simply scaled up without the risk of losing its dynamism, but you can have many such vibrant hubs if they are free to adapt.
The most significant challenge faced in a society’s attempt to make progress is that, as earlier suggested, the world becomes increasingly complex. To deal with this becomes a necessity. As one of the deeper studies of this concluded, “the adaptive possibility of societies is the main source allowing them to survive in the long term, to innovate of themselves, and to produce originality.”⁴ More recently the word ‘resilience’ has crept into the strategy literature to reflect the same concern.
Studies of a society’s ‘transformative capacity’ can be distilled into three themes, in my terms ‘processes’ or ‘hows’. Following the earlier hows of (a) benevolent authority and (b) critical thinking, these next three are labelled (c) innovativeness and adaptiveness, (d) cooperativeness, and (e) the balancing of interests. How these three processes evolve will largely govern a society’s ability to adapt to a changing world. They are interlinked in reality and each society will achieve its own capacity for dealing with them.
When a society faces the challenge of enhancing its innovativeness and adaptiveness it is commonly meeting a normal feature of growth. As new complexities change the rules, and as traditional resources get used up, there may be decreasing marginal returns. Studies of this by the Santa Fe Institute⁵ – a think tank dedicated to societal complexity issues – reveal certain natural laws at work that reduce the dynamism possible beyond the scale of a successful city or hi-tech ‘valley’. A clear indication of the effect of this is the widely-observed ‘middle-income trap’ met by developing countries as they reach a level of prosperity around USD15,000 per capita and then level off. Put very simply a city-state like Singapore cannot be simply scaled up without the risk of losing its dynamism, but you can have many such vibrant hubs if they are free to adapt.
The worsening ‘middle-income trap’
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on middle-income countries which account for 75% of the world’s population. It is crucial for the international community to help these countries to overcome the pandemic and its economic fallout to maintain an effective global health security infrastructure. Photo: iStock
The releasing of productive energy across an entire society will take place in line with that society’s instincts about whom people cooperate with. So a society’s own culture of cooperativeness plays a significant part in its progress-making. As human beings we are gregarious by nature, and so have a genetic disposition to community. But there are limits, and our moral brains did not evolve for cooperation beyond our habituated group. Some societies have learned to release that constraint by building forms of trustworthiness that permit their members to trust strangers. Forms of reliable order evolve to break down the barrier of mistrust. The ‘modern’ world is in effect defined by such ‘civic’ consciousness. What it brings is a higher level of cooperativeness based on agreed systems of such reliability that matters can be transacted more easily and efficiently. People are safe to feel ‘empowered’. The end-result visible in the massive data banks of the World Values Surveys is a very strong correlation between such empowerment and societal prosperity and progress.6
The third of the processes that permit a society to transform itself while keeping its character, is the challenge of staying balanced, the ultimate test of political achievement. Note here that the crucial version of this achievement is when a society is also being persuaded to change some of its behaviour. A large literature on this topic tends to agree on its being infinitely difficult. A common theme is that of reliance on the use of rationality (our earlier ‘critical thinking’) to bear some of the load. One of the world’s leading scholars on societal progress, Steven Pinker at Harvard,7 has recently argued forcefully for the contribution of this rationality to the balancing act. His argument is that there is no evolutionary law that lifts us upwards in progress. On the contrary nature has no regard for our wellbeing. So progress is a set of “victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe… a phenomenon that needs to be explained”. His explanation is that when people set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows and apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others, they occasionally succeed. But when they keep up the success and learn from the failures, the benefits can accumulate to make for progress. For this to happen ideas must be seen to have validity regardless of who thinks of them, so they evolve in a social grounding of equality. But for the ideas to have moral force, rather than brute force, they need to be soundly argued. The power of rationality to guide moral progress matches its power to guide material progress and wise choices. It will rest on impartial principles that transcend our local experience, which is the point of this paper.
EMPOWERING ACTION
We turn now to action, and the three key processes, or ‘hows’ that deliver enough of it to permit societal progress. They are (f) Communicative Action, (g) Spontaneous Emergent Ordering, and (h) Competitive Productivity. The nature of human progress to modern prosperity is that such processes of action take place in forms of industry. Only then is there enough wealth generated for most people to find human comforts such as peace, welfare, learning, longevity and enriching sociability.
The idea of communicative action is associated with the distinguished theorist Jurgen Habermas,8 who introduced the term to capture an essential feature of societal success, namely that of key people collaborating, discussing, and coming to agree among themselves on shared definitions of desirable action. A key feature is their being not primarily oriented towards their own individual successes. The rationality that follows is then based on criticiseable validity claims negotiated socially. He noted the risk of the dark side of modernisation if people lose contact with their instinctive humanity and its moral reciprocities, and lose control of the agenda.
Rising inequality
According to the 2021 Social Progress Index, the US is the only G7 country to go backwards on social progress and one of only four countries that have declined since a decade ago, along with Brazil, Syria and South Sudan.. Photo: iStock
The nature of human progress to modern prosperity is that such processes of action take place in forms of industry.
A parallel view of this same process is seen by Deidre McCloskey⁹9 as “the bourgeois virtues”. Over a series of detailed studies she shows the key role of a bourgeoisie in providing moral economic and social leadership in many successful cases globally.
Connected with this process of communicative action is its logical consequence, seen here as the process of spontaneous emergent ordering. When people are building a socio-economic system by collaborating to make it better for the society, there is a natural tendency to ensure its perpetuation by adding structures that will encourage that. This is how the fabric of an economy comes to be largely constructed in collaboration between the people of business and the people of government. The aim is to provide stable guides to conduct, the reliability of which is a public good; hence professionalism in accounting systems, banking, systems for conducting business transactions, and the like. So, too, Chambers of Commerce and professional bodies to coordinate the mechanisms. The emergence of such forms of order will normally keep pace with the need to handle the rising complexity. And it also symbolises empowerment and trust.
The last of the processes is one that is concerned with quality of ‘delivery’ and is termed competitive productivity. In a sense it is score-keeping. Few socio-economies can isolate themselves from the demand to work competitively, and their wealth will be largely set by the capability known as ‘productivity’. It is like an athlete’s essential fitness – to get the most out of the assets available. As a recent World Bank report on this concluded, “most cross-country differences in per capita incomes have been attributed to differences in productivity”.10 The key is growth in output per unit of input. The processes of being competitively productive normally include investments in physical and human capital, flexible re-allocation towards more productive sectors and enterprises, stronger competition, innovative use of technology and human skills, and a stable, growth-friendly context.
Engaging the public
Every ten years, Singaporeans are asked to contribute their ideas and vision in the country’s long-term land use plans through a year-long consultation exercise. Flexibility and inclusiveness are the keys that will allow future generations to adapt and adjust to rising future uncertainty. Photo: iStock
Here is a society that cultivates cooperation both internally and externally, that respects learning, and that pays tribute to virtue serving the public interest.
CONCLUSION
I have suggested here that all societies aiming to make progress for their people face the same set of issues. These stem increasingly from the complexities of the modern world that affect all societies. To meet this rising complexity certain societal conditions have to be achieved, although exactly how can remain distinctly local in many respects. The building of the local ‘hows’ to achieve the universal ‘whats’ becomes the varying trajectories towards progress.
I go back now to where we started, and the case of Singapore, Wooldridge’s “closest thing to a meritocracy” and one of the world’s ten most innovative societies. As he notes, here people can get ahead in life based on their talents; all can have education; discrimination is banned; jobs are openly competed for, and unearned privilege is scorned. As I illustrated from the conference tribute at the outset, here is a society that cultivates cooperation both internally and externally, that respects learning, and that pays tribute to virtue serving the public interest. Few societies can match its performance in the key processes: legitimate authority, critical thinking, adaptiveness to change, cooperativeness, balanced interests, communicative action, spontaneous ordering, and competitive productivity.
Societies of this nature have from time to time been the envy of the world. They have usually – in their own way and time – achieved the same conditions and processes: Venice, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, New York, Paris, London, Silicon Valley and Switzerland. And always there are larger societies looking on with envy when a city-state or equivalent is able to find the magic mixture. In other papers in this series I will examine new research that illuminates what might be learned from such magic, and the conditions elsewhere that may leave such lessons so hard to apply.
PROF GORDON REDDING
Prof Gordon Redding is Emeritus Professor at the University of Hong Kong, where he spent 24 years. He also founded and directed the university’s Business School.
He served as Director of the Euro-Asia Centre at INSEAD for seven years, prior to being appointed the initial Director of The HEAD Foundation from 2010 to 2014. He held a Visiting Professorial Fellowship at the Institute of Education, UCL, from 2013 to 2015.
In 1999 Prof Redding was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Stockholm School of Economics for his work on Asian business. In 2006 he received the bi-annual Award for Distinguished Scholarship of the International Association of Chinese Management Researchers. For two decades he was honorary Secretary of the Association of Deans of Southeast Asian Graduate Schools of Management.
Prof Redding has published 15 books, including The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism, The Future of Chinese Capitalism (with Michael Witt), and The Oxford Handbook of Asian Business Systems (edited with Michael Witt).
MARCH 2022 | COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE
Healthcare and Education for Asian Development
- Wooldridge, A. (2021), The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, London, Allen Lane.
- Currently being written for Oxford University Press as a book with the title The Orchestration of Societal Progress.
- Piketty, T. (2020), Capital and Ideology, Cambridge MA, Harvard Belknap Press, p. 7.
- Nicolis, G. & Prigogine, I. (1989), Exploring Complexity, New York, W H Freeman, p. 242.
- West, G. (2017), Scale: the Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organizations, Cities, and Companies, London, Wiedenfeld and Nicolson.
- Welzel, C. (2013), Freedom Rising, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. See also Pinker, S. (2018), Enlightenment Now: the case for Reason, Science, Humanities and Progress, London, Penguin.
- Pinker, S. (2021), Rationality: What it is: Why it seems scarce; Why it matters, London, Allen Lane, p. 325.
- Habermas, J. (1984), The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, London, Heinemann.
