Podcast

Can Singapore Reinvent Itself? - Jamus Lim

Jamus Lim is an Associate Professor of Economics at ESSEC Business School and a Member of Parliament in Singapore. With a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and experience at the World Bank and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority , his work spans international economics, political economy, and development.

01:43 Why NIEs
02:22 Understanding Heterogeneity Among Asian Economies
06:36 The Contrast Between Singapore and other NIEs
08:16 Hong Kong vs. Singapore: Economic Divergence
16:17 Was The Asian Miracle A Myth?
20:49 India's Unique Economic Experiment
24:41 How Singapore Can Stay Ahead
28:04 Balancing Growth and Equality
33:23 Are Wealth Taxes (Actually) Viable?
47:31 The Tension of Being A Global Hub
56:58 Urgent Problems Singapore Needs To Solve
01:05:48 Advice For Graduating Students

Transcript

Keith 00:01:43

Why is it that in most economic analyses of global economies, they don't really take a lens of "Why should we study Asian economies?"

Jamus Lim 00:01:53

I think part of it has to do with the fact that for a long time, Asia was lagging. For various reasons, this affects the ability for Asian economists to speak from an Asian perspective. One was that you don't have that much credibility if your economy is still languishing in various states of underdevelopment. It becomes harder to make an argument that you have something universal and credible to say.

At the same time, many Asian economists, even those trained in the West, will then be inculcated in Western ideas and Western models. To be fair, I find many of these to be quite universal. But there is certainly something to be said about a kind of cultural and institutional lens that as Asians we might apply. And we do so, to be fair, unconsciously. We don't do so because we explicitly want to squeeze some Asian view into this, but rather we have certain values that differ just naturally, based on our upbringing, our experiences, our exposure, and what we see.

So it's important that that perspective also bleeds through in the way that we look at Asian economies. And of course, now we have enough of a lecturer class, if you will, that we can be in a privileged position of writing and publicising a textbook on the Asian economy.

Keith 00:02:22

If you look at Singapore, together with the other three Asian dragons, back then, the way people classified these economies was the NIEs, right? The Newly Industrialised Economies. You make this point that they're much more heterogeneous than what people assume them to be. If I look at it just from a layman perspective, it seems like they're all very high-growth economies. They did quite well. They went from third world to first, to use that term. So what's so heterogeneous about them?

Jamus Lim 00:02:51

I don't want to oversell the point that they are different because certainly there are many similarities, not least the fact that they're all based in East Asia. So that alone means that there's a common thread amongst them. But what I wanted to point out in that chapter and in my general views is that indeed, other than the fact that they all grew very quickly, you could probably draw a much closer lineage between the experiences of Singapore and Hong Kong because they're both small, open city-states. Taiwan and South Korea are extremely different from the two in terms of geographic size, but also in terms of their endowments.

Of course, even Singapore and Hong Kong differ in terms of their institutional structures and the manner by which they go about their public policy-making. Perhaps these are the kind of nuances that would only be evident to someone that really focuses very deeply on the differences between these economies. To an outsider, they're all small, open economies, heavily trade-dependent, and, of course, grew very rapidly and enjoyed both economic as well as financial development along the way.

But their starting points were also something I emphasised in the book. Singapore and Hong Kong were lucky in that, while we know they were still developing economies, they were upper-middle-income countries when they started off. And that was not the case with South Korea and Taiwan. And furthermore, if you take another 20 years forward and look at China's experience, China started even lower than all these other economies.

So while they adapted many elements of the same recipe for development, lots of what we call factor accumulation—the accumulation of labour through demographic change, but also human capital, training, educating a workforce, and finally a lot of investment, a very capital-intensive model for development—all that was a commonality. They followed that same recipe, but their respective trajectories are actually quite distinct.

Keith 00:06:36

What about Singapore that was different in its approach towards policymaking, from your perspective as an economist, that the other three countries didn't?

Jamus Lim 00:06:49

I mentioned earlier that in some ways, Singapore and Hong Kong are somewhat more similar. They face similar constraints. But even if you compare the two, Hong Kong has an hinterland, which is China. Of course, their hinterland was not always accessible. But nevertheless, if you speak to industry insiders, certainly portfolio managers, they'll tell you that for a long time, before the Chinese markets opened up, Hong Kong was the indirect China play.

You contrast that with Singapore. We can't claim that Southeast Asia is our hinterland. We try to build trading relationships and naturally we do have strong trading ties with our nearest neighbours. But no one would mistake that to be the natural market for Singapore. So that itself is already different.

And regarding domestic policy, housing for instance, Singapore and Hong Kong both have major housing programmes, but Singapore has a much larger government intervention when it comes to the housing market, as opposed to Hong Kong. 80% versus about half of the housing stock in Hong Kong is public.

And then, of course, Hong Kong, in terms of their approach towards businesses, is far more, to use a French term, laissez-faire, just relying much more on the free market. Whereas Singapore, even though it has an affinity toward unfettered markets, recognised very early on that government interventions can be very useful. And so a lot of our major companies are all state, either directly state-owned or indirectly state-owned through Temasek.

So I think in certain important but nuanced ways, the two economies are different. And then once you get to countries like South Korea and Taiwan, you have stark differences in terms of the industrial structure. Taiwan, for instance, is often known for one firm, TSMC, a semiconductor company. But even once you step away from TSMC, 99% of the companies in Taiwan are small and medium enterprises. So they have an industrial structure that is quite different from the kind of large major players that we have here in Singapore.

And Korea, in many ways, if we were to look at their industrial structure, would probably relate a lot more to Japan because Korea, of course, was at one point a colony of Japan. And from there, it inherited the Japanese industrial structure. So at the time, the Japanese had what's known as the Zaibatsu, what today is more the Keiretsu. But the Chaebol is essentially that kind of conglomerate structure with single or small concentrated family ownership right at the top, and fingers in multiple different industries: finance, trading, logistics, manufacturing.

So in that sense, Korea is sui generis in this particular element, industrial structure, compared to the other three countries. Again, I've gone a little bit into the weeds when it comes to the differences, but I think it's important for us not to simply lump them together just because they grew 8% every year for 20 years. Sure, but there are important differences.

Keith 00:08:16

Hong Kong is quite interesting. I spoke to Professor Angelson from LSE. She's a historian, so she focused on US-China relations in the 1970s. That was prior to China opening up trade to the US, and one of the first industries that China opened up to international trade was textile trade. And Hong Kong was primarily the first kind of entryway in which many merchants go and find potential suppliers.

Jamus Lim 00:08:46

Hong Kong's experience will not be necessarily replicated by the others, or even other middle-income economies that are aspiring to high-income status. It had the benefit of being relatively close to Shenzhen. So what happened was when costs rose, it was natural to go across the harbour and start to relocate a lot of that lower-cost, labour-intensive manufacturing over in Shenzhen, as opposed to in Hong Kong.

So you saw a fairly rapid de-industrialisation. If you compare Hong Kong to Singapore now, Hong Kong is almost completely de-industrialised. It's an economy heavily reliant on services. And it can do so because, of course, it serves not just the global economy in some ways as a global financial centre, but also the hinterland of China. That doesn't apply to Singapore. We still have an industrial base. It's certainly smaller than it was in the 1990s, where it briefly touched a quarter of our GDP, but even now, it's still a sizeable contributor to the Singapore economy. So Hong Kong and Singapore, in that sense, even despite their similarities, certainly differ in that way.

In a sense, I think Hong Kong can perhaps afford to be more de-industrialised. I don't know if that's the right word, but especially when you're now following 2019, Hong Kong is starting to integrate more and more with the mainland. So it does make sense for them to perhaps outsource or move their manufacturing to Shenzhen.

Here's a funny story. When I was first teaching the course that came to be the basis for this book, I used to make an argument that students would ask me, "So with Hong Kong now handed back to China, and Shanghai being the natural financial capital of mainland China, as it has been for a long time, will it mean the end of Hong Kong?"

And I used to tell them, "No, look, there's no reason why that would be the case because if you look at any sufficiently large economy, they often have two financial centres that serve slightly different functions, right?" If you look at the US, you have, of course, New York, the global financial centre, that is outward-oriented and not just inward-oriented. But at the same time, you have Chicago, for which a lot of the derivative trading originally came from. And even to some degree, you could say that a lot of venture capital financing and the like, all that comes from San Francisco. So sufficiently large and deep economies can certainly sustain more than one financial centre.

Hong Kong would be the natural outward-oriented financial centre, as it has been for much of its own history. And Shanghai would be more, well, the national, the major financial centre. But nevertheless, I felt that the two could exist alongside.

And the Umbrella Revolution really shook the foundations of my belief that China was not going to kill this golden goose, right? Because it was applying policy in a sufficiently aggressive manner. I think no one in Hong Kong would say that they imagined a world where they would return to the same kinds of political organisation as it was under the British. But they were looking for a much more gradual transition. After all, the transition was meant to take 50 years. But halfway through the plot, suddenly China wants to accelerate that process. And I think this took many Hongkongers aback.

It was at that time when I started to question whether we were going to see a vibrant Hong Kong. And it did go through some pretty tough times. That was just about two or three years ago when we started to see a flood of Hong Kong professionals consider relocating to Singapore. And of course, that led to pressures on our domestic house prices and the like. But then we've since seen a reversal of this condition.

So all that to say that Hong Kong's future is still somewhat indeterminate, but like so many things that are playing out in the world today, geopolitics or politics more generally seems to be driving a lot of the action that influences the economy, rather than the other way around.

Keith 00:16:17

Now these NIEs have to grapple with this challenge of what to do. Has the miracle run its course? Or even in your book, you actually shed light on Paul Krugman's argument, which is that it wasn't so much a miracle as opposed to a kind of factor accumulation.

Jamus Lim 00:18:04

The NIEs had one significant commonality, and that is that they grew rapidly as a function of perspiration rather than inspiration. Perspiration because, really, it was about saving more, which led to the ability to invest more domestically. In some cases, like in Singapore, it is through a mechanism of forced saving, in this case, CPF.

In other cases, like in the other NIEs, it was just the fact that there were demographics. Young people tend to save more in their earlier working years, in part because they would then need to dis-save during retirement. So there were a number of tailwinds that led to high savings. And of course, the post-war global economy was one where there were baby boomers everywhere. That's why they're called the baby boom generation.

So a combination of all these directed accumulation led to rapid growth. Now, to be clear, this isn't a bad thing. Look around us, we are prosperous, so are the other NIEs today. So you can't say that this recipe for growth is fundamentally problematic. It is just that it has an element of a lack of sustainability that's built in. Because at some point, you are not, think about accumulation. The accumulation of capital happens through saving. You can save 40% of your income, you can save 50% of your income. At some point, you need to eat. You can't save 90% of your income. So at some point, you're going to hit what economists call diminishing returns. You simply cannot postpone certain day-to-day expenditures any longer.

And that's when that model will have run its course. And that's the same for all the other factors of production. At some point, due to demographic change, you're going to have a reduction in the fertility rate and you're not going to have that benefit of having more workers. You could solve that, as to some extent Singapore has tried, through immigration. So you can import those workers rather than birth them yourselves. But those entail certain kinds of tradeoffs. Whether they're reasonable or not, that's a question for that economy and that society to decide. But the point is that the model is not sustainable indefinitely.

So at some point, you have to recognise that you have to shift to a more sustainable model. That more sustainable model comes from innovation, from research and development, from technological advancement, and what economists call productivity growth, total factor productivity growth. And that will be the only way, by pushing the boundaries of what we know to be the global frontier in knowledge and technology, that's how you would generate growth. And that kind of growth is indefinitely sustainable as long as we keep pushing those boundaries, we will continue to grow.

Keith 00:20:49

Do you think that kind of factor accumulation model was a necessary path that if you are actually interested in innovation, you had to go through? An example closer to home is someone like Inderjit who went to found UTAC, a semiconductor packaging and testing company. He could only found that because you really made this space attractive to FDI. You had Texas Instruments there, same with Morris Chang. They were a result of you mobilising labour, and then learning by doing. Eventually, people innovate and then they built these enterprises. So my question was, do you think this is something that maybe all economies who aspire towards innovation have to go through this process?

Jamus Lim 00:21:45

So we have a live experiment for an economy that is, I wouldn't want to use the word "short-circuiting," because "short-circuiting" suggests that we know for sure it might not work. And that is India.

So India is going through a process that economists call premature de-industrialisation. The traditional model for development for all economies up to now that we are familiar with has always gone from one where you have a large agricultural sector. The agricultural sector eventually provides the pool of underemployed labour that is cheap to hire when you form your manufacturing base. And the manufacturing base could come from investments that are domestic in origin, so that's what high saving rates get you. But it could also come, as you suggested, from foreign direct investment. So saving of other countries that are invested in your country.

Either way, that builds up the manufacturing base, and you continue to supply that relatively low-cost labour, and you build the industrial base. Eventually, you'll pass what economists refer to as a Lewis Turning Point, named after Arthur Lewis, who was an economist from the West Indies that argued along these lines of a two-sector economy. So eventually, you run out of surplus labour in the countryside, and all your labour is already employed in the manufacturing sector. So what happens when factories demand more labour? They'll bid up wages. And with those rising wages, you start to substitute away from just low-cost labour and you move up the value chain. Occasionally, you see a reason to substitute capital for labour. And eventually, you'll start to de-industrialise. But you would first have managed to build a middle class, a middle class that is premised on manufacturing.

Now, India is not exactly going through that model. So, of course, it does have manufacturing capabilities, especially in certain states, Gujarat, for instance, in the northwest. It's one of those where they have a significant manufacturing base. But if you ask the average person, what is the state that they think most when it comes to a driver of Indian growth? It would be Bangalore. Or rather, what is around Bangalore. So that is a service-oriented industry.

And India has proven that it can work, but the open question is whether that model alone can absorb the vast number of people that would come from the rural sector. And I honestly don't have the answer. It could be that India will defy this traditional recipe that East Asian countries have followed. But we don't know.

There are also a lot of other intervening factors. The world has become much more globalised. Many services can now be tradable across borders. And so that kind of upends a little bit of that simple story that I just told you about the need for you to go through manufacturing, because manufacturing, of course, is tradable. But yeah, so that's the answer for you. That's the experiment that we're living through.

Keith 00:24:41

Now, Singapore and the other NIEs grapple with this question of how to ensure sustainable growth. How do you ensure that your people can push the frontier of innovation? I guess the question to you is, looking at Singapore now, in 2025, where do you think the challenges have emerged for Singapore that it needs to urgently tackle? For one, you think about what you talked about earlier, which is the demographic dividend has ended, pretty much. We are entering into a rapidly ageing society. That's one.

Jamus Lim 00:26:33

I think it's undeniable that not just Singapore, but all the NIEs have passed a point of inflection where potential growth rates in the order of 7% per annum are well in the rearview mirror. We are never going to, except for a blip where you have a major recession, for instance, and you have bounce-back growth. By and large, you're not going to have annual growth rates like we saw in our early development years. But that's okay. We are a rich country, and that's not the kind of rapid growth that you typically see exhibited in rich countries.

Growth that is based on innovation and innovative capacity, what I will refer to as endogenous growth—growth that can feed on itself—that, as far as economists know, tends to be lower in terms of the growth rates, something like 2% or 3%. That's a kind of a steady-state growth rate that I think many advanced economies will be very comfortable with achieving. So that's the kind of growth rate that we should expect in Singapore, going forward into the future. And again, there's nothing wrong with that.

In fact, if you have that lower level of growth, but accompanied by small diminutions in the workforce or the population, then you are actually still getting richer. So your per capita income growth, or your per worker income growth, is still rising over time.

And of course, that begs the question of whether growth in and of itself is good. We perhaps will revisit that question. But I think we have to accept that when we are relying much more on innovation-oriented, knowledge-oriented growth, we will inevitably, as far as the headline growth numbers are concerned, see slower numbers.

Again, that's not a problem. We know that this is an experience of other advanced economies as well. That's why, in a sense, the deeper public policy questions that an advanced economy like Singapore has are not necessarily how do we keep growth up year after year? We don't want growth to collapse, there's no doubt about that. But are we going to try to squeeze 4% or 5%? You could. But for me, many of the deeper questions have to do with distribution. Where do the gains from that growth flow?

Keith 00:28:04

If I look at other democracies, maybe they don't even agree that these are the same problems that you're facing, right? So, do you think you guys agree that these are the right problems that we should be tackling?

Jamus Lim 00:28:24

I will say that the problem set that many policymakers see is not necessarily that different. So, even for someone that cares about elements like distribution and inequality, I would never say that we need to give up growth entirely for that. If you tell me that the tradeoff between improving equality is to allow growth to be zero, that's a completely ridiculous proposition. No one would choose that.

But if your proposition was, would we be willing to accept instead of a 3% growth rate, a 2% or 2.5% growth rate that is much more inclusive, where much of the gains from that 2% or 2.5% is actually more equally distributed amongst different elements of the population, as opposed to one where it's 3%, but 80% of those gains in income accrue only to the owners of capital or to the wealthiest in our economy? That's where I think there are potential differences.

So, in a sense, it's a philosophical difference. In a sense, it is even an analytical difference. Perhaps one policymaker could look at the evidence and say that I don't see this tradeoff. They could say that, I think that if we were to squeeze 3% growth, I don't think that most of that will accrue to the rich. Or you could look at the same evidence and say, well, based on the past 10 years, based on the past 15 years, we have seen rising inequality. Inequality has fallen since COVID, so that's a positive trend. But for 20 years before that, we were experiencing rising inequality.

And then the question comes down to, well, do we as a society accept this rising inequality? Perhaps you don't think it's a big deal. In fact, there is an argument attributed to Simon Kuznets, who was an economist, who says that it's inevitable that as an economy grows, you will have rising inequality and eventually that will fall. But for others, we may look at the same phenomenon and we say, well, we believe that there's an insufficient amount of redistribution.

And even when you look at the question of redistribution, you could arrive at different conclusions of what is appropriate redistribution. Some would argue that we don't want to overtax people because taxation often is one of the main mechanisms for redistribution. What we want to do is we want to give equality of opportunity. And that sounds great in principle. I don't think any right-thinking person will ever say, yeah, we don't want to provide equality of opportunity. The problem is, it's a much more elusive chimera to provide genuine equality of opportunity.

So we could say that we're going to charge everyone the same prices to go to primary school, for instance, which, in fact, we do in Singapore, right? Everyone pays the supplementary fee. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor. Everyone has, unless you happen to go to an independent school or an international school, if you go to a public school here, it's all that supplementary fee that everyone pays. But even there, is opportunity truly equally distributed? If the way that we grade students is always relative to their peers, and you have kids that have wealthier parents that are able to afford more hours of tuition for their kids, more supplementary classes, and those kids do better, then, even though ex-ante, you have this equality of opportunity in terms of access, you don't truly have an equality of opportunity either.

I'll say the same about schooling, about the way that we fund our schools. So now there are, for lack of a better word, what some would call neighbourhood schools versus so-called brand-name schools, right? You could say that they all should have an equal budget. So the Ministry of Education should furnish them with equal budgets because that's fair, that's equal. But if, because the so-called brand-name schools are wealthier, because they have wealthier alumni, they have deeper history, and they're able to raise money more easily, is it truly equal if we give each one of them the same amount? Or should we disproportionately, we don't cut off the so-called brand-name schools, but we may want to disproportionately fund the neighbourhood schools so that we make them more competitive?

And in the long run, I feel that that kind of approach is more equal. So that's where I think reasonable people can disagree over what is fair and what is truly equal.

Keith 00:33:23

At the end of the day, the ability to redistribute is also determined by how your economy or the government of the day sees itself as a price setter or price taker in the international economy. For example, if I want to redistribute more, and I know, for example, the proposed a wealth tax previously, there is an assumption that if the government sets a tax, this capital wouldn't flow out. So in that sense, you're putting a higher premium on the ability to set the terms and conditions.

Jamus Lim 00:33:56

I think you can even go a step further and say that there are just differing schools of thought about how, in principle, the world works, if you will. One school of thought is that if we overtax people, especially the ultra-high-net-worth individuals, they are footloose, and it's very likely that they would leave. And then you lose that pool of potential revenue altogether. So you might as well not have imposed it. That's one argument.

Another argument would be, well, there are many things that determine where people choose to locate themselves. And there are many factors that go into that decision, over and above how much you get taxed. For instance, some people prefer to locate themselves in Europe, which is, overall, for many of the jurisdictions there, a higher tax country. We're not talking about the wealth tax here, just overall taxes, versus, say, the US, which are relatively low tax countries. It's because there's no magic when it comes to a high tax or a low tax situation. If you tax more, you'll be able to provide more public services and more social protections, more transfers to average individuals. If you tax less, then those public services become less available because you don't have the revenue to fund it.

So it's the decision that the US has made as a society is that they're going to prefer a lower tax regime, and most European countries have been willing to accept a much higher one. The same applies to a wealth tax. People make decisions about where to live for reasons that are varied. It could be that they like the safety in Singapore. It could be that if we become a high tax country, or rather, if we impose a net wealth tax, but the very wealthy feel that in exchange for that, we get some pretty solid public goods. They may be comfortable with that alternative. For starters, things like safety and security. These are public goods too, which we fund through government revenues.

So that's the other argument: it's entirely fine to have a modest wealth tax. Of course, once you cross some reasonable thresholds, anyone with their right mind will leave. But it's just a matter of how much you're going to tax that, too.

Keith 00:47:31

I ask those questions in terms of tradeoffs because, as an economist, you think everything in terms of tradeoffs. You're always thinking at the margin of decision. It seems to me that the government today focuses more on taxing consumption as opposed to production, investment, and savings, right? And that's their approach, which is why they pushed for a GST and then they complement it with a voucher scheme, all sorts. The premise is essentially that we're going to tax consumption, and then we'll redistribute after we collect the revenue. I know you yourself don't think that's the right way, or maybe you think that tax collection should be done another way.

Jamus Lim 00:48:26

On that specific issue of tax brackets, for me, it comes down to how that system of redistribution through the GST voucher scheme is actually fairly generous, especially to the bottom quintile, so the lowest 20% of income earners. Indeed, there are other schemes that supplement the incomes of the very poor as well, including schemes like Workfare, which is a form of an income tax credit, a variation of a negative income tax, if you will. So the very poor, they do benefit from that.

But once you start inching up in the income distribution, you start to see that that consumption-based taxation really bites, especially for middle-income families: the lower middle income, and those that are in the median or just above the median. Because these are the ones that are truly counting their pennies. These are the ones that are facing the common trope of being the sandwich generation, where they're supporting their children as well as their parents. And given the amount of expenses, that's when having limited, very limited support from the government comes to bite.

It's true that not every scheme is excluded from that income category, but enough of them are that some would willingly say, perhaps we should have greater income taxation on the wealthy that can then be used to relieve the kinds of pressures that the middle class face. And again, just to underscore this point, it's a matter of degree. No one is saying that what you need to do is to completely scrap a GST system and return that to zero. I think that ship largely has sailed. In the earlier years, when it was substantially lower, an argument could credibly be made that maybe you want a different system for raising revenue. But now that it is already a significant source of revenue in our overall revenue mix, suggesting that it should be completely eliminated is unrealistic.

But saying that there are alternative channels that would preclude the need to increase GST from, say, 7% to a higher rate, that is an argument that we can have. And again, you may not agree with me, which is entirely your prerogative, but at least I've made an argument that there are these alternative channels that could be made available.

Keith 00:56:58

On the note, there's this book that Professor Chua Beng Huat wrote on public housing in Singapore. I think he calls it "Public Subsidy, Private Accumulation," which really speaks well to the dilemma of public housing in Singapore. I found it incredibly illuminating in understanding some of the paradoxes of the Singapore housing market. I definitely agree with the point.

Jamus Lim 00:57:02

And I'll just say, do we think that it should be the way? Should housing be so central to our mind share? Or should it be something that, yeah, we make, of course, everyone does care about where they live, but it shouldn't consume us to an extent that it shapes our decisions in so many other parts of our lives.

Keith 00:57:12

That's definitely a question I've been grappling with as well. There's one last question.

Jamus Lim 00:57:21

Keith 01:05:48

There's one last final question that I wanted to ask, which is, you're a professor. So what is that one piece of advice you give to your graduating students entering the working world?

Jamus Lim 01:05:55

I've already, in a sense, alluded to this, which is to, of course, approach questions that you face not from the perspective of "What is the corpus of existing knowledge I have already from which I can draw to answer the question?" but rather, to approach it from the perspective of "All the tools and techniques that I've already learned, how do I then apply them to this problem to solve it in a fresh way, in a new way?"

The other is to stay curious, to know that the journey of learning and knowledge accumulation and acquisition is a lifelong thing. But not to see it as something that you need to do so that you can get the next degree, the next piece of paper to flash, so that you can get the next job. No, rather, to be genuinely curious about the world and to build that deep curiosity in whatever it may be for you. Maybe it's in economics, maybe it is in automotive repair, maybe it's in Labubus, I don't know. But whatever it may be, to stay deeply curious. Because I think if you look at the world, you'll see that some of the people that succeed in unusual ways are the ones that somehow became obsessive about knowing something in an extremely thorough and deep way. And I think that will position us well in the future because that kind of curiosity and deep expertise will be valued evermore.

Keith 01:07:45

On that hopeful note, Jamus, thank you for coming on.

Jamus Lim 01:07:52

Thanks for having me.

Transcript

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