Sepupus, I’m very proud to announce that recently I had the chance to have a conversation and an interview with Malaysia’s very first Royal Society fellow, Dr. Ravigadevi Sambanthamurthi!
Dr. Raviga is a biotechnologist who works with palm oil, and she was Founding Director of the Malaysian Palm Oil Board‘s Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Centre, as well as initiator of the Oil Palm Genome Project.
Through Dr Ravigadevi’s work, oil yields were improved because of the SHELL gene and the MANTLED gene identifications, allowing palm oil cultivators to select high-yielding through that increased land use efficiency, and land-use efficiency was increased; workers could harvest oil palm more reliably and effectively because of the VIRESCENS gene selecting for colorful fruit.
These achievements were recorded in back-to-back articles in the prestigious science journal Nature and unprecedented for Malaysian science as a whole.
I have a very deep and abiding respect for science, and on your part, you might be wondering: why is this relevant to the Malaysian economy?
Well, it is relevant because a sizable part of the Malaysian economy is built on palm oil.
Palm oil represents around 3 % of Malaysia’s national gross domestic product (GDP) and contributes nearly 38 % of our total agricultural output. In 2022 alone, the industry exported approximately 15 million tonnes of palm oil and related products, generating RM 137 billion in revenue and adding about RM 40 billion directly to GDP. The sector also supports livelihoods across the country, with plantations spanning nearly a fifth of Malaysia’s land and employing hundreds of thousands of people, particularly smallholder farmers whose operations account for over 50 % of the workforce in this industry.
Gross Domestic Product: the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a country’s borders over a specific period of time. In this context, the total monetary value of all goods and services produced in Malaysia in the course of a year.
Palm oil is also extremely important in many different types of goods and services in our economy, namely:
Our cooking oil
As an additive to lots of different food products
As an oil in the oleochemical industry
And…
It is also part of fascinating narratives about discrimination, land use, agriculture – the stuff of myth to the point that it has in fact been called the alleged Lord Voldemort of the plant world, as Dr. Raviga discusses in this excellent video.
If you want to watch our conversation, you can do so right down below!
Enjoy the conversation and I’ll see you in the next one ahead.
P.S. Incidentally, Ms. Raviga is the mother of at least one Sepupunomics reader. What a surprise!
Hello and welcome back! In this premium report, you’ll learn about Lee Kuan Yew, who in an alternate history could very well have become Prime Minister of Malaysia. But that was not to be, and he was the founding Prime Minister of Singapore instead. In this premium report, you will get to hear about his story and journey his legacy.
From Third World to First – An Economic Vision Realized
Lee Kuan Yew is revered as the founding father of modern Singapore, the man who transformed a tiny port city with no natural resources into one of the world’s richest and most developed nations. When Singapore became independent in 1965, its prospects looked bleak – per capita GDP was roughly $500, on par with countries like Ghana(review.brunswickgroup.com). Yet within a generation Singapore had vaulted into the ranks of high-income nations, even surpassing its former colonial ruler in prosperity. Under Lee’s leadership, the country’s GDP per capita grew almost 15-fold in real terms from 1960 to 2013(livemint.com). By the early 21st century, Singapore’s income per person exceeded $50,000 – higher than that of Sweden – prompting observers to dub its rise the “economic miracle”(review.brunswickgroup.com). This dramatic ascent, often called the Great Singapore Miracle, was no accident; it was the result of deliberate policies and institution-building that Lee set in motion.
Lee Kuan Yew served as Prime Minister for over three decades (1959–1990), during which he laid out an architecture for nation-building that would turn a vulnerable post-colonial city into a thriving global hub. He identified five key pillars for Singapore’s success: political stability, quality education, attracting investment, rising living standards, and strong security(nlb.gov.sg).
Throughout his tenure, his government made strides in each of these areas. Lee built a stable, trusted government almost from scratch – a feat in itself given the turbulent conditions of the 1950s and 60s. He cultivated public confidence in Singapore’s institutions and future, often saying that the people’s trust and unity were vital ingredients of the nation’s success(exploringculturaldatablog.wordpress.com). Investors and citizens alike came to believe in the Singapore story, enabling bold long-term plans to take root. This bedrock of confidence allowed Lee to implement tough but forward-looking economic decisions that fueled growth for decades.
Meritocracy, Elitism and Technocratic Leadership
A core tenet of Lee Kuan Yew’s governance philosophy was meritocracy – the conviction that a country must be led by its ablest people, chosen on talent and performance rather than connections or race. “Singapore is a meritocracy. And these men have risen to the top by their own merit, hard work and high performance,” Lee declared in 1971, referring to the cadre of officials and professionals guiding the young nation(nas.gov.sg). He prided himself on assembling a “closely-knit and coordinated hard core” of top talent in government, stating that the fate of millions depended on the “quality, strength and foresight” of these key figures(nas.gov.sg). This emphasis on elite talent led to the recruitment of scholars and experts into politics and the civil service, turning the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) into a highly educated, technocratic team. Lee himself would later reflect that his “greatest satisfaction” was “mustering the will to make this place meritocratic, corruption-free and equal for all races – and that it will endure beyond me.”(time.com)
But not all that was said about him was beautiful and rosy.
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Sepupus, it’s been a minute! Haven’t been posting videos for a while because I was working on Sepupunomics (read: To serve you!), but here we are with a brand new update featuring some of our acquaintances from PAS that’s giving ✨racial discrimination ✨, which has been completely fair game for economics since Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination.
Now, why am I writing this?
Essentially, Malaysia got its very first Malaysian Chinese three-star general in the country (Congratulations, Datuk Johnny Lim!), and then immediately, as with most problems in Malaysia… PAS.
PAS’s Zaharudin Mohammad, who is also an in-law of PAS president and communism accuser Hadi Awang, came out and started undertaking wild speculations about Chinese prime ministers and the lot, feeding into the racial frenzy, imaginary fear of oppression, and rabble-rousing that the party is so famous for using in lieu of any sort of measurable, tangible economic success or semblance of intelligent decision making.
Speaking of intelligent decision making, seems like even though he tried deleting his Facebook post, Zaharudin didn’t make the intelligent decision of removing his Instagram post, which I reproduce here.
Meanwhile, he is just casually saying now that what he wrote was taken out of context.
I find that interesting. How and in what way was it taken out of context?
How do you even take something out of context when you established the context very clearly, and in what way was it not related to the context? Is there genuinely no relation? I wonder.
Well, if it was not related to the context because he was just writing in an incomprehensible way while expecting his piece to somehow go viral or go completely off into the stratosphere, I think that he’s got something else coming there – I also find it funny how he proceeded to delete the Facebook post but left the Instagram post intact. If he forgot, then he’s incompetent. If he left it up, then I suppose it’s pretty obvious that he’s just intentionally baiting us. Neither is a good sign.
Update: He tried to come up with a justification. He also cropped the picture and tried to hide the fact that he misspelled “My Second Home” and cannot even get simple facts correct lmao.
But is this just a Zaharudin thing?
Before you ask about whether discrimination exists in Malaysia and before you meet any Malaysians who ask if you are crazy for asking this question…
Yes, discrimination 100% exists and it is a widespread thing – you can already see it in the comments below.
Oh, did you need a trigger warning? Here’s your trigger warning.
Now, confront reality.
What did you learn from that wonderful sampling of comments?
These are real comments from people who are not Zaharudin.
These are people who seem to have all these suspicions and hears about Chinese people and who will mock Chinese people, lie about Chinese people, express paranoia about Chinese people or about people from other races, and thrive in calling Chinese people communists whether that’s true or not, while casually suggesting that Malaysians are communists and do not deserve their positions.
The thing is,whether they even understand what communism is is beyond a convenient label for Chinese people deeply suspect, and frankly, this is just scratching the surface – Not even close.
How is this related to Economics?
Discrimination is deeply relevant to Economics, given that discrimination is the differential treatment of individuals or groups based on perceived group membership, rather than individual merit.
Discrimination shapes how resources are allocated in our society by others, and it also shapes our view of ourselves and what seems logical for us to do when we ourselves allocate resources, whether we invest our time into an endeavor, our money into a business, or our presence within a country.
So, what does it mean when people and the politicians that they elect support, favour, and facilitate discrimination with no qualms or compunction?
Politicians or elected representatives are in charge of constituencies. They decide how resources will be allocated for their people, how they will fight for their people, and how in turn they will fight in order to push forward the nation as a whole. In deciding intelligently or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be how the nation’s resources income from taxation dividends and everything else will end up giving Malaysia the best possible future.
If you elect people like this, they are the ones who are going to make decisions about how government budgets will be spent.
They will be the ones planning out what’s going to happen in the country, and they will be the ones who decide on the long-term vision of your country’s development.
Now here’s a question for you:
How confident do you feel about leaders like Mr. Zaharudin in terms of how they could potentially steer Malaysia as a country?
Let me be frank here, I am not confident in them at all.
Just look at this person. He cannot write properly, he can barely articulate himself, and he features in this beautiful little graphic here raising question after question about familial ownership and affiliation… And that’s even leaving aside the fact of his casual discrimination and the way that affects the country as a whole.
The unfortunate thing about Malaysia though is that people’s utility functions and the way that they make their decisions, at least in aggregate and within certain sub-classes of people within Malaysia, is such that people like this individual are likely to come to the top not necessarily due to any particular merit but instead because he happens to fit the correct religious profile.
Apparently, this is a sufficient condition – no need for ethics, no need for administrative skill, no need for anything beyond a qualification from a mediocre religious school…It also helps if they discriminate against the correct people while appealing to the weaker part of the population that somehow thinks that they are constantly persecuted or need to thrive and fight against colonialism even though it isn’t there in the same process becoming colonizers themselves while pretending that that’s not what they’re doing.
The unfortunate thing about democracy is that if enough people choose individuals like this to lead a country and if their propaganda effort succeeds, which we can at least partly see with some of these people in the heartlands of Malaysia with people who are less educated, then that’s probably what’s going to happen unless there is a realization that there is a danger in the first place on a wide scale, beyond any echo chamber, any language community, any platform – which means that if you merely leave this here and don’t talk about it, it will die as an issue unless you start discussing it.
Having said that, we are not completely blind on this or committed only to just raving about our personal opinions – there is a little bit of economics research about discrimination, most of it is done outside of Malaysia, and what is done in Malaysia concerns the private sector, not the public sector, the military, or otherwise.
Beyond Greg, Emily, Lakisha, and Jamal, we have our very own Muhammad Abdul Khalid and Lee Hwok Aun, who feature in the study of this extremely interesting topic with Discrimination of High Degrees; It is possible to study, understand, comprehend, and perhaps address this issue and the toxic subcultures that have come up around it.
