Nicholas Cocks

Advertising copywriter living in Singapore Inc. Opinions my own. Whose did you expect? #COYI 🇺🇦 🇮🇱

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

You didn’t get this in #Qatar. What a god awful spectacle that was. This World Cup on the other is a huge tribute to the hospitality and open heartedness of the #USA.

[Ali Walker @AliWalker24]

Extraordinary night in downtown Boston.

Brazil, Morocco and Haiti fans + the Tartan Army moshing to NO SCOTLAND NO PARTY.

Only the World Cup.

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@mayaWSB80 @Handre You rather prove the gentleman’s point with this pathetic comment.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

He’s so incompetent, he can’t even make the point he’s trying to make. The U.S. relationship with the UK is closer than any other bilateral relationship and far beyond the U.S. relationship with Israel. It isn’t a partnership, it is a sacrosanct alliance in which almost all intelligence is shared (or was before Trump) and trust is implicit. It’s why chief of London Station is the coveted pre-retirement assignment for CIA officers. We spy on Israel and they spy on us. They are not in Five Eyes and won’t be. Vance just elevated Israel to a level they’ve never attained by way of trying to diminish them. He has no idea what he’s talking about.

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

Iran will go down as the USA’s biggest foreign policy failure, ever. Nothing comes close. They should have got rid of Trump last year. His amateurish administration is far too dangerous to humour any longer.

[Spencer Hakimian @SpencerHakimian]

BREAKING: Iran has reclosed the Hormuz Strait as Trump’s Peace Deal collapses

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

Test Match Special ain’t what it used to be. Cliched and banal. #testmatchspecial

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@JockAyeTheNoo Magnificent

[Jordan @SLCLunk]

Oh fuck you. There is no way the guy who got the no-bid contract for using bottom shelf Home Depot sealant on the reflecting pool looks like this. Come the fuck on

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

Still happily prescribing it to all their clients though I’m sure.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Accenture, $ACN, heavily involved in AI consulting, is down nearly 20% after AI fails to magically transform their business.

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@GregAFC Plenty of evidence already

[Capel Lofft @CapelLofft]

Trevor Howard came up in conversation yesterday and I remembered my top Trevor Howard fact: he would have it written into film contracts that he had to be excused filming on days when a home Test Match was being played so he could watch. Heroic

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

Brilliant summary of the last 60 years. #singapore #malaysia

[Handre @Handre]

In 1965 Malaysia kicked Singapore out of the Malaysian federation, and Tunku Abdul Rahman thought he had won. He had dumped a port city with no oil, no farmland, no fresh water, and two and a half million people crammed onto an island smaller than Lake Tahoe. Sixty years later Singapore's GDP per capita runs past $84,000 while Malaysia limps along under $12,000. The man who got expelled built the richest patch of dirt in Asia. The man who did the expelling built the New Economic Policy.

Let's study what happened.

Start with what Singapore lacked. No resources. No hinterland. No domestic market worth the name. By every theory that says a nation needs raw materials to prosper, Singapore should have starved. Instead Lee Kuan Yew made his country a place where capital felt safe. Low tariffs. Easy entry for foreign firms. Courts that enforced contracts instead of shaking down the parties. Corporate tax dropped to 17 percent, personal rates capped at 22, no tax on most capital gains. Money flowed in because money is not stupid.

Malaysia chose the opposite. The New Economic Policy was racial central planning dressed up as fairness. Bumiputera quotas demanded that ethnic Malays hold 30 percent of corporate equity, that government contracts favor Malay-owned firms, that universities admit by race rather than ability. The state picked winners by bloodline. Predictably, the productive Chinese and Indian minorities took their capital and brains elsewhere, much of it to (where else) Singapore. You distort prices and incentives long enough, the talented people leave. They always leave.

Lee Kuan Yew was not perfect. The man jailed opponents, sued journalists into poverty, and ran a soft authoritarian state with a fondness for caning. He banned chewing gum, which is the kind of thing a control freak does when he runs out of real problems. Singapore is no libertarian paradise. The government owns Temasek and GIC, sovereign wealth funds sitting on close to a trillion dollars combined, and public housing covers 80 percent of the population. Plenty there for a free market thinker to dislike.

But here is the lesson Malaysia missed. Lee understood the difference between an interventionist government and a parasitic one. Singapore's state stayed mostly out of the price system. It kept inflation low, the currency credible, the bureaucracy clean, and trade open. Transparency International ranks it the fifth least corrupt country on earth. Malaysia sits at 57th, with a former prime minister, Najib Razak, currently serving time for looting 1MDB to the tune of billions. One country treated public office as a trust. The other treated it as a buffet.

Capital responds to incentives, not slogans. When Singapore guaranteed property rights and kept the rules predictable, Exxon and Shell built refineries, banks set up regional headquarters, and the port became the busiest transshipment hub in the world. When Malaysia told investors that race would override merit and that the rules could change whenever a minister felt like it, the smart money discounted everything by a risk premium. Over fifty years that premium compounds into a $70,000 gap in living standards.

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

Ten minutes #LinkedIn sucks more life out of you than two hours on #Twitter. God it’s awful.

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@jimmaxcricket Third Man wants a word.

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@ludoonchart Be interested to hear his opinions on Singapore

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@London_W4 It’s A, okay?

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

The entire tech world has sold people a plausible fiction: that digitising everything will inevitably make it better, and that money spent on tech magically does not incur an opportunity cost.

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

And those teams alerts every time someone sends an emoji or something equally important. If you don’t turn them off you get nothing done.

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

This is inarguably true. Email has made communication worse and decision-making inordinately slower and more bureaucratic. Yet nobody ever talks about it.

https://t.co/OabLddGSmd

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@Mollyploofkins He’s 80. Looks like he’s doing fine!

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

The Russians have fired warning shots in The Channel. Good grief. https://t.co/N70eMJB3wq

[Nicholas Cocks @NickoCocks]

@Microinteracti1 This will not end well