AND THE LEE Kuan Yew Honorary Award for self-proclamation of instant expertise in everyone else's business goes this month to Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey Sachs.
What fun to go swanning around the world telling others how to manage their affairs and run safely elsewhere when it all goes wrong, what joy of intellect to know that you comprehend all the world's problems and can offer the solutions in detail too. Bow down, minions, at the temple of this new god.
Let us look a little closer at Mr Sachs' embellishments of the World Economic Forum's announcement that Hong Kong has slipped to 13th place from seventh in its macro-economic competitiveness index. This one, by the way, scorns objective criteria. It is based on the opinions of 4,500 'chief executives' who all, of course, share Mr Sachs' detailed knowledge of every country.
Here we go anyway - Being a finance and trading entrepot is necessary but not sufficient to ensure competitiveness.
Why should it be a necessary condition? A country can be very competitive and not be a finance and trading centre at all. We know of one right across our border. China has probably the world's most competitive industrial economy at the moment and it is growing gangbusters too.
Yet in finance it still has a closed capital account and trade for China means little more than shipping the goods to the dock.
And why should finance and trading not be sufficient to ensure competitiveness? It has always been so for us, just as it has been for New York. We serve roughly the same function to our hinterland as New York does. The fact that we operate under different political conditions from New York does not change our economic function. Mr Sachs is talking nonsense here.