the Malay hourglass economy

In the olden days, the wealthy were generally those who were close to the seat of political and military power. In traditional Malay society , these would be the court people with the sultans at the top.

The economic system was characterised by one in which the powerful extracted wealth and wealth producing factors from the people. That would include land, labour, capital equipment( animals, crude equipments etc). The majority remained in the rural areas, working the land rivers and forests. What ever they produced, a sizeable portion was taken by the custodian of the feudal system. The major stakeholders of the feudal system.

From villages by village headmen, by penghulus, by territorial chiefs and eventually by the central treasury of kings and princes. It has always been like this.

If I were to describe the Malay economy then, a suitable analogy or model if you may, is the hour glass economy. The hour glass as you know consists of two bulbs arranged on top of one another and connected by a tube. Fine sand is filled in the upper chamber and passes through the tube at a given rate, until the upper half is emptied and the bottom is filled up.

In modern terms, one can infer this as the trickle down mechanism. Structurally, the trickle down mechanism didn’t work for Malays. Wealth generated will eventually pass on to the more powerful in society. Those at the bottom half of the hour glass. The principle of the hour glass economy, is one by which wealth created will always trickle down for the benefit of those controlling political and military power. The producing/ supplier half will pass on wealth created to the consuming/recipient half.

When the British came and introduced the modern economy, the beneficiaries of the hour glass economy were replaced by players of the modern economy- Chinese businessmen, European traders, the traditional feudal elite of Malays society who were either co-opted as real players or older version of rent seekers. Those goyang kakis or loafers a.k.a. the aristocrats, who benefited on account of feudal lineages.

The Malay economy was simply one based on privilege. In a privileged society, men are rewarded according to who they are, rank, position in the hierarchy etc. A society appropriately described by David McClelland as a society fed by ascriptive norms.

In that society, men are rewarded based on their lineages. In modern times for example, Dato Najib became an MP at the young age of 24 because he was the son of the late Tun Razak. He was not selected because of qualifications nor contributions to society. He probably did not even like Pekan then. Kampong in the backwaters etc. Apart from being the PM, Tun Razak was also a feudal chief and so was the grandfather. The more feudalistic elements of Pekan society, were already predisposed to honour that ascriptive norms.

In such a society, low productivity can be easily explained. In such a society the lazy, loafers and the incompetent were paid more than the industrious and the intelligent( i.e. the common people). Such a society ended up where all the good men gave as little as possible to society because the lazy bumps whacked everything.