The Soil and the Seed

On the afternoon of May 18th, as a guest on The Bright Side with Pauly Suba on Wave 105.1, I found myself making a plea I had not planned to make. The interview was winding down — the moment when a host begins to thank a guest and glance toward the next segment — when I asked whoever happened to be listening for a single thing: that we build a Guam where capable young people can step into public service and actually make a difference — and would want to.

It can sound like sentiment. It is, in truth, a demand, and a heavier one than it first appears. The reply one usually hears is a shrug — that honest government is hard because honest people are hard to find, that the talented leave, the principled tire, and the rest make their peace with how things are done. It is a comfortable answer, because it puts the trouble in human nature, where nothing much can be done. The history of places that actually repaired their governments suggests it is also the wrong answer.

The island has no shortage of capable, conscientious young people. They study hard, start businesses on thin margins, look after their families, and serve in the village. The shortage is not of seed. It is of soil — of ground in which diligence takes root and is rewarded, rather than ground in which the careful are outpaced by the better-connected. The real question is not how to find better young people for public service. It is whether we will build a system worthy of the ones already here: one that selects for them, keeps them, and makes honesty the easy path rather than a lonely act of sacrifice.

One night in October 1951, a gang hijacked a shipment of opium — eighteen hundred pounds of it, worth some four hundred thousand dollars — on a beach at Punggol, in what was then colonial Singapore. Smuggling was ordinary in a port that size. What turned the heist into a scandal was the identity of three of the robbers: they were police detectives.¹

Investigating police corruption, at the time, fell to a branch housed inside the police force itself. Asked to pursue its own, it did what such arrangements tend to do — it faltered. Though senior officers were plainly tangled in the racket, only two were ever dealt with, the inquiry hobbled by the plain fact that the investigators answered to the men they were investigating.² The lesson the government drew is the one that matters here. It did not decide it merely needed more honest policemen. It decided that no institution can be trusted to police itself, and in 1952 it built a new bureau to do the job from outside the force entirely.¹ That agency would help turn one of the most corrupt ports in Asia into one of the least corrupt nations on earth.²

That a system can be designed to select for its better people — rather than wait and hope for them — is among the most durable findings in modern economics, and it begins by overturning an old assumption about what makes nations rich.

The 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics went to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson for showing that prosperity rests less on what lies under a country's ground than on the rules written above it.³ Where institutions are inclusive — dispersing opportunity, protecting effort, rewarding invention — societies grow. Where they are extractive — concentrating advantage among a connected few and treating the public as a resource to be tapped — they stall. The gap is not marginal. By the laureates' reckoning, the richest fifth of the world's countries are now some thirty times wealthier than the poorest fifth, a chasm explained largely by the rules under which people live and work.³

For an island that cannot vote itself a larger landmass, a deeper labor pool, or a shorter distance to its markets, this is not bad news. It is the opposite. Where nature is stingy, institutions carry more of the weight, not less — and institutions, unlike geography, are built by human hands. Whether a permit takes a week or a season, whether a contract goes to the best bid or the best-acquainted, whether a young auditor's careful finding is acted upon or left to gather dust: these are not the weather. They are choices, set into the design of the system.

So what does a system that selects for good people actually look like? The evidence points to a few undramatic ingredients, beginning with how people are hired and kept.

One answer has anchored its field for a quarter-century. The sociologists Peter Evans and James Rauch scored the economic agencies of thirty-five developing countries on a single quality they called "Weberianness" — the degree to which a bureaucracy hired by merit and offered a career worth staying for.⁴ The higher a country scored, the faster it grew, even after accounting for how rich or schooled it was to begin with.⁴ The reason is human and recognizable. When advancement follows competence, the able have reason to enter public service and remain. When it follows connection, they cede the field to those who trade in connection — and the institution slowly becomes the sum of what it rewards.

What an unfair system does to its ablest people is more corrosive still, and it falls hardest on the young, who are deciding where to spend a whole working life. The economist Albert Hirschman gave the dynamic its enduring vocabulary: faced with an institution in decline, a person can exercise voice — the effort to set things right from within — or take exit, and simply leave.⁵ Where voice is met often enough with futility, exit prevails, and the most capable leave first, because they are the ones with somewhere else to go. For a young person on Guam, exit is seldom abstract; it is a seat on a plane, and an island that gives its most promising no reason to stay will keep losing them to places that offer one. Those who remain absorb the quieter lesson — that pressing for change mostly marks a person as a problem, and that the safer course is to lower one's expectations and accept things as they are. An unfair system, then, does not merely tolerate mediocrity. It produces it — discouraging the conscientious from trying, and steadily exporting the very people most able to make a difference.

Then there is money, which topples a piece of received wisdom. Honest government is often assumed to be a rich country's luxury — that one cannot expect integrity from underpaid officials. An International Monetary Fund study by Caroline Van Rijckeghem and Beatrice Weder confirmed that corruption does climb as public pay falls behind the private sector.⁶ But its deeper finding cut against the fatalism: integrity does not require salaries a poor treasury cannot bear. Fair pay works only in concert with a real chance of being caught and a real penalty once caught.⁶ In Singapore, the new bureau supplied the catching; decent public wages removed the temptation.² Neither, alone, would have held.

Estonia, another small nation with empty pockets, reached for a different lever — one that handed ordinary citizens a power they had never held.

When Estonia broke from the Soviet Union, it was poor, and could not afford a sprawling bureaucracy. So it built a digital one instead. Beginning around 2001, it laid a secure backbone — called X-Road — that let government databases speak to one another, then moved nearly every public service online; by the end of 2024, essentially all of them.^{7 8} The genuinely radical piece was a rule about watching. Each time an official opens a citizen's file, the system records it, and the citizen can see who looked, and when.⁷ For most of history the state has watched the public. Estonia turned the lens around: now the public watches the state. Favoritism is harder in a lit room, and accountability no longer waits for a brave soul to file a complaint — it is built into the wiring.

None of this required wealth that Guam lacks; it required a decision, and the patience to keep it. Neither place is a template to import whole — Singapore's cleanliness came bound up with a concentration of power and a narrowing of dissent that Guam neither has nor should want, and Estonia traveled its own particular history. What carries across is sturdier and more modest than any single regime: oversight that is genuinely independent, advancement that turns on merit, and a process open enough that ordinary people can watch it.

The stakes are not abstract, because the Government of Guam is the largest single employer on the island — roughly 11,750 of some 67,690 jobs in late 2025, close to one in six.⁹ The same offices that hire and promote that workforce also issue the permits a business needs to open, award the contracts companies bid for, and enforce the rules everyone competes under. Their character is the climate in which every venture on the island either grows or fails — and the inheritance the next generation is being asked to take up. A shop owner who cannot tell whether a license will take ten days or ten months, or whether an honest bid stands a chance against a favored one, learns to expect little — and invests accordingly, or not at all. Multiplied across an economy, that hesitation becomes the quiet tax that weak institutions levy on everyone, paid not in dollars but in ventures never begun.

The repairs are unglamorous and well within reach: hiring and promotion that turn on what a person can do rather than who they know; public careers stable and rewarding enough that capable people can build a life in them; oversight independent enough to follow a finding wherever it leads, with consequences that fall on conduct and not on convenience; and transparency wired into the process, so that contracts, permits, and payments are visible by default. Every one of these has been done by a place that started with less than Guam holds now.

Beneath the economics lies an older intuition, one that needs no proof to be felt. Public service was once understood as stewardship — the holding of something in trust for others, above all for those least able to fend for themselves. A system that rewards the connected over the careful does its deepest harm not to the powerful, who can navigate any arrangement, but to the family waiting on a delayed benefit, the small contractor shut out of a rigged bid, the patient at the end of an under-resourced line. And it quietly teaches the young who are watching what their integrity is worth. To make institutions fair is not merely efficient. It is a way of loving one's neighbor, and of keeping faith with the generation that will inherit whatever we build — written in the plain language of hiring panels and procurement rules and audit trails.

That is what I was trying to say on the radio, more clumsily than I have managed here. Guam's trouble, named honestly, is not a scarcity of good people. It is a set of conditions that ordinary, lawful, patient work can change — as a colonial port did after a beach full of stolen opium, as a broke Baltic republic did with little more than resolve and a length of cable. Neither went looking for better citizens. Each built ground in which the better instincts of the people it already had could finally take root.

Work like that needs people willing to lead it, and I will be honest that I am not, today, among them — like most who might be, I have a family to provide for, and cannot make a martyr of myself. That is precisely the point: any system that depends on martyrs has already failed. What the rest of us can do is humbler, and in an election year, decisive. The greatest power an ordinary citizen holds is the choice of whom to entrust with authority — at the ballot box, and in every appointment that flows from it. The question worth putting to anyone who seeks that authority is not whether they are charming, or generous with promises, but whether they will use the powers we lend them to build merit, independence, and openness into the system — and then live under those rules themselves. We do not choose leaders for the favors they can do us. We choose them for the conditions they leave behind.

The capable young people are already here. The soil is ours to prepare.