> Surely a de facto dictatorship like this shouldn’t be so wealthy and successful[...]

It's also worth noting that the entirety of Singapore just barely exceeds the area enclosed by Washington DC's beltway.

Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.

The better comparison for the nation should be Luxembourg, and Andorra, not other Asian countries.

> Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.

Recently, I also heard the opinion that another country that can be compared to Sing is Kazakhstan... wait?

The comparison is not so ridiculous if you go through with it:

... it is not a city state, but you can say that it is a "two city state." Besides Astana, and Almaty, the nation is effectively a post-soviet wasteland.

... LKY, just as Kazakh president was a socialist and nationalist early on, and of a very radical kind.

... LKY, just as Kazakh president purged every socialist and nationalist the moment he got a nation for himself.

... aside from elites living in ghettos for the rich, the ordinary population is pressed against the wall by low median income.

... to a very big extend, the state gives just enough of handouts to the masses to prevent them from rioting. This way, both Kazakhstan and Singapore can be called a de-facto, but not de-jure socialist states.

... both countries' economies are one trick ponies, despite of decades of dramatic efforts to change that.

... both countries spend lavishly on clearing up their image abroad, but the general populace of both countries can't disagree more with their respective countries popular image.

The biggest noticeable difference is of course that Singapore is cosy with the West, and Kazakhstan isn't.

> both countries' economies are one trick ponies

What is Singapore's trick? Their economy looks moderately diversified to me - GDP comes 13.3% from finance, 19.2% from manufacturing, 17.6% from wholesale and retail trade, 14.8% from "Business Services", and 35% from other stuff:

https://www.tablebuilder.singstat.gov.sg/publicfacing/create...

There is very little genuine manufacturing left in Singapore. Back in nineties, there was big industry for trade agencies which imported random cheap stuff, and resold it to the West after stamping things with "Made in Singapore."

I assume, the big portion of manufacturing other than output of chip fabs, is the remnant from those years. Add it to that double digits of trade and services will also relate to the same activity.

And a big portion of services labelled as other and business services will relate to offshore banking.

And yeah, both countries run humongous sovereign funds, or better to say, both countries are ran by them.

So it is transitioning from manufacturing to offshore banking, and yet it's a one-trick pony?

Well, a two trick pony then...

I can’t say about Kazakhstan, but anecdotally, a lot of Singaporeans I know (not terribly many) are quite satisfied with, even proud of their country, the government, and the Lee family. The activists are the minority, by a wide margin.

This sounds like an argument for smaller nations?

In fact, many argue that modern globalization is better suited to smaller forms of government than the XVIII century typical Nation-State on the French model. The concept of "Europe of Cities", on the model of federal Germany, is actually pretty compelling: most citizens of, say, London, have more in common with the citizens of Milan or Prague than they share with home-county backwaters; and the instances of the British countryside are closer to the ones of French countryside than of post-industrial cities like Manchester. Having London-sized macro-regions meet at European level to coordinate might be more effective and representative than the current "deep" model. It would also neutralize a whole set of issues with regional "independence" movements: Catalunya, Scotland or the Milan hinterland would be peers in Europe, rather than subjects in Milan, London and Rome.

Historically, nation-states have been mostly defined by culture, which is defined by language, which was mostly defined by communication speed, which was mostly defined by actual transportation speed. That's not an element anymore because all culture can be everywhere at any time. A new approach is required.

I've long suspected that we should aim for more city states and less bloat. Do you have any further reading on the topic that you would recommend?

Not really, most of my knowledge is from the '90s and in Italian - when I was studying international relations and European institutions were in heavy flux. Policymakers back then floated all sorts of ideas, it was a very "creative" time in retrospect.

Since then, most of the attention has been on tribulations resulting from the common currency, 2008, and migrations, so there is a general unwillingness to rock more boats.

City-states have historically lead to far more numerous wars.

I won't argue the fact that Cyrus was enormously influential to the course of fertile crescent civilizations. That said, really he was just one of the first Fertile Crescent leaders to see not only the weaknesses of the city-state, but the means by which to exploit those weaknesses. (It's just that what he did to exploit those weaknesses was so radically orthogonal to the way things were done at the time that even today we're still calling the guy Cyrus the Great.)

Once the Nation-State idea was out of the bag, city-states just couldn't compete. Even the Greek city states fell to Macedon because by the end of the Theban hegemony, they were all so weak that even Macedon, effectively a baby nation-state at the time, was able to take them out. City-states wouldn't be able to compete today either. You'd always have to have some great power around to back them. Even Federations of city-states have faired poorly historically.

It's like continuing to rely on bronze swords once people got the hang of making iron ones. It no longer mattered all of the reasons that bronze was better for you, because iron was better when it counted. The cat was out of the bag, you could try to put it back in the bag, but everyone's already seen it.

You reason in industrial terms, though: nation-states "won" because they were bigger and more resorceful. In a situation where this is not necessaily advantageous, or even disadvantageous (because of centrifugal forces), those considerations are somewhat irrelevant. The URSS had the bigger army (and in some areas, the bigger industrial capacity) and lost the cold war. Turkey has the biggest army in NATO and still struggles to stay together.

In a world where everyone sorta-speaks English and the power is in know-how and transnational market access, it counts very little that you can mobilise this or that amount of tanks. It counts even less if those tanks are coordinated at a higher level anyway.

All things come with problems. Lots of small principalities may have better local goverance, but they tend to squabble.

The other thing is that a place like Singapore is exceptional. It’s a strategic chokepoont established by a colonial power.

Welcome to feudalism.

Like Singapore: Norway, Finland, and Denmark all are around a population of 5 million, are well run, and don’t appear feudal. HN knows well, scaling is hard.

> This sounds like an argument for smaller nations?

It is sometimes used as one, thought it is also sometimes argued that the advantages of city-states are offset by problems (among others, international instability) unless the city-states are relatively rare and economically engaged with (and buffered from each other by) larger polities.

India has a similar situation. All the south Indian states are demanding to be declared as separate nation. One of the Singapore's official language is Tamil whose origin is an south Indian state TamilNadu. Singapore is taken as a motivation to demand a separate nation.

>that one Dictator in a million

Also called an enlightened despot; In the Eastern -Chinese Legalism tradition- a 明君 "míngjūn". There have been instances of them throughout history. But like you said, the problem is usually what happens once the ruler is gone. It's never a (long-term) good idea to have the success of a group dependant on a single person. A political system that produces mediocre-but-stable success (over several generations) seems preferable to one that produces a superior-but-brief success.

> what happens once the ruler is gone

Well, in the case of Singapore, his son takes over [1]. Interestingly (for the HN crowd) he knows C++ and iirc from an old thread about the current PM, Haskell.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Hsien_Loong

From the linked sources: "One of [my children] browsed a book and said, 'Here, read this.'" It was a textbook on the Haskell programming language, Lee recounted. "One day that will be my retirement reading."

He did get a CS master at Cambridge (UK) though, so the C++ bit is likely true.

You might like this - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime...

> But like you said, the problem is usually what happens once the ruler is gone.

Or, even worse, when they get old and start losing their faculties.

>In the Eastern -Chinese Legalism tradition-

Oh my, can I ask you where did you pick that up? It feels to me that an average Western person nowadays has been taught more of that stuff than a well studied Chinese.

Picked it up long ago in a class on Eastern Philosophy. Given the vastness, variety, and history of Asia it barely covered 1% of it all, of course, so I only have a rough overview of the main traditions.

You’re assuming this person isn’t Chinese?

I do. I can not imagine an educated Chinese person these days going at that, moreover somebody from mainland China who is not a party member.

Not the poster you're replying to, but an examination of Legalism was presented in both law schools I attended. Additionally, I know it is also addressed in East Asian studies faculties (with additional historical context above the legal philosophy aspect of it, albeit with less emphasis on the functional qualities).

Why is it a legalist tradition? Isn't the (competing) confucian tradition all about the 2 ways social contract binding and the virtuous ruler?

Not surprised, William Gibson dubbed Singapore as "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" in his seminal article [1] on wired. That was true in 1993, that is still true now (can also relate since a lot of friends and family are living there).

[1] https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

edit: corrected spelling mistake

This is a good point. Free societies don’t arise from education and wealth, but rather peoples’ culture. US GDP per capita in 1870 was about $3,000 in today’s dollars, comparable to Syria. Most African countries have a higher ratio of primary school enrollment today than the US did then.

There is a very odd conceit among Americans. We believe our culture is universal, which causes us to devalue it and asset culture doesn’t matter. We assume the natural outcome of education and economic development worldwide will be western-style individualist free societies, so there is no need to protect western culture from globalism.

“Which is great” is an understatement. Looking at the other southeast Asian all the countries in ASEAN one starts to realize that Singapore could have been a lot worse off. Instead the GDP per capita is comparable to the United States, and crime is much lower.

LKY strikes me as both highly intelligent and pragmatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8GwmsLXOx8

But I guess only time will tell if the system is as good as the man himself. If I had to guess, I’m skeptical.

I lived in Singapore for 2.5 years. I mostly remembered him for his psychomumbling of later part of his life.

Calling him "doing all things right" is a big stretch. The biggest error of him was to cling to power long after his mind went going.

Singapore's economic success was pretty much a meme too. The median income is only ~20000 USD a year, less than half of the economic product per capita.

There were three epochs in Singapore's economy:

First - everybody sat in their campungs and chewed paan. Pretty much nothing was happening till seventies. The only exception to that was that there was pretty much a small scale communist insurgency going on.

Second - reformation and industrialisation. This is the fabled Singaporean miracle. They built MDB flats, and everybody got so happy. A small industrial sector appeared, but it was quickly overshadowed by another kind of activity.

Singapore exploited Western reprehension dealing with Asia, and marketed itself as a "Western outpost" in the middle of barbarian lands. Singaporean companies used Singapore's GATT membership to run trade agencies that bought cheap goods from Asia, and stamp "made in Singapore" on them. That brought the country a big part of its current wealth.

Third - wind down and stagnation. China accessed to WTO, and Singapore's WTO membership no longer meant anything anymore. Singapore got into the middle income trap. People began to feel that Sing's economy was a one trick pony. It tried, but failed to upgrade its economy towards advanced economic activities. From that era, we got the fabulous Nanyang University, excellent primary education, and, back then, liberal immigration policy.

But there was blessing in a curse - China's WTO accession brought tons of money from China's first generation of billionaires to the country. From then on, Singapore fully took on its current identity of the "Luxembourg of Asia."

>The median income is only ~20000 USD a year, less than half of the economic product per capita.

This[0] publication puts median household income at $108k SGD or 79.5k USD (and that would actually be higher if adjusted for PPP). The median household income for the US is 59k USD.

[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/-/media/files/publications/house...

It's also my understanding that almost everyone in Singapore lives in some sort of government-subsidized housing. The system is structured such that it's difficult to get an apartment or buy a house unless you're married so many typical Singaporean households have several adults earning an income under the same roof.[1]

[1]https://www.economist.com/asia/2017/07/06/why-80-of-singapor...

Clarification - Singaporeans live in these flats (HDB housing) - not expatriates. Expat families live in different neighborhoods, different apartments, go to different schools and eat in different places than the locals. No part of an expat life is subsidized. It is therefore unfair to say that almost everyone in Singapore lives in subsidized housing - almost all of the Singaporeans do.

Nobody prohibits a privatised HDB flat tenant from subletting it.

It's a big stretch to say that every expat lives in a landed property.

My first place in Sing was a room that I shared with 3 Indian labourers, and no aircon.

Then, when I moved to a more upscale place thanks to hefty sales commissions, I think everybody was bedazzled "how such a pipsqueak can rent a place for $1800 by himself." Only then, I realised that only top few percents of Singaporeans can afford to live in non-HDB condominiums.

As pointed out elsewhere -- That's the median resident income. There's a huge class of workers that are never given residency that are purposefully ignored by the official stats. Roughly 1/3 of the inhabitants of SG are non-residents who typically work low wage jobs (nearly all domestic help in this category) and they have very limited rights.

> median household income

Not median per person for the whole population including non-residents in the country.

> Looking at the other southeast Asian all the countries in ASEAN one starts to realize that Singapore could have been a lot worse off.

I find this very funny in reality because as someone from the US living in SE asia for nearly 4 years, I pretty much prefer everywhere else in SE asia than Singapore, though I guess if you look at from a monetary standpoint I can understand.

why?

Over regulated daily life (though very well run) combined with being very culturally bland automaton like outside of very few pockets, mixed with Israeli militarism applied to its own people, just doesn't feel very welcoming compared to say Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia.

Some of my wife's family has lived there and Indonesia for a while, and it is agreed that out of all the places in SE asia, it is a good place to make money and potentially for schooling when young, they plan on moving when retiring.

Fair enough, but every city in malaysia feels like post apocalyptic singapore, infrastructure wise. Indonesia - not much quality of life overall.

Well I live in South Jakarta, in a pretty nice area in a 2br apt with alot of amenities that I would never want to pay for in the US or SG, so I'm biased because I probably have a very high quality of life compared to say most Indonesians (or even what I had compared to living in Boston paying the same for a room in an apt with 3 other grown men), but Indonesian's seem to be much more welcoming/laid back/hospitiable than Singaporean's (at least to me as a Black American). Plenty to complain about here (as anywhere), but progress is being made here without whole jack boot feel to it, albeit at a slower pace.

Do you have to go to an office daily? How convenient is that? Do you go out socially a lot? How are the restaurants and bars?

Jakarta is the city in SEA i know the least. I spent 3 days there as a cheap backpacker 10 years ago. I remember spending a substantial amount of time in traffic.

No I worked remote for companies in the US, which was my main willingness to live in SE asia in the first place because salaries here are crap.

Some places are better than others, if you lived in SCBD or Pondok Indah (where I am), and your office is close, it kind of feels like some parts of tokyo, but with a little more green space. Traffic is pretty crap though (morning and eveing when people are coming from work), but go-jek or grab biking doesn't make it too bad. Pollution is still bad during the work week, and if you do it alot best to get one of those face masks people tend to wear a lot in Asia anyways. MRT is coming online soon (alot of test runs on the tracks now), so that will make it alot easier geting around esp from south to central jkt.

Plenty of restaurants, bars, and clubs, I manage to have a good time when I out (pretty introverted though, so I tend to not go a lot in general, maybe a couple of times every month, but I tend to order food via gojek at least like every other day), though I try to avoid places that allow smoking indoors. I also tend to avoid eating any street food unless I have something I can take that my stomach can handle (but I'm like that in the US as well ha). It's also nice to be able to take a quick flight to some of the Islands and relax (Bali is ok, but super crowded with tourists compared to other places).

Never was really interested in backpacking unless it was hiking in mountains purely, so I don't really know what would appeal to that perspective.

> No I worked remote for companies in the US, which was my main willingness to live in SE asia in the first place because salaries here are crap.

You can make decent money in Singapore as an expat. But the range of salaries i've seen here is quite a bit larger than in most of the west.

As for the rest of your comment - interesting. Thank you for taking the time to write that up. I am no longer a backpacker and i travel and look at places differently nowadays. I have to check out Jakarta again.

I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.

> But the range of salaries i've seen here is quite a bit larger than in most of the west.

I noticed this as well, do you have a college degree? I've noticed companies over here place even more emphasis on having such (even despite paying less than in the US, at least regarding work relating to writing software).

> I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.

Do you go back and visit fairly often? I found that friend's and family were more likely to want to come to me or meet me somewhere outside than the US so I haven't really found the urge to go back to at least visit.

I have a bachelor’s degree but i know people without a degree making 130-140k USD anually in software related roles. Not quite SF/Valley rates but it goes a long way here with the low tax rates. And these are relatively young people. (Early thirties)

I visit home about once a year.

Yeah but Singapore is so bland they fucking banned the song 25 or 6 to 4.

> Some of my wife's family has lived there and Indonesia for a while, and it is agreed that out of all the places in SE asia, it is a good place to make money and potentially for schooling when young, they plan on moving when retiring.

Not having to shoulder the cost of an aging population would work very well for SG.

> Not having to shoulder the cost of an aging population would work very well for SG.

One (surprising) way Singapore addresses the cost of caring for an aging population is Singapore's "Maintenance of Parents Act"[1] which basically permits parents to sue their adult children for alimony.

[1]http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1614_200...

You should see their subways when they are littered with signs for people to get pregnant.

"Pool of citizens aged 65 and older grew to 14.4% this year, from 9.4% in 2007, as lifespans increase and births stay low"[0]

[0] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/spore-ageing-at-faste...

I've never ever seen signs in the MRT about anything to do with pregnancy... (been here 7 years, catch the MRT to work every day, yellow and green lines)

This was sometime between Feb 27 and early march 2017 passing through some station on coming from somerset station on the red line, coming off one of the trains and on the walking tram, there was a huge billboard for it.

Ah I never get the red line. It’s always so crowded :)

Singapore once aired a commercial during their National Day Parade about making babies, sponsored by mentos obviously. [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jxU89x78ac

WOW! I never knew this existed. Just sent it to my singaporean friends and they are like "BAHAHAHA OMG I FORGOT ABOUT THIS"

The day they released this was so so funny. and awkward.

I don't think the issue is that 'good' dictators are so rare (one in a million), but that they are rare enough that two back to back is extremely rare and three back to back is beyond hope, even if each dictator tries their best to train up their replacement. As such the real test of these systems is how they fair after the original dictator is gone. Singapore is currently in the middle of their test and the grade won't be seen for a while.

Even consecutive good dictators aren't that rare--Rome had the "Five Good Emperors" after all--but a single bad one can be enough to wreck the polity. Rome did recover from Nero... but it never really did from Commodus.

Singapore and Hong Kong have a unique position in that they have an established bureaucracy, trade law, and international banking infrastructure - thanks to the British. Because they are tiny islands of stability and 'rule of commercial law' in a sea of political and economic instability ... they essentially have a powerful export industry, one that also relies on political stability.

Without that wealth, I think the leaders would be goners.

People are willing to put up with a lot so long as they are gaining wealth, the rules are not so harsh, and there is the perception of rule of law (i.e. no bribery).

Not to inflame the anti-Imperialists :) but I wonder where Singapore would be were they to have a (elected?) Governor from the UK instead of a 'Dictator'. Especially since there is no such thing really as a 'native Singaporean' (i.e. when the British took over it was almost an empty plot) and this is more like a trading post than a colony, it really does question the classical late 20th century narrative views of Imperialism.

I suggest that at very least, this guy could be having his little Skype meeting. But maybe the streets wouldn't be quite so clean?

> Surely a de facto dictatorship like this shouldn’t be so wealthy and successful. Turns out Lee Kuan Yew is that one Dictator in a million who managed to do pretty much everything right.

This made me think of some scripture.

> Nevertheless, if it were possible that ye could always have just men to be your kings it would be well for you to have a king. (Mosiah 23:8)

The preceding verse talks about how everyone should be equal ("one man shall not think himself above another") and the following verse talks about the effects of a bad king ("But remember the ainiquity of king Noah and his priests;")

It constantly shocks me how many hackers worship Singapore. I know many.

I mean it's not anywhere close to the worst place. It has a good economy and better rule of (incredibly strict) law than many. But I just find it shocking to see it held up as a near utopia and see hacker friends of mine sharing glitzy Singapore propaganda videos on Facebook.

To the type of person that dreams of living in a small space with little more than a laptop and a remote job, with all the necessary infrastructure for life externalized, Singapore looks pretty appealing for basically all the reasons you stated.

Good economy, but also good food which matters when you don’t plan to cook for yourself. Good transit infrastructure going anywhere you need or desire to go, so you don’t have to have a car. One level of government, so reduced complexity dealing with all those annoying things that hackers think are stupid and dumb, like taxes. Only thing it is really missing is the kind of critical mass of hackers that would make it into Y Combinator in City-State form.

How come you call your fiend a hacker? Ever since the late 90's the term has largely been co-opted by the "iamverysmart" type of people.

Thanks. I've seen that too but never had a fitting term.

It's not just that it's wealthy, the people are pretty free there. I visited recently and there's nothing there that indicates it's anything other than a first-world democracy. Media and internet are not censored. It's socially conservative compared to Western Europe or the US, but not draconian at all. The authoritarian streak is there, but it's not pervasive like China.

> Media and internet are not censored.

Singapore has strong censorship mechanisms for the media and Internet. It ranks 151 on the Freedom of Press Index [0].

[0] https://rsf.org/en/singapore

What I meant is that they don't firewall the entire internet the way China does. You can read any international news or social media. Their censorship regime is purely domestic.

> Their censorship regime is purely domestic.

They block:

-pornography

-ashley madison

-an admittedly very questionable "news" site targeted at Singapore but operated from the outside

Further, the sale of malaysian newspapers is banned, as is private ownership of satellite TV equipment.

Fun Fact. Lee Kuan Yew was a computer scientist before becoming politican and coded solving sudoku and shared his code over github also mentioned he wanted to learn haskell. Looks like computer scientists would make great politican's once elected but getting elected requires a different set of skills, luckily for Lee Kuan his father paved the way before him.

> Fun Fact. Lee Kuan Yew was a computer scientist before becoming politican

No, he wasn't. He was a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in economics. The closest that gets to being true is that his son, Lee Hsien Long, got a B.A. in Mathematics and Diploma (essentially an M.S.) in Computer Science before getting a Master of Public Administration. His work history immediately after getting the CS degree was as a military officer with a meteoric career path which appears to have been in field command and operations and general staff positions; he does not appear to ever have been a working computer scientist.

> Looks like computer scientists would make great politican's once elected but getting elected

That generalization goes far beyond what the single example you seem to rely on would support even if it were accurately described.

The current leader is Lee Kuan Yew's son.

>Every election since 1965 has been won by the same party

hence "de facto dictatorship"

It could alternatively be that the people are reasonably happy with their levels of peace and prosperity and see no need to change the government.

It clearly wasn't right for the guy doing a skype call. Stalin also substantially grew the economy of the USSR. US economy grew with the slave trade. Maybe using economic gains as an argument for what is "good" is a poor argument.

The "West" actually enjoys much less freedom than the rest of the world. It's only an illusion of democracy and personal freedom.

Is it really 1 in a million? There are other pseudo democracies that are doing well e.g. Liechtenstein

While it has problems, Liechtenstein is much closer to a normal democracy than Singapore (At least these days). Currently, four parties have seats, with no party having an absolute majority.

Didn’t the prince win a referendum to give him real monarchical powers though? The BBC summary from 2003 says “The people of Liechtenstein have voted to make their prince an absolute monarch again.” Although this description may be a bit exaggerated.

I assume the parent comment is in reference to the prince, not the parliament.

Similar to America where Republicans and Democrats are really no different from each other in the grand scheme of things.

For example, they both want to dismantle social security, move away from anything resembling universal health care, shut down immigration from non-white countries, cut taxes, and jack up military spending.

Wait a minute....

Wow,

Not true, it looks so from where you're sitting. But politics change a lot over time.

It's slow moving and in a two party system, you are unlikely to see big differences between either side.

That said, the world would have looked differently had Hilary won in 2016.

Syria would have looked different, that's for sure.

(i.e., more like Libya looks now)

Or Gore in 2001

2000

This tired and ignorant take is so frustrating to continue to see, especially after the Trump win.