I will say that the “law and order” aspect is way overblown. Residents will break laws and take shortcuts just as they do in the West. The difference is the government will not hesitate to make an example out of you (doubly if a foreigner).
It is very impressive what Singapore has accomplished but there are a lot of problems under the surface that rich expats never see.
Oh and the deference to authority is prevalent. Their Covid contract tracing app went from “for Covid only” to “general law enforcement” right quick with barely a peep from the voters before the govt passed a law making it all “legal”.
In the places I've been to in Asia, racism is not something that's actively thought about. People still have biases within them, but because it's not something they ever discuss or think about. Hence they don't even realize they have those biases.
Perhaps one reason could be that some those places aren't very racially diverse to begin with, at least not as much as America.
I'm from Asia, and I've lived in America for a few years. Trust me, I was treated more politely in America than I would've been in my own home country lol.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it also seems like your account is on the border of using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts, because it's the line at which they start being destructive of the site. If you'd please fix this, and use HN as intended (for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation), we'd appreciate it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I'm not saying that they should settle for where we are now. No, we need people who keep pushing us to make good on the check that Jefferson wrote when he said that "all men are created equal". But when you talk as if we've made no progress, people who are at least nominally on your side are going to start tuning you out. That may not be good strategy...
Btw, we all, save maybe a few enlightened ones, have negativity to reflect on. Probably the enlightened ones do too. The goal isn't to get rid of negativity—that's would be setting the bar far too high. We just want to prevent negative swipes from making it into the comments here. You can take care of that via the 'edit' link after you post; that's what I do. You can also set 'delay' in your profile if you want time to review your comment before it gets seen; I do that too.
Could you name a few example? I have college friend who live and work there, and they never mentioned discrimination. Although we are both Chinese mainlander, might be treated as part of majority.
There are several reasons: Chinese are rich. Nobody likes the rich. Chinese are foreigners. Nobody likes foreigners. Chinese are heretics and infidels. Nobody likes those. Another cause is the, admittedly brilliant, tactic of divide and conquer that Western colonial powers used. Set the natives up against the Chinese merchants instead of white government officials. The Chinese conveniently lacked the firearms and navy guns that the whites had access to.
There have been many downright genocidal riots against the Chinese across the region. The Chinese government was too weak to do anything about it.
Why do they feel the need to ask that question? Are issues with people of specific nationality more prevalent?
Someone correct me if I am wrong.
So, like the US, but with less hypocrisy about it?
In Singapore it’s just tolerated.
You are misunderstanding what the GP comment said. The reality is that landlords/employers can and do discriminate based on race, religion, age, etc all the time. They simply just can't say it out loud, that's the illegal part.
I find that Asian people tend to be pretty open about this stuff, whereas in the west it's taboo. Don't think that anyone would be foolish enough to try arguing that there's no silent discrimination occurring in the US.
It's a unique place in every sense: social and cultural issues, economy, geography, history, leadership, etc. It's a very interesting country to study, but the most important thing in any analysis of Singapore is that lessons from Singapore almost certainly don't extrapolate well to anywhere else; don't draw conclusions about how some other country should be run based on what works there.
Singapore is a safe banking haven in a sea of legal risk and chaos.
Singapore was effectively an (almost) empty plot of land when it was established, and it was designed to be an 'banking/commercial haven'.
What makes Singpore 'rich' is the foundation established by the UK as having 'rule of law' and 'peace and order'.
As long as Singpore remains peaceful and orderly, where the commercial law is respected and foreign entities trust that their money is safe and they will get a fair deal, and that ability is not available in surrounding nations (which it isn't, even today), they they will do well.
If you're a Western company looking for a 'gateway to Asia', then Singapore is a good choice. It was literally built to be that.
It's a little bit how Swiss standard of living is supplemented by the fact that 1/3 of the world's offshore money is parked there, and that surplus benefits the locals.
Like a more complicated version of having 'Oil Wealth'.
It is what it is, and we have to be careful about criticism from afar, but that doesn't mean we can't be critical.
Singapore was a trading port from it's first conception when the Sultan of Johor sold the basically uninhabited swamp island to the British. When they were amicably booted out of Malaysia the country was one of the poorest on Earth, they had no natural resources, rampant poverty and unemployment, no military and infrastructure was in a terrible state. They somehow managed to completely turn that around in half a century, if you look at other new nations formed since then not a single one has managed to even come close to their success despite having vastly superior natural advantages. The Balkan states in particular come to mind, they also had a chance to start anew with a clean slate in the 90's and 30 years on they are a collective basketcase of nations whose younger population is abandoning in droves.
40% of all shipping traffic on Earth passes through their waters, the Port of Singapore is the worlds 2nd busiest by tonnage handled. People associate the country with finance while ignoring the sheer volume of cargo that moves through there.
> Like a more complicated version of having 'Oil Wealth'.
Find this comparison very hard to grok. Any country on Earth could copypaste Singaporean banking and corporate laws today if they wanted to, there's nothing stopping them. Now those same countries can't magically have the oil reserves of the Saudis or Venezuela.
> What makes Singpore 'rich' is the foundation established by the UK as having 'rule of law' and 'peace and order'.
By that metric all former colonies should be thriving?
Singapore had Colonial 'laws' 'order' and 'policy' and what amounted to national strategy that worked well within their context as I pointed out in my first sentence: good commercial law in a sea of chaos.
Also, they were a 'fresh slate' without historical ethnic groups, political causes, large swaths of poor, under-performing industries to be subsidized. They can focus on the 'high surplus' activities and leave everyone else to worry about the other things.
Much like if Manhattan were to 'separate' from the US, kick out the poor people, and still control 65% of US banking activity - Manhattan would be much richer and the US somewhat poorer. They could bring in poor worker / non-citizens from upstate NY etc. and keep social costs externalized.
'Any state' cold 'copy' the Singapore model, yes, and the results would be they would probably be 'much better' (if they came from a bad starting point) but not as good as Singapore because of their strategic placement.
If India were to be as efficiently run as Singapore, they would all be 25x wealthier just as a matter of efficient organization.
But it'd be impossible to 'copy' the model because of historical, legacy political forces, every group and party wanting their supposed piece of the pie. And of course, 'efficient organization' is one thing, but without some kind of strategic industrial advantage, it's a bit harder. Of course, India could focus on being the 'IT / Software' power house of the world, and if they did that, then backed by efficient organization, they would be a 'rich' country.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand are 'clean slate' (mostly) colonies with an effective colonial bureaucracy, and at least some advantage of natural resources, and they are rich.
And FYI if every nation surrounding Singapore did adopt their model of governance, Singapore would be much less important in the equation, much like if the 'Rest of China' became as trustworthy, consistent and fair minded as Hong Kong ... then Hong Kong would lose much of it's advantage.
This is an ignorant thing to say and it borders on orientalism and ignores all the facts that led to them being "basket cases".
I would say it's unfair but it's mostly lazy.
If you remove that from the equation, what makes SG, or any of the aforementioned places, so special?
And being a Bangladeshi migrant worker is fucking awful and not particularly safe.
There's an undercurrent of really horrible shit going on underneath the shiny surface:
* https://tnp.straitstimes.com/news/singapore/maid-who-killed-... (she probably was abused a lot, it is very common...)
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57563235 (the pinnacle of maid abuse)
* https://archive.md/RCAI2 (tl;dr don't try to protest being paid less to drive a bus because of your race. they will toss you in prison and beat the shit out of you before deporting you)
You have to watch out for your safety all the time. Just a few weeks ago my friend's bf was beaten up along with several of his friends in Warsaw. The police has done nothing, the embassy has done nothing (they are from on the biggest Western EU countries). You won't read about it in the newspaper either.
I also never feared police or the state for that matter in Singapore, if I didn't do anything illegal.
I cannot say the same for the USA, where there are "no go" areas in all major cities (and many smaller ones), crime stats are way higher, and an encounter with a cop can turn sour way more easily.
Not to mention I had an accident (in Singapore) and my friend called the ambulance there, and had to spend the night on a hospital, where they did several tests, and the cost was like $100 for first rate care in ultra-modern facilities.
>I also never feared police or the state for that matter in Singapore, if I didn't do anything illegal.
Japan, Korea and Taiwan achieve the same level of safety while not being dictatorships. No need to compare it to the US.
They have the rule of law, they have elections, all of those countries are characterized by, in reality, a very monocultural, depolitized, bureaucratic system of government. Live in Singapore in reality is no more or less 'democratic' than live in Japan or Taiwan or SK.
You absolutely will not be arrested for holding up signs outside government buildings[1], or questioned by the police for reading a book on the train as a protest[2]. You would not be sued to bankruptcy for making what would be considered political speech in these other countries. Or just about anything on this list https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1174024357443600384?s=21.
Singapore is absolutely less democratic - there's no need for scare quotes.
[1]: https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1353999081287245824?s=19
[2]: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/police-question-one-ma...
I think this is a false equivalence. TFA mentions a democracy activist who was imprisoned for 21 days because of a small, non violent protest on a subway. He had been previously arrested for criticizing the judiciary in Singapore.
Unless I'm mistaken, you would not be arrested for either of these acts in South Korea or Japan. They are both imperfect, but in some important ways more free.
Things like that, and worse, have happened time and again in the US too...
Are they the Illinois of SE Asia? For that matter, if the US laws on insider trading applied to congresspeople, half of our elected representatives would rightfully be behind bars, too.
The amount of "mindbending messed up"/"distropian" stuff the US has from a European point of view is absurd.
Well, the slogan «‘No Way To Prevent This’, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens» is from The Onion («America's Finest News Source»)...
99% of Europeans haven't been to America and only know what Hollywood movies tell them. The kind of person who thinks you can visit New York City and the Grand Canyon in the same day and have to worry about mass shooters everywhere all the time.
And this is not some pop culture instilled notion, but my empirical observations on the ground. Heck, I've talked with too many people who didn't even know the major cities in their own state, 100 miles away from their town, or major parts of its own history, and might as well never even left their county...
San Francisco has some very obvious problems, but there's no way I'd rather be in Singapore as someone who has worked at social media startups, crypto, and dabbling in biotech/longevity... the early opportunities aren't there because the imagination and freedom to pursue it isn't there.
It's a systems problem because allowing serious dissent and dissatisfaction can inspire innovation.
This is out of scope.
The comparison is about city management. Not creativity.
When you talk about creativity, SF is at the forfront a giant nation of 300M people, 2 orders of magnitude larger population and market size. That naturally support more creativity and innovation.
As for how much the market contribute to your claimed advantage, it's hard to measure. It might be that indeed SF per capita creativity, excluding market impact, is better than SG. I have no reason to doubt that, but I see not proof.
Not mentioning other aspects when you are a central cit in a superpower.
If we're talking about the Bay Area tech startup founders then roughly half of those are born outside of the US. Singapore could have just as easily attracted those immigrants, but they went to SF instead.
Same for me in Barcelona. Getting pickpocketed is the worst that can happen.
> I also never feared police or the state for that matter in Singapore, if I didn't do anything illegal.
Well that's the thing, there's a lot of stuff illegal in Singapore :)
In terms of the police, if you are detained you have no right to remain silent and no right to counsel (until after you’ve been interrogated).
And the healthcare system is top notch and affordable, but the governments attitude is “citizens need skin the game”. Private insurance is almost a requirement otherwise the public system will leave you with thousands in out of pocket costs.
It is a remarkable country but scratch under the surface and there is a lot that doesn’t work well too.
You might have never been in fear, but were you ever stoked? And I mean genuinely socially stoked, not the monetary excitement after winning at the casino.
Violence is a big predictor of strong sentiments among the populace.
If you don't risk taking punches and kicks, you'll hardly get the reward of hugs and kisses.
Social volatilty gives socially competent people a good opportunity to capitalize on their competence. Nowhere is this ever more clear than places like Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico...
A socially competent person will make friends and romantic relationships as soon as they get off the plane.
A socially incompetent person will get robbed and risk mugging, again as soon as they get off the plane.
The so called dangerous places are also the fun places.
Of course if you are loaded but socially incompetent (say many of the billionaires in Silicon Valley or Wall Street) then your 50B net worth won't be enough for people to restrain themselves from beating you unconscious and taking you Rolex or Phatek Philippe (that your socially incompetent brain decided to sport there even though you are nobody but a walking wallet with no street cred)
That said, even rappers seem to retire to "safer" places then these "lively" options you describe. So something about being safe appeals to many people, not just the socially incompetents'.
The US is huge and there are pockets of instability of course, especially in big metro areas such as LA, Chicago , Baltimore and Detroit.
For a socially competent person who lacks the prequalifer of fame though ,they are not that great again due to prices which are US-like
These people have no rights and any protesting ends them up in Changi or shipped back somewhere else.
> These people have no rights and any protesting ends them up in Changi or shipped back somewhere else.
Presumably they would have rights in their own countries. Since they left those should tell something about practical value of rights when one is just trying to survive while being poor.
Just pointing out that he was an upper class non-citizen and his experience is very different from a lower class non-citizen because of that.
A migrant Mexican worker has full access to the US courts, labor laws protect them, etc.
Migrant workers in Singapore are simply discarded if troublesome. Even though the population of 90%+ vaccinated (for months), migrant workers in Singapore have been confined to their dormitories (when not working) for almost 2 years now.
Pretty regularly trucks with workers in the back with get into accidents and a number will die. Government says “to expensive to make companies transport them in buses”.
There are literally two different systems for Singaporeans and foreigners.
Most places have some source of cheap labor that is exploited.
On the contrary, I think this is essential. As an American, I'll note that criticizing our government is a national past-time. One that even extends beyond our country and others join in. It's important to remember we live in a democracy (don't detract by saying we live in a democratically elected republic). We perform checks and balances on our government. The government is flexible. We can learn from the good and bad from other countries and ourselves (specifically what works in states run by different parties and economies). This is great.
We also need to criticize governments and societies that are violating human rights. This cannot be ignored just because they are not seen as culturally okay by someone else.
What I think is the problem is the comparison. The "America is the greatest at everything." But also the other countries that criticize America but then ignore their own similar issues, just shifting focus. We have to criticize ourselves, but use it as a means to move forward. It can't ever be "x is bad and that's the end of the conversation." It's about a "more perfect union" than "a perfect union" because we have to constantly be improving and adapting to the changes in the world. The danger is being static and thinking what worked before or what works somewhere else automatically works else{when,where}.
The whole problem is that now we just complain and the conversations lack nuance. I'm not sure if they ever had nuance, but I do know that it is important if we're to progress from where we are now.
I think that is a stereotype itself, and at this point held more by non-Americans than Americans. Aside from a minority of hard core believers, what I mostly hear is complaining about the country. Especially online.
I've seldom met Americans who didn't think so, even leftists seem to have this mental wart (well, some of them might think Canada is the apex of civilization). Manifest destiny, and everything.
I can't remember the last person I met who thought the US was the best place in all regards. We're mostly aware of the problems, but completely opposed on how to fix them. The current political climate is born from that intense frustration with the status quo.
One reason is it kind of insinuates that people can exist beyond time and space. So they can have all good things cherry-picked and be made available.
Like I see here people drooling over cheap mobile internet in India without thinking about so many good things in life are simply not available or far too costly by local purchasing power when compared to US.
The entire global economy is one, too, in fact. Not to spoil it, but that's something The Good Place ends up wrestling with by the end.
I could never bear it myself. I'm from the Netherlands and I hate the way most areas there are so boring and designed by committee. I'm more attracted to cities where not every brick has to be the prescribed colour. It makes a place so much organic and interesting IMO. And I value individualism much more than an orderly society. I prefer the laissez-faire attitude in Spain over rigid policing.
This is why I'd never consider Singapore and choose to live in Spain. But this works both ways, I would imagine a lot of people live in Singapore precisely because things work that way there.
Of course not everyone has that choice but I'd say most people that are reasonably well-off do. And Singapore seems to be full of those :)
Upper and middle class? I agree. The lower class and the Indonesian and Malay below them? I saw slightly more discontent.
I have mixed feelings about my time in Singapore. If you’ve never been there the only way I can accurately describe it is it’s like if Disney built a real city. I believe you would get very different results of a survey during the day vs after about 2200 or 2300, when the shoppers are all home and the street cleaners come out.
I think it absolutely earns its name as “the air conditioned city“. But… I will say that for the most part it works well, I just couldn’t do it. I did see people litter here and there, mostly lower class workers stuffing cigarette butts in nonobvious places. But I would send my older mom there without a care in the world for her safety.
As to safety… for a country with strict laws, all police still had body armor, I saw patrols of 4-5 guys all with handguns and usually two with MP5 submachine guns walking around different places, and thought it was interesting to see posters along the stations that warned you should be prepared for terrorism including where to go and how to cut off bleeding.
The whole time I was there I felt like there was an underground I couldn’t get to. That for as beautiful as the city was on the surface (it really is), that there had to be an equal but opposite underground, wether true or not.
They did had issues with terrorism in the past, from islamic extremists...
I think you're talking about 1960's. Today, this is completely opposite. In fact, I see European exceptionalism on HN which rarely gets challenged.
Considering all legal systems equal is a slippery slope to saying that only inhabitants of the "first world" deserve human and civil rights.
On the other it's an authoritarian one party system posing as a democracy where the government owns/runs more of the economy than most so-called socialist states.
It's a great example of the trade-off between personal freedoms and economic security.
Umm, no this isn't a trade-off you need to make. Look at Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. In Sweden, we have complete economic security and personal freedoms. I don't know why you'd think authoritarianism is a necessary trade off for even less economic security than here.
I live in the USA, and it seems like culturally we tend to think that our country is the best place in all dimensions. I love traveling and enjoying the differences in different places. I think that it is a slippery slope downwards criticizing different cultures and legal systems.