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by BelenusMordred 1892 days ago
Many people really forget how brutally poor Singapore was not long ago. After being kicked out of Malaysia for wanting equal racial rights they had no land, resources, army or wealth. Any reasonable assessment would project them staying third world for a long time.

As boomers were entering adulthood in 1970, the GDP per capita in Singapore was US$900, in Australia it was $26,000.

Australian pensioners are the wealthiest of that cohort on the planet. Due to rampant property gains and incredibly favourable tax laws, technically you can live in a $10M mansion and still collect a full pension + benefits.

The two countries took wildly different trajectories and as such have very different attitudes by the generations that grew up in that time.

For a thousand dollars or so you can get setup and run your own hawker stall a couple hours a day in Singapore, lower that cost to a few hundred if selling sundries. The only equivalent I could think of for Australians is weekend markets which are full of oldies, but those are transient tents on some grass which are usually quite competitive to get and are once a week/month things.

Undoubtedly there's many who do need the income even in old age, but there's also a big cultural difference and many don't really consider retirement a thing. They may work a lot less, but have no plans to stop until physically unable, this is pretty common attitude to see.
1 comments
Clewza313 1892 days ago
Actually, the "Singapore was a third world fishing village" trope is mostly PAP propaganda. Singapore was very successful economically before WW2, and ranked second behind Tokyo or Shanghai as the wealthiest city in Asia by most measures.

Also, you're off by a factor of around 20x on your estimate of the costs of setting up a hawker stall: https://blog.seedly.sg/how-much-to-be-hawker-singapore/

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BelenusMordred 1892 days ago
Singapore was a British colony before WWII, not a nation state though. All the Straits Settlements accumulated that wealth on the back of colonial England, and before that it was part of the Johor Sultanate but was just some jungle that no one cared about, not even the Sultan himself who gave it to the British.

After leaving Malaysia it ranked right down the bottom on basically every economic and social measure, unemployment was at 10% and many lived in slums. Plenty of third world countries had better GDP per capita numbers.

Also my estimates are just fine according to that clickbaity link and a minute of research:

Upfront:

    $10 tender application
    $39 three year hawker license
    $321 Basic Food Hygiene Course
    $260 Stainless steel cart + delivery From JB [1]
Ongoing:

    $49 a month for a stall at Mei Chin Road
    $600 a month in cleaning/service fees
    $1000 a month in raw materials for say 100 chickens + everything else. Serves 1000 dishes.
It's certainly possible. That rental isn't common but certainly not out of the ordinary, you can get cooking stalls for ridiculously cheap.

[1] https://www.carousell.com.my/p/second-hand-stall-stainless-s...

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