[jhanschoo]

> To the naive, Singapore is a paradise, but once you visit for long enough you realise it’s just a super nice prison and it’s not very fun being with the other lags

Oh come on, your yardstick is completely ill-calibrated. Among polities that

- didn't exist as independent polities until post-WWII

- were not modernized/westernized/democratized until post-WWII (thereby excluding NZ)

you'd be hard-pressed to name one that you'd be rather born as a random citizen in. Perhaps another of the Asian tigers, like TW. Presumably you have in mind, as Gibson probably did, a country that has had a longer history of independent or democratic rule and economic development.