[lgvln]

There are probably better examples to be found. The "competence" comes at a price - extremely high levels of inequality, utter lack of civil liberties, a one-party authoritarian regime and so forth.

[HPsquared]

A lot of places have all those problems, without the competence.

[bilbo0s]

Notice how the list of negatives leaves out the 800 pound gorilla in the room? High levels of debt taken on to finance their, uh, ‘competence’.

People praising their ‘competence’ seem to ignore it. And the people complaining seem to ignore it. We’re beset on both sides of our political divide by fiscal apathy.

If places like Carmel fail, I’m certain their failure will have much more to do with bad debt than homelessness.

[HPsquared]

Without at least an appearance of competence (well, technically, tax-raising power), nobody would lend them the money.

[elteto]

The only difference between an efficient, totalitarian regime and an inefficient totalitarian regime is time. Just give Singapore some time.

A system in which there are no or few effective feedback mechanisms are bound to diverge over time.

[HPsquared]

There are a couple of dimensions to consider. It's like how in a control system you can get better performance by reducing the level of damping, but at the expense of reduced stability or oscillation. It's possible to have too much damping, but stability is crucial too.

[alan-hn]

Do you have any specific examples of this happening in the cities listed in the article?

[lgvln]

What I mean is Singapore is hardly the ideal city to be measured against if we take into account the non-materiale aspects of life.

[alistairSH]

He's referring to Singapore.