[RivieraKid]

I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?

[kardianos]

Lee had a dedication to results, not ideology. Survival is not right; survival must be earned. They explicitly avoid multi-culturalsim and groom technically competent, detail oriented bureaucrats and politicians. In other words, they view reality as real and consequential, and they do what works and take the next step.

[nerdsniper]

Did I misread your thesis? It seemed like your strongest argument is “survival must be earned” and your most immediate claim to this is that “Singapore avoids multiculturalism.”

And then you kind of go on to imply that because they avoid being multicultural they instead are detail oriented and technically competent.

A lack of multiculturalism seems…like a very very nonsensical claim to make about Singapore. Its one of the most celebrated intersectional cities merging the identities of three different major regions.

[xyzzy123]

It is not "multiculturalism" in the way that word would be used in say, Canada.

They have quotas to prevent enclaves, they actively manage immigration to keep it about 3/4 Chinese, there are a lot of restrictions on speech and the ways you're allowed to organise.

The things Singapore does to manage their ethnic diversity 100% would not fly in the west.

[rayiner]

> Its one of the most celebrated intersectional cities merging the identities of three different major regions

The Chinese population share in Singapore is similar to the white population share in Nebraska (75%). And Singapore has maintained the same 75% Chinese supermajority since 1960, despite Malays having about double the total fertility rate of Chinese since the 1980s.

[rrvsh]

It is not nonsensical in the slightest. The government does their best to maintain a monoculture while promoting the farce of multiculturalism, because a monoculture facilitates easier economic growth which is the overall aim of the government rather than cultural development. Multiculturalism is essentially pacification because obviously this is unpopular

[sillyfluke]

>a monoculture facilitates easier economic growth

The why of this is not explained by you nor the original comment referring to the lack multiculturism, it is simply asserted. That's why the original comment came off as nonsensical. More than a quarter Singapore's population are foreign workers, and they make up at least 40% of Singapore's entire workforce. Seeing as the workforce that is driving Singapore's economic growth is not a monoculture your claim needs a little tweeking I would think.

I'm not claiming this means Singapore is embracing multiculturalism in the same way I don't claim the UAE embraces multiculturalism due to similar foreign workers dynamics, but not putting a disclaimer involving these stats while talking about the benefits of monoculture and lauding a country for its realism is a ridiculous sidestepping of reality. Both Singapore and the UAE are extremely cosmopolitan.

>Multiculturalism is essentially pacification because obviously this is unpopular

Why would it be unpopular to the dominant monoculture to maintain the monoculture? Who is being pacified when a country embraces multiculturalism? Please explain.

[rrvsh]

Having a diverse population != multiculturalism in the way that we were discussing. Singapore promotes "racial harmony" where every "race" is given equal public holidays, equity, and inclusion in government etc. This is not wholly true, as the majority ethnic group is overrepresented in positions of power, and foreign workers making up (the bottom) 40% of the workforce does not change that. This extends beyond ethnic lines - the monoculture is not only Chinese > over the rest, but also the dampening of any freedom in expresssion, art, etc. - this is easily verifiable by 1. speaking to any Singaporean 2. looking at the education system and 3. looking at how much cultural impact Singapore has had compared to other "global" cities. You are also clearly misrepresenting my comment about pacification, and I do not appreciate it. I am clearly not referring to some conspiracy where people are disappeared. I am talking about a decades-long government campaign to supress alternative voices and _pacify_ (in the correct sense of the word) dissent.

[nerdsniper]

So you're saying what?

1) The countries that are less multicultural than Singapore are more technical?

2) The countries that are more multicultural than Singapore are less technical?

3) The diversity of foods, religions, ethnic backgrounds, and economic backgrounds in Singapore celebrated here [0] is completely fake?

0: https://www.sg101.gov.sg/society/multicultural/

[defrost]

> Where every citizen is equal, regardless of race, language or religion

Citizen is a pretty key word there - things are pretty okay for most citizens, damn fine for the elite, and rosy for the well heeled ex-pats and foreign STEM workers.

There's an underside of non citizen day workers that stream back and forth, and a deeper layer of hell for indentured "lesser" Asians of the region that are looked down upon and struggle.

[rrvsh]

You don't need to quote my own country's government propaganda to me. My family has been here for seven generations. I made no claims that multiculturalism is wholly correlated with "more/less technical". The point is that monocultures are easier to control and a multicultural society is harder. The monoculture is cultivated so that the government has an easier time servicing their main goal of economic growth, because multiculturalism is NOT a priority, just a PR tactic to allow them to achieve what they actually want. Quoting a .gov.sg source has literally zero bearing in this.

[infecto]

It definitely is not nonsensical for anyone with experience in Singapore.

[gmerc]

Bullshit - Singapore is managed multicultural like no other nation. We integrate faith - halal options in every food center, the public holidays of 4 major faiths, 4 languages, culture associations and centers, festivals, multi racial neighborhoods and forced tolerance

[dyauspitr]

I would say one of the biggest things is it’s basically the size of a city. But then again, China is basically doing the same thing with a massive country right now.

[atlasunshrugged]

Shameless plug but you might also be interested in Estonia's story if you want to hear about how a formerly Communist country also became quite developed in a single generation (and churned out startups like Pipedrive, Veriff, Bolt, Wise and partially Skype). I wrote a book about it which of course I hope you check out, but I also went pretty in depth in this interview: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government

[teleforce]

> I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?

It's mainly its strategic location and it's always been the the busiest maritime route chokepoint since recorded history between east and west, specifically between India and China two of the most populous nations in the world.

It sit right at the tip of the Strait of Malacca, the busiest and the longest strait in the world. This one famous quote by a 16th CE Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires, who declared: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".

Secondly is the people, and the third is the governance policy. Essentially, you must have be a bone-headed to screw up Singapore, like the one who can bankrupt a central bank.

My original top most comment on the great lie of Singapore was just an obscure fishing village during the early colonial time but it's has already downvoted to oblivion, you can check them out if you want.

[rrvsh]

The reason for your last point is that Singaporeans are taught in school that we were nothing but a fishing village until first colonialism (and Chinese immigrants) arrived and turned us into a major port, then the PAP (Lee Kuan Yew's party) turned us into a first world nation. It's really propaganda, and of course you wouldn't bother looking up information that you were taught to see as truth when you were a young child

[teleforce]

That explain it, thanks.

My comments point at one time at double figure and then it went south to zero now, but it probably can be negative soon, c'est la vie.

[rayiner]

Many post-colonial societies (Arabs, Indians, etc.) puff up their supposed past wealth and success, but that’s the real propaganda. Even when these countries were on important trade routes or whatever, the per-capita GDP of these places never went much above the subsistence level. High estimates of the per-capita GDP of the Roman Empire have it at around half of modern India. These societies were very poor in pre-colonial times.

[rayiner]

> Essentially, you must have be a bone-headed to screw up Singapore

The place that is now Singapore had less than 1,000 people when Raffles got there. So what happened?

There’s lots of places with strategic locations or natural resources or such advantages. The U.S. has the largest contiguous stretch of fertile land connected to one of the largest navigable river systems in the world. But the north american indians did essentially nothing with it. It’s not easy to make a modern civilization out of even a favorable geographical situation.

[teleforce]

Need to check the veracity of this 1000 population claim by the master colonial no less.

The British took over Malaya from Dutch with minimum effort, by exchanging some of their Indonesia colonies after an agreement with another colonial power. Fun facts, that's how Batam Islands got under Indonesia.

The first thing they did was to create Strait Settlements with strategic and rich Malayan States including Penang, Malacca and Singapore, definitely any of these was not an obscure fishing village [1]. These are the major trading ports for Asian major empires including Langkasuka, Srivijaya, Majapahit, Chola, Malaccan Sultanate, etc.

[1] Straits Settlements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straits_Settlements

[dunkvg]

the prioritization on education has alot to do with it

[rayiner]

The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then.

LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z.... (Read the whole thing. The first part is about culture, while the second part starting on p. 114 is about how he implemented western economic policies without trying to import western style social policies.) Singapore focused on neoliberalism within a social and cultural framework that accommodates the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities that compose the country. It focused on anti-corruption and government efficiency, a major weak spot of nearly all developing countries. But it didn’t try to go straight from fishing village to liberal democracy. Like other countries that developed rapidly in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and now China) development of state capacity and civil institutions happened under soft-authoritarian, one-party rule.

To put it in one sentence: LKY was a bog standard neoliberal who didn’t suffer from the neoconservative delusion that American-style individual rights and populist democracy can be transplanted into any country hand-in-hand with neoliberal economic policies.

[IncreasePosts]

It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.

[elevaet]

Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story.

edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!

[atlasunshrugged]

I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).

[HDThoreaun]

Singapore's location on the straight of malacca is one of the most valuable resources in the world. #2 in container throughput worldwide even though they barely manufacture anything.

[boelboel]

China wasn't as poor as India, especially not until 1990s.

[rayiner]

It absolutely was: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-china-got-rich-and-india-didnt (“In 1987, median purchasing-power adjusted income in China was $1.88 per day, compared to $2.94 per day in India. Chinese median wages surpassed Indian ones in the early 2000s.”). Also: https://mgmresearch.com/china-vs-india-gdp-comparison/ (“During 1990, China GDP per capita was 0.9-times of India.”).

[swyx]

as a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience

[rayiner]

I’m using “neoliberal” because it’s the closest American term for someone who supports free markets and free trade. He was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s economic ideas while diverging from Hayek’s views on individual liberty.

A better comparison might be Alexander Hamilton or Abraham Lincoln’s view of free markets combined with an interventionist government. But we don’t really have a neat label for that. In the U.S., free markets get conceptually lashed together with individual rights and limited government.