[DevX101]

One of the greatest leaders of modern times.

Singapore was a backwater country with no natural resources when he came to power. It's since evolved into one of the primary economic hubs in Asia, with a higher per-capita GDP than her former colonizers, Great Britain.

To transform a country in such short a time is nothing short of remarkable.

[oska]

I recently learnt that Kuan Yew fought desperately against the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. At the time, he didn't believe Singapore was viable as an independent state.

"Every time we look back on this moment when we signed this agreement which severed Singapore from Malaysia, it will be a moment of anguish. For me it is a moment of anguish because all my life ... you see, the whole of my adult life ... I have believed in merger and the unity of these two territories. You know that we, as a people are connected by geography, economics, by ties of kinship..."

Quote taken from transcript of a press conference given by LKY on August 9th, 1965 [1]

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140809182331/http://www.nas.gov...

[archlight]

that is why he is great man. when you are abandoned against you believe is best for your country, he didn't give up and come up with even better solution.

[adventured]

Their economic production is quite remarkable.

Circa 2001 their GDP per capita was 1/3 lower than Japan, and about 1/5 lower than Hong Kong. They suffered a decade of stagnation from the early 1990s until 2003. They've been on a tear ever since, with GDP per capita now 45% higher than Japan and Hong Kong. Quite a jump in just 13 or 14 years.

Likely within another few years they'll pass Malaysia in GDP, with Malaysia having six times the population.

[seanmcdirmid]

I think with China weakening, it can't continue. We are probably in for a second Asian Financial Crisis in the next few years.

Also, Singapore is very much like Switzerland: they have to import many/most of their workers, except whereas Switzerland focuses on the high end, they focus on both (importing Chinese bus drivers and American programmers). Its a weird mix that isn't sustainable (also, they should stop using cheap construction for everything, concrete shouldn't be used so much in a modern city!).

[adventured]

I agree, China will create an economic blackhole effect in the near future. They've accumulated between $25 trillion and $45 trillion in new debt in the last seven years (depending on which analysts you listen to), and are strictly reliant on trillions in new annual debt at this point to continue their fake GDP growth. Their real estate market is crashing. They have a demographics nightmare looming. The age of robotics replacing low value manual labor has arrived. And to top it off, China has half a billion farmers that are effectively unemployed with no future prospects.

I'd argue they stopped growing in real terms years ago. Most of their added GDP the last five years has been purely low value debt derived 'growth.'

Also, the last time the US Dollar behaved like it is now, it caused a large emerging markets crash, and it's likely that will be repeated again (if to a lesser degree).

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-16/strongly-ri...

The countries that benefited hugely from China's rise, will suffer as China's boom turns into decades of stagnation. That will include Singapore, Australia and much of Asia in general. I think given China is repeating Japan's debt mistakes, and has a similar demographics problem (but much worse given the extreme poverty covering 2/3 of their population), China will at best probably mimic Japan's post 1980s stagnation.

[lucaspiller]

Citation? I visited last year and went to a tech meetup, and other than myself and a German guy who had been living in the area for 20 years, everyone else out of 60 people was Asian.

Quite a few people I spoke to were from China and said they came to the country to study. As I understand they are provided full scholarships if they stay to work for X years after completing their studies.

You are right about lower class workers though - Singapore and Malaysia, like GCC countries, also import a lot of construction workers from India.

[seanmcdirmid]

Plenty of non-rich Mainland Chinese also come to Singapore for work. The ones you meet in tech aren't all of them (likewise, Singapore gets poor/rich workers from India).

At some point, a country should provide social mobility to remain healthy. Switzerland is a great example: they take refuges who many take lower-level jobs, but their children are basically Swiss and move up the ladder quickly. Singapore isn't like that.

[jpatokal]

Switzerland and Singapore aren't actually all that different here, although I'll readily admit Sg is more draconian -- eg. government permission is required for a Work Pass holder to marry a citizen!

But both make it very difficult for "unskilled" people to acquire residence or citizenship. This avoids the need to provide an option for social mobility among the lowest earners by ensuring that they get shipped out to become someone else's problem before they have kids, and some undemanding fresh meat is imported instead, because life as a maid/construction worker in Sg is still more lucrative than toiling in the fields in the Philippines/Bangladesh/etc.

[seanmcdirmid]

Switzerland doesn't import unskilled workers directly, they just get them as refuges that they accept. They do not take them in as short term residents, that would be very unswiss.

(lived in Switzerland for two years)

[crdb]

I think this is a very Western-POV argument to make. Like the minimum wage argument, it stems from a belief in a fixed pool of resources being abused by robber barons, or a diluted version of the argument, which may be true in some cases. If you dislike Austrian flavored economics, it's probably not a good idea to keep reading. I will leave aside the fact that Singapore was recently targeting to be 50% immigrant in the near future (and, in practice, is still heading there), and focus on the implied criticism of Singaporean labour policy in your comment and others on this thread.

From an Asian or third world POV, Singapore is creating thousands if not millions of jobs that wouldn't otherwise exist. These workers aren't abducted from their countries and shipped in chains to be sold as free labour as used to be the case in another country just a couple centuries ago. They voluntarily seek income and non-monetary benefits such as living in a country with clean roads, a fair justice system, clean water from the tap, ample food, and pay several times what they'd get at home which goes a LOT further when sent back home to the family (source: I lived and worked in India for an Indian company, on a project involving Pralahad's "bottom of the pyramid"; never was I so grateful to be born in the West).

An illustrative example is the market for maids. Although I don't personally have a house maid, plenty of middle class income families here have a full time one because they can afford it (around $500/month + lodging and food I believe is the going rate, although the families I know pay upwards of $2000). Bump the cost of a maid to a Western minimum wage on a PPP adjusted basis, and the locals will start doing their own cooking and cleaning, and the Pinay ladies who get to spend a few years in Singapore won't have that opportunity anymore. Their jobs mostly won't go to Singaporeans, they'll just disappear, just as your illegal Latina maids in the US would disappear if "la Migra" was more thorough.

Singapore is not responsible for the policy failures of other states (indeed a strong argument can be made for Lee Kuan Yew being instrumental to the bettering of policy and prosperity in a lot of much larger states such as his influence on Deng Xiao Ping, and his part in the creation and direction of ASEAN).

As such my personal opinion, however politically incorrect in the Western ivory tower it may be, is starting to lean towards Western policies being the "inhuman" ones - "close the borders and go protectionist on your labour markets" - with a huge opportunity cost in millions of jobs that simply disappear or become illegal (as with the extraordinary 11 million illegal immigrants estimated to live in the US, over 3% of the population!) which aside from sucking more from a worker point of view, is a breach of the rule of law and therefore yet another attack on the primacy of individual rights.

A strong case can be made for the opposite argument: look at Australia for a tightly regulated foreign labour market, with high worker benefits, a comfortable welfare state, and thus a much flatter society which can be argued to be nicer to live in for citizen. It also has millions of people knocking at the door and being turned away (see any discussion about "Big Australia").

And therein lies the uncomfortable part of any immigration discussion: how do you define who gets rights? What is a citizen? Who is part of my "group"? What defines my home and what do I want in it? We Westerners benefit from excellent borders, so we do not need to think too hard about these things.

[BurningFrog]

How specifically is it not sustainable?

There are plenty more foreigners willing to emigrate to a prosperous and safe city state.

[seanmcdirmid]

The rich highly skilled foreigners aren't really escaping poverty back home. The poorly skilled foreigners aren't welcome to stay.

[CyberDildonics]

You might want to look deeper into that. Economically Singapore has been well run, every other way is up for debate.

[skinnylatte]

Every other way is up for debate?

We have a good education system, and I would not trade our healthcare system for what you're likely used to; as a gay Singaporean, I have no curtailing of my social freedoms. I cannot marry or adopt legally yet, but that's the conversation that we're soon going to have (and which the "West" has only just recently gotten). The civil service is good. More can be done for the low income, and that's happening at the moment. The roads are clean and everything gets fixed. I walk around the city at any time of day and night with no fear, in any neighbourhood. Which ways are up for debate?

[CyberDildonics]

Can't marry legally? Being gay is illegal, although obviously tolerated to a large extent, so that issue is far behind western countries.

You have to realize as a Singaporean you have been exposed to an enormous amount of propaganda (not that other countries aren't, but you are very close to the situation).

Among other things the democracy and elections are a sham as you must know. Opposing candidates can't have any media exposure until a couple of weeks before an election. If a neighborhood votes in an opposition candidate, they lose funding for public transportation etc in their area.

Also there is a lot of crime that goes unreported and unsolved, and you probably know this too. Chinese gangs/mafia violence, loan sharking, and the police spend half their year looking after brothels since they don't work full time throughout the year.

The healthcare system basic cost and access is hugely better than many western countries with clinics scattered into every neighborhood, but the quality is also not nearly on the same level. There are definitely some aspects of it I thought were very refreshing. The medicines prescribed can be ridiculous though.

The list could go on and on. Laws stack up against tenants and are made so landlords can take advantage of them. Agents are unnecessary middle men that could be replaced with simple phone apps but grift large amounts of money from the overall economy.

Basically Singapore is a double edged sword. The financials are managed well in general compared to many other countries. It is not the wonderland people make it out to be, and Singaporeans don't realize the propaganda they've been fed and all the freedoms they don't have. Singapore is so far above all the surrounding south east asian countries though it is easy to see why people get caught up in thinking they are the best at everything since locally the neighboring countries' governments are a joke.

[cplease]

Well, as a gay Singaporean, I assume you are familiar with section 377A of the penal code that makes having sex or trying to pick up a date punishable by two years in prison? And that your parliament is basically unanimously in favor of retaining it, with overwhelming public support?

[skinnylatte]

Yes, and I fought for its repeal along with other members of civil society. There was no overwhelming public support. In the only show of overwhelming public support was when fundamentalist Christians (who are not affiliated with the government) took over a feminist organization and overwhelming public support for the feminists and homosexuals pushed them out.

I'm not comfortable with blanket statements about Singapore politics and society from armchair political scientists.

[cplease]

Right, and how far did you get with that? Nowhere. Your PAP won't even vote on it. Where's the SCLU on this fight? Oh right, there isn't one. There's M. Ravi fighting the good fight all by himself, in between stays in the mental hospital and being disbarred.

Convenient of you to blame it all on the fundamentalist Christians (purely colonial Western influences, no doubt), when any identified Christians are 18% and there's as many Anglicans as mega-churchers. Your Chinese Buddhists are clinging to this law, the Muslims and Christians are fellow-travelers. Majority wat!

[nailer]

Because if you needed to protest, and did so, you'd be arrested?

[LLWM]

Most people here are ideologically committed to western concepts of freedom. It doesn't matter how good the results are as long as things aren't done their way.

[skinnylatte]

I've come to see that listening to them talk about 'freedom' and about how we don't have any = somewhat the same as my strong beliefs that breakfast should always have curry and noodles. Never the twain shall meet. But I'm not the one telling them that curry and noodles are the only things anybody should eat. Eat horrible cereal and muesli and bacon if you have to.

[CyberDildonics]

What is your version of freedom?

[LLWM]

A comfortable enough life that you can actually choose what to do rather than having your hand forced by circumstances.

[yen223]

I believe that a strong economy will ease the transition from an autocratic society to a more liberal one. Singapore appears to be loosening up socially.

[_delirium]

It will be difficult, because their strong economy is directly tied to the fairly non-democratic society. Its main competitive advantage are the large quantities of cheap labor it is surrounded by, which it manages very carefully with a top-down system of residence classes. A Singapore with more equal rights would be a very different one economically.

[yen223]

One could argue that Singapore's competitive advantage is that they can attract top talent from neighbouring countries by offering a better quality of life - which, anecdotally, is the case among my friends - in which case a Singapore with more equal rights might actually be stronger economically.

[ptaipale]

Some of that quality of life is dependent on having cheap labour from neighbouring countries (and repressing any protests). Who washes the laundry quickly and efficiently at a low price, and serves at that nice restaurant?

For tech jobs talent, the immigrant status is different of course.

I'm not telling Singaporeans what to do, this is just for the note.

[stefantalpalaru]

http://therealsingapore.com/content/why-are-frail-elderly-st...

[skinnylatte]

This is kind of the equivalent of someone posting something from Breitbart or NYPost and saying "this is real news".

[stefantalpalaru]

You don't like the source, lah? Take this one instead: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-06/what-retir...

[azeusa]

please, don't use "lah" or any other form of Singlish. it's condescending and, worse, embarrassing for you when you get the syntax wrong, as in this case.

[skinnylatte]

exactly. thank you for saying that.