Singapore is the first place where I actually began to question whether democracy was the absolute way. Democracy was how I was raised. Overall, I still believe it is the way long term, but what can you do when you have a single, unified government that cares for its people is simply amazing.
Safest in the world, hands down. This can be felt in every day life. I hold tables while I get my lunch with my cell phone. I've even dared it in public "hawker centers" a number of times. My friends have had stuff stolen, but that was in the bathroom where there's no "watchful eye". My kid can run/play freely and I only worry about her running into traffic.
A about 1-2 years ago, someone was stabbed to death in the central business district. It was the biggest headline for ages - murder of passion from father-in-law. That's it... nothing else. I don't think/worry about guns - ever.
"Hawker Centers" are basically food for the people. Each meal can be had for US$2-4. I live in public housing, HDB, and while that sounds weird - 70%+ is public housing. i.e. only PR or citizens may purchase (I can rent as an expat). This keeps the price of homes at a relatively reasonable amount. US$250k - US$600k. Housing is not perfect but it is way better than stateside problems.
There are dark sides, do not get me wrong (built on the backs of migrant workers who can never gain status - is just one. Black and Chinese built US but gained status eventually... migrants can never gain status here and continue to build this country), but they're not nearly as dark as others.
Is it worth it? I say if you are willing to submit yourself, it completely is.
Any figures to back that up? It's said that nothing gets stolen in Singapore, until you speak to Singaporeans. Bikes still get stolen for instance. The city seems super clean, but mainly because low paid workers clean the city really often. If a Singaporean visits another country you'll notice that they're used to the city being cleaned often, not so much that they're behaving differently.
Your "Hawker Centers" have people in their 70s bent forward cleaning up tables to some earn money. Those centers are cheap, but why does the benevolent government not care for those people?
Further, Singapore is pretty much a city, nothing more. Being isolated from any other country helps a lot too.
I think you too easily dismiss the "dark sides".
> My kid can run/play freely and I only worry about her running into traffic.
This is the same as a lot of other countries.
IMO the biggest benefit of Singapore is being a small city on pretty much an island.
> It's said that nothing gets stolen in Singapore, until you speak to Singaporeans.
A friend of mine left her cellphone in a mall bathroom once, on the bench when she washed her hands. Went all the way home and realised she forgot it.
After ~4 hours when she reached the mall. It was still sitting where she left it.
> Your "Hawker Centers" have people in their 70s bent forward cleaning up tables to some earn money.
There is no social safety net in Singapore. So once you get old, there's no benefit or dole, or any government funded programs to give you a comfy life where tax payers pay for you. The idea is you life off your CPF. Because there are people who have no savings. The government subsidizes their salaries. If a company hires them then the government will pay a portion of the salary, this gives incentive to businesses to hire them.
You could raise taxes for businesses and individuals, but then who would move their business or come work in Singapore?
Democratic Iceland seems to be #1 mostly. Fun Iceland fact:
>It [has] the oldest surviving parliament in the world, a claim shared by Tynwald. The Althing was founded in 930 at Þingvellir ("thing fields" or "assembly fields"), situated approximately 45 kilometres (28 mi) east of what later became the country's capital, Reykjavík.
A simple Google search will show you Singapore and Tokyo are regarded as the 2 safest cities on Earth, which one is first depends on which report you read.
And Tokyo happens to be quite democratic and non-authoritarian. So an argument that people necessarily need Big Brother to behave falls flat on its face.
> So an argument that people necessarily need Big Brother to behave falls flat on its face.
Japanese culture is very different from pretty much any other culture. They respect each other and their country and environment. (except whales) They are raised from a young age to look after each other and respect each other. Something the rest of the world could learn from.
Japanese culture is largely a product of developing on an island archipelago where there's not much livable space (much of the land is mountains) and there's almost no natural resources. Add to that the various contacts with Western culture they had, and you get what they have now. The bit about respecting the environment (which isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than many other countries) is an example of this: when you don't have much space, you have to work harder at keeping your environment good because you don't have the option of just moving west when it gets too crowded, like they did in the US. Of course, they tried emulating the Europeans and doing the colonization thing a while back, and that didn't work out too well.
There are so many extreme problems with racism in Singapore, including abuse of “minor“ ethnicities in the corporate workplace. It’s benevolent for certain people, and the complete opposite for others. Slave labor is the norm in that country, for both manual labor and seemingly corporate desk work. It’s vastly underpaid, overworked, highly restrictive lifestyle if you’re not a native.
You are an expat from United States, so your experience is much much different than most people there. Westerners are immediately moved to the top of the culture stack.
The median income in Singapore is S$5400/mo, or around US$40k/year. This is a king's ransom compared to neighboring countries and that's why so many people come to Singapore to work.
There absolutely are abuses, particularly for maids and manual laborers, but many of the worst (eg advance fees that put them into debt) are explicitly illegal in Singapore, and calling white-collar expats "slave labor" is absurd hyperbole.
A skilled graphic designer working for a major international brand, even after several years with the company, will on average earn equivalent of 20k US dollars per year for 60 hour work weeks and limited health benefits, if that individual is from a neighboring company. Compare that to nearly triple the salary for a fresh grad with no experience if the individual is a native or westerner.
The ethnic bias is real and extreme, and they take advantage of the employee’s home country disadvantage when setting terms.
Is the safety and honesty embedded in the culture now? That's how Nordic countries keep things straight -- not by police force, and they're indeed some of the leanest police forces in the world. I'm basically wondering if you could change Singapore to a Nordic style democracy and keep the upsides you speak of just by the force of culture?
Singapore has lot more underlying tensions than a Nordic country: massive wealth inequality, different races with different languages and religions, a huge barely-human migrant worker underclass, etc. The ruling party uses this as an convenient excuse to justify everything they do, but there's a grain of truth to it as well.
That said, yes, I think safety and honesty are fairly embedded. Yesterday, the case of somebody trying to bribe a condo rentacop to overlook their (illegal) AirBnB guest made the news: the guard refused the $50, reported the bribery attempt to the police, and the offender was sent to jail for a week:
Exactly -- Nordic countries are among the safest, most honest places, but by culture instead of by control. I was wondering if long enough control would turn into a culture, and the dictatorian control could be eventually abolished.
Have you ever been to Switzerland? What you describe sounds like Suisse, but without all those dark aspects you mention. Open and just society that does treat people fairly. Super low criminality (compared to most world). Kids playing outside etc.
Maybe for US persons this seems like a paradise, but its not a unique place. I know where I want to raise my kids. It sure as hell ain't some artificial bubble like Singapore. Never have been there, plenty of colleagues did (or live there), cool and all but not great for actually settling there.
Most small towns in the U.S. are extremely safe. I used to live in one and I basically never locked my home or car. And people are spread out enough that you still get plenty of freedom... no particular zoning, nobody to be bothered by your noise, etc.
You can ping me if you want to find a coding job in Switzerland (iwan@coderfit.com). I am a coder turned recruiter living and working in Zurich. I am active on the local tech job market.
Thank you, I already live and work here for 10 years, otherwise I wouldn't dare to comment about stuff I have no first hand experience with. Good luck to you
The „watchful eye“ part sounds disturbing. I‘ve been to Singapore and it‘s a very impressive place.
But it‘s also very sterile imo. Sure there is awesome street food and culture in general to a degree. But i kept missing the borderline stuff there. I like to live in a place where people are allowed to make mistakes, even criminal ones in some cases, and not have their live be over Immediately. That sounds weird to some i suppose.
You like to live in a place with crime, there's plenty of places to choose from. People should also have the right to live in a place where they won't mug you or rape you.
> My kid can run/play freely and I only worry about her running into traffic.
To be fair, that is possible in a lot of countries, I would have doubts to do that in America though. And not only because of crime.
> I actually began to question whether democracy was the absolute way.
There are several democratic countries that beat Singapore in regards to safety. So I believe this to be flawed reasoning. It is a safe country, but not exceptionally so.
edit: Disregarding the fact that Singapore is officially a democracy. A benevolent dictatorship would probably look more like the Gadaffi regime. Economic success in such a dictatorship is probably mandatory.
In the US, you can have your kid run and play outside if you live in a suburb, in fact a better life for their children is what pushes many families to move to the suburbs in the first place.
you could let your kid run free & unsupervised with little worry on probably near 90+ percent of the north american landmass. i spent the vast majority of my childhood with little to no supervision and crime rates have only fallen since then.
You spent your childhood in a time before helicopter parenting became legally mandated. If you let your kid run free and unsupervised today in America, you will probably end up with a visit from CPS and/or the police, and you might get arrested. It has nothing at all to do with crime rates.
Public housing in Singapore is not equivalent to those elsewhere simply due to them being built not for the poor but for population demographic control with arbitrary ethnic quotas per building and rules preventing singles from leasing flats. 70-80% of the population lives in public housing estates which are sold with a 99year lease, you don’t even get to own your own flat.
Whether a system would stay benevolent (say, to a particular class of people, etc) depends a lot on what's good for the economy. And people under the system have a general grasp of that too. This is why you have things like countercultures.
I would say the contemporary West's emphasis on authoritarianism is probably doing more harm than good. First of all the emphasis doesn't make things better - authoritarian would continue to be authoritarian whether you put the emphasis on their authoritarian nature or not. Secondly, it's pretty much a heresy suppression situation [1] here, or a (conscious or subconscious) distraction strategy embedded in the mode of thinking if you will, both of which are ironically what authoritarianism is best at i.e. suppression and distraction. Ultimately there is some form of authoritarianism existing in every system. You just have to look deep enough. Of course, some systems enjoy more democracy and a higher degree of freedom than the others, while some enjoy more achievements in KPI. But by emphasising on a system's authoritarian nature you are painting yourself a much simpler picture about the world here as if it is authoritarian v.s. the people, when things are so much more complicated than that.
It's very unfortunate that comment like this one is getting downvotes on HN.
I cannot answer for most of the population, but I can hazard a guess — they do not care to think that far. We have our bread and ciruses, and that makes us complacent that our government will at least maintain benevolence.
Singapore's biggest challenge isn't whether its political system is "Democratic" or "Authoritarian", because such dichotomies are not terribly revealing about the peculiar situation Singapore is in geopolitically. The biggest challenge, rather, is whether it can continue to thrive in a rules based, international global trade regime.
Its a small place so it can adapt fast. In fact, many such miracle places are small, thus government is not some distant entity. If anything it is the big countries that are struggling to adapt to globalisation
