The government is every bit authoritarian which at this point increasingly looks like a euphemism for totalitarian.
https://www.aristeon.net/2019/04/singapore-as-pioneer-of-cap...
https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202...
It's also a cultural thing. Most people can afford to rent in their twenties, but plenty of families discourage it.
Subsidised public housing is available to married couples, and to singles 35 and above — but the wait time for new public housing with a 99-year lease is 3-4 years [1], which probably also affects the birth rate.
[1] https://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/news-and-publicat...
If it's 'control' then why is birthrate high in many dictatorships? If it's apartments, why is birthrate decent in many ex-soviet countries full of apartments?
As for general societal progress, I am really not sure what are you talking about. There is no progress whatsoever.
Economic progress is a thing. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/singapore/overview
> Singapore is a high-income economy with a gross national income of US$54,530 per capita, as of 2017. The country provides one of the world’s most business-friendly regulatory environment for local entrepreneurs and is ranked among the world’s most competitive economies.
> In the decades after independence, Singapore rapidly developed from a low-income country to a high-income country. GDP growth in the city-state has been amongst the world’s highest, at an average of 7.7% since independence and topping 9.2% in the first 25 years.
my hunch is that "clean streets" is mostly important to those who are not sensitive to social injustice...
After all, if you can't enforce anti-littering laws, how can you hope to enforce anti-discrimination laws? To be effective at convert the law's promises into reality is a good thing, if the laws are a good thing.
Of course, I don't accept the proposition and I don't think anyone else does either - otherwise lawmakers would all have retired because their work was done.
Some people still litter on the streets, and it's shameful if one gets caught by law enforcement [1]. Singapore hires lots of cleaners to clean it up. We're nowhere as gracious as the residents of Japan or Taiwan.
I don't know enough about Taiwan to comment, but the 'cleanliness' of Japanese is exaggerated in many ways:
1) there's a very large population of smokers and I see them everyday throwing their cigarette butts on the streets.
2) yes, Japanese tend to be quite clean when people are looking (social pressure). However, go in places where nobody's there or nobody's watching, like mountains, and you will see massive amounts of litter dropped by hikers. Go on a beach that's not too frequented, and find out someone did a barbecue party the night before and left all their trash behind. Come back from a firework at night and watch your step as you walk on thousands of plastic bento boxes dropped on the floor after consumption.
So, let's tone down the myths a little.
For example, labour laws are faaar from what people imagine of Singapores ultracapitalist image.
Also the legend of the bank who called a fire drill then revoked everyone’s security when they were out of the building and told them they were laid off ...
Singapore is probably the only country which would force a business to hire somebody with clinically severe mental development issues.
On the other hand, mental conditions are heavily stigmatised in Singapore.
No government-linked company (and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund has its fingers in most large and up-and-coming companies here) would hire someone on a career track if they have a diagnosed mental condition of some sort, anxiety and depression included.
Public health insurance downplays the severity of most mental conditions, but the status quo seems to be slowly improving: https://www.tnp.sg/news/singapore/move-include-addictions-se...
A lot of this is due to their education system. It can be outright propaganda at times, but it has proven very effective at increasing literacy nation wide.
They've also made internet access an strategic initiative. When you marry a literate population with (generally, wink wink) free access to information and a seemingly draconian government, you get a very interesting bunch of people.
And the Australian Covid tracing app is a copy/paste from the public open sourced github repo the Singapore government shared.
I guess being part of FiveEyes makes any fantasy of me _not_ living in a surveillance state pretty lame...
Apple and Google’s thing was late to the party too, both Singapore and Australia had published their apps before the in built OS exposure notification because a thing (and I’d ballpark over 90% of Android phones haven’t got OS upgrades available that let them use the Google one anyway, none of my Android devices have it, being stuck with no manufacturer support or locked down by carriers).
So Australia and Singapore pushed on with their non OS native versions of the apps, even though the Bluetooth implementation on iOS made it very unreliable if the app wasn’t running and in the foreground. (The Android version’s Bluetooth is more reliable, if just chews through battery at a very quick pace...)
The end result is almost no useful data has come out of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/15/covid...
Just 20 “close contacts” identified, and the government stalling on freedom of information requests to find out if any active cases were identified from those.
The article seems to blame the lack of uptake.
Singapore doesn't have this problem, having dangled further relaxation of lockdown restrictions if more of its residents downloaded the app: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/phase-3-unlikely-by-e...
The GitHub repo has a "reference" implementation of the published BlueTrace protocol [1].
Encryption keys aside, it's not possible to reproduce the Singapore TraceTogether builds currently released on both the iOS and Google App stores.
The 'tracking for criminal cases' is clearly a 'bad thing' but ... it's also legit democracy with excellent universal healthcare and rule of law.
... careful with the easy characterizations.
> it's also legit democracy
If your interpretation of a democracy boils down to mere voting rights and choice, then sure, it's legit. But I think we should also consider the trickle-down effects of having the same party in power ever since the government was formed. Your ethics, beliefs, judgment, and mentality determines how you vote - it's not that hard to sway the majority to your side if you are always in total control of how lives are shaped across generations.