The World Admires Singapore’s Benevolent Autocracy. Should It?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Besides, what he intended for the rest of the world is irrelevant to whether the system is worthy of admiration.
In any case, he has advised China's CCP and Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, both authoritarian governments.
Sadly, it failed in that supreme function of government, which is to flatter all the conceits of the NYT editors as to how a modern nation's judiciary ought to be operated. Do you think that an anonymous poll of Singapore residents would prefer a.) their current system or b.) the system that the Times and its editors tacitly support in NYC?
What do you want to bet?
Prosperous for _whom_? Inequality is rising and according to CIA World Factbook, Singapore is ranked the 24th on the Gini index, right behind Saudi Arabia (23rd). (Singapore is curiously missing from World Bank's Gini index due to insufficient data)
Prosperous of _what_? Material goods? Considering the severity of the inequality, prosperous is hardly the right characterization.
Let's establish some facts. One of the areas the article fails to mention is how the dominant party (PAP) manages to stay in power for such a long time. It achieves that through a sophisticated system of gerrymandering, draconian national security laws, persecution of oppositional figures, control of the local media landscape, lack of civil and political rights (which allows for all of the above) and the list goes on. [0]
With all that in place, the PAP received ~60% of all the popular votes in the 2020 general election (gerrymandering allows them to obtain ~85% of parliament seats). Would you like to speculate on the number of votes the PAP might receive if Singaporeans were allowed to make an _informed_ choice? If the system is as desirable as you seem to think, why would the government need such absolute control over the nation and its citizens? Surely the citizens would overwhelming vote for such a government/system.
In any case, disagreements ought to be directed at the facts of the article, not the speculated agenda of the paper/author.
[0] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691211411/sp...
Yes, there's been people there forever. There will be people there in the future. Would Singapore the modern nation exist without the current gov't and its immediate antecedent? That LKY is a tough act to follow is a given; but the clucking in the headline assumes a level of decay not in evidence.
Singapore is ranked the 24th on the Gini index, right behind Saudi Arabia
Six lumberjacks are drinking in a bar. Bill Gates walks in, orders a beer. One lumberjack says to another: "Hey...on average, we're billionaires!"
Let's establish some facts.
Indeed. Paternalistic Anglo-Confucian mercantile oligarchies aren't going to be run like Iceland, or a town meeting in Massachusetts. The people in charge absolutely do believe in the superiority of their system; and allowing more people to vote on more things (in a way that would please the NYT) isn't going to improve anything, in their thoughts. I'll bet that there's plenty of people that you'd prefer not vote on election day, and plenty of subjects that you'd like to place beyond debate.