For me, life is not just about money and financial success; without freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, sexual liberty, etc. who cares about material riches?
Who cares about them? Everyone who doesn’t have material prosperity? You think the Chinese would trade their last two decades of growing material prosperity for greater speech and sexual freedom?
Wealthy societies are able to afford those vices. But when America was developing, for example, the scope of those freedoms were sharply narrower than the way you probably think of them today. The Americans who made the country wealthy and prosperous today are not the post-1960s libertines that now enjoy the fruits of those efforts.
It's definitely not a kind of "freedom" that is easier to exercise in the general absence of material riches.
But I guess it’s different for Westerners that already have a lot of liberties and material success to begin with.
South Korea is way more impressive transition than Singapore. First of all, it is a large country with a local nation whose culture had to be preserved. Second, it was really poor, and after Korean war it was poorer than most of Africa.
From the said region. This is objectively no.
Singapore and Korea are the only twos. Korea is not even in the region.
Other countries are rampant with corruptions, political problems, and incompetence. Think of Trump and multiply it by 10. My prediction is that Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines , Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, and etc. will never become developed. These countries are too big to change and the legacy systems (that are insanely corrupted) are too powerful.
Take Thailand for example. It's objectively bad to have military run the country. Apart from corruption, they are just incompentent; it's well known and blatant. Yet almost half of the country supports a military government.
I do not think this was much different historically. Europeans are not very present in Singaporean society.
They did before WWII and they certainly do now.
Whereas these 20% non-Chinese cannot turn a Chinese culture country to something else, hence the South Korean / Taiwanese / Hong Kong trajectory.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZM64SAoG7/
It’s the age old complaint about the Romans by their conquered peoples as illustrated in the Life of Brian.
Did you already have safety, career prospects, food to eat, and other niceties in life?