Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
Everything works, it’s very efficient, public transit and internet is good and it’s extremely safe. It also has great food and has low taxes.
Most Western countries just can’t compete and while the UAE is pretty well run in some aspect, there’s always the religious part which makes me uneasy when I’m there.
As a single person without kids, there is no better place than Singapore.
Also there are a lot of service apartments available too!
The local mouthpiece even has a topic for maid abuse https://www.channelnewsasia.com/topic/maid-abuse
If you hire a maid and fire her, you have to pay her repatriation back to her country of origin.
The benefit of not granting citizenship is that it makes it much easier to kick out people again and maintaining benefits for citizens.
As you mentioned, for families, it’s extremely safe, everything is well run and maintained so healthcare and education are not a concern. Proximity to other countries for travel is excellent (well, I’m from Melbourne so much easier to get places than from here!), and the country it self has plenty to do for families in terms of activities, shopping, and food.
Beyond that, I found Singaporeans just really great to work with and be around. It’s really multicultural, they value education and talent so the workforce is full of bright and capable people, and there is a huge expat community as well.
The only major downside for me - the heat and humidity! It was a struggle the first few months for sure.
Why do you think New York or Chicago isn’t like this? What could western countries change?
Singapore is a business masquerading as a country. While it is technically democratic, in practice there are some barriers preventing truly free and fair elections. That being said, the leaders in Singapore are not corrupt and truly do focus on what's best for the country. As a result decisions are made quickly, for the greater good, and are not politically driven. The leadership have the latitude to make decisions that they believe will make the country better. Sometimes these decisions don't have a lot of public support (because people are naturally more short-sighted) but, because of the political system, they don't need to rely on public support.
In the case of Singapore, I think this dynamic has led to a compounding effect of good decisions that have put the country in such a strong place today. You see this similarly with Norway's oil fund; it was likely unpopular initially to reinvest so much money into savings, but today it's paying off where they have a $2T savings account, from which they can withdraw up to 3% annually ($60B) for the needs of Norway.
I don't see why this would lead the country to being well organized. All the big businesses I've seen are very inefficient and disorganized internally, where decisions are made slowly, mostly to benefit the decisionmaker's little princedom inside the company.
But what makes them act this way, lol? That's what every country wants out of its leaders. Why is Singapore able to do it? I know that's a hard question to answer...
Wealthy Asians tend to commit less violent crimes. If you go to a country with less law and order (like PNG), you’ll see more violence.
America and other countries had a spike of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Chinese gangs in the 80s/90s due to a refugee influx from Vietnam. Turns out a forcibly relocated, non-wealthy population who has to readjust to live in a new country is going to have issues, even if they are Asian.
Countries like Bangladesh have fewer homicides than Canada, and less than twice as many as the U.K. or Sweden, while much richer Latin American countries have 5-20 times as many.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Singapore
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/singa...
As a german, are you ok with the death penalty (for as little as 14 grams of drugs)? Are you with violent and cruel corporal punishment (for as little as vandalism)?
I do think the death penalty for drugs is reasonable. Drug dealers destroy families and communities for their own profit. The arrival card in Singapore literally states that smuggling drugs is punishable by death. If you still attempt, that sounds like a “you” problem.
Also the punishment for vandalism or rape sounds reasonable.
The treatment of foreign construction workers is not good and can be improved.
Well, it's not. It's barbaric and primitive. A warning is no justification.
It's actually Singapore that turned me against the death penalty. I saw a photo on a news site one day showing a casket in Singapore, with some kind of placard showing the decedent's name, DOB, and then the date that they "died."
They didn't die due to illness or injury; they died because Singapore executed them. That was it for me.
Wrong. It's barbaric and primitive.
> execution is no more or less "barbaric" than the alternatives
Yes, it is. People make mistakes. People have infinite possibility to grow, change and contribute to society. Snuffing everything someone is out because of an arbitrary society rule that ultimately does less harm than murder is indefensible.
> "mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent."
Taken as far to defend murder it becomes nonsense.
It’s also a repellent.
Yes, all these offenders deserve a second chance. Extreme penalties to set a deterrent are not justice. Just barbarism. Very primitive people.
Source?
> Yes, it is. People make mistakes. People have infinite possibility to grow, change and contribute to society. Snuffing everything someone is out because of an arbitrary society rule that ultimately does less harm than murder is indefensible.
Putting aside statistics on actual reform instead of fantastical infinite possibility, as I understand this policy mostly serves to deter foreigners from attempting the potentially very lucrative business of smuggling drugs into Singapore. Even if Singapore didn't take the "barbaric" approach of executing them, they would have to either host them as prisoners on their already very limited land, or go through the process of deporting them to their home country, where they might not even face any consequences and just try again. Why should they bear this burden for people who have no ties to Singapore and will never contribute anything to it?
Do you know what an opinion is?
> as I understand this policy mostly serves to deter foreigners from attempting the potentially very lucrative business of smuggling drugs into Singapore.
So what? That's not a justification.
> Why should they bear this burden for people who have no ties to Singapore and will never contribute anything to it?
Singapore is perfectly able to control their borders better than most countries. It's not like the US where it's relatively easy to sneak in. 'They might come back' is a poor justification for murder.
Cool, what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans?
>Singapore is perfectly able to control their borders better than most countries. It's not like the US where it's relatively easy to sneak in.
Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore.
Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct. Not that I'm willing to put in the effort when it already took this much for you to realize I was stating an opinion though.
> Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore.
If you think casual murder is fine because it's convenient, I don't think there's much for us to discuss anyway. We clearly have drastically different values. I'll just take solace in the fact that Singapore likely won't survive another 100 years.
Out of curiosity, How can your argument "be supported and shown to be objectively correct" ?
It seems the evidence is actually the other way around. After introduction of the death penalty in the 90s, the average net amount of opium trafficked to Singapore famously dropped by ~70%.
I do not support the death penalty myself, but primarily for ethical and moral reasons to preserve our humanity - which is constantly under attack. But not "objective ones" since the evidence clearly supports the death penalty for "objective reasons". For these positions, objectivity should be left in the gutter.
If we introduced the death penalty for minor shoplifting, minor shoplifting would probably drop by a huge percentage. Would that justify it?
> But not "objective ones" since the evidence clearly supports the death penalty for "objective reasons". For these positions, objectivity should be left in the gutter.
I disagree. When you evaluate all the pros and cons, I think the evidence is solidly against the death penalty.
Of-course it wouldn't - but you are precisely reinforcing my point. Because opponents can claim via evidence that the death penalty is effective for this, if you argue on the basis of "facts". Thus, objectivity should not be used as an argument for an ethical and moral human principle. Such principles stand by themselves to maintain the sanctity of the human soul - no justification needed.
I don't believe I am. The death penalty being effective at reducing a crime isn't itself a sufficient justification of the death penalty.
> Thus, objectivity should not be used as an argument for an ethical and moral human principle. Such principles stand by themselves to maintain the sanctity of the human soul - no justification needed.
We do have objective arguments though; ultimately everything can be quantified by the amount of harm or good it does.
Then that's not an opinion, it's a proposition aiming at fact, and you should back it up rather than restating it loudly and more slowly when asked for justification.
> you should back it up rather than restating it loudly and more slowly when asked for justification.
It's a fair amount of work to do so, and I haven't seen anyone worthy of putting in such work. This site isn't great, from a practical point of view, for that type of lengthy debate, either.
So aside from the subhuman Singaporeans who should be violently forced to adopt your ethics, it is also everyone on HN that is far below your golden ethical level and not worth of effortful discussion (but definitely worth moral lecturing and grandstanding), got it.
I didn't use the word subhuman, I used the word barbaric, and that's more regarding the authoritarian regime in power.
> it is also everyone on HN that is far below your golden ethical level and not worth of effortful discussion (but definitely worth moral lecturing and grandstanding), got it.
There's plenty of people who I could have a great, in-depth, reasonable discussion with, it's just that you're not one of them. Even this reply of yours is mainly bait, reliant on twisting things to get a reaction.
You're one of those commenters who needs to have the last word...this unproductive discussion is still going to go in for a few more replies yet because you can't let stuff go. I'm guessing my comment offended you because you live in Singapore and like it, is that it? All of this is just defensiveness?
There should also be (and probably is in a culture that has drone slapping), that death penalty is a sign of moral bankruptcy.
You'll need to put more thought into it. Imagine your kid traveling somewhere, smoking pot, flying back to Singapore, getting randomly checked and facing consequences.
“Any Singapore Citizen or Permanent Resident found to have abused drugs overseas will be treated as if he/she had abused drugs within Singapore. Consumption of a controlled drug is an offence and a person may face imprisonment of a minimum of 1 year and up to 10 years, or a fine not exceeding S$20,000 or both.”
I see nothing here that applies to executing drug traffickers.
Otherwise you are on a fast track from "unable to find housing" to "have to leave the country".
It seems like one of those places that is probably quite nice if you're loaded, but it seems like a pretty rough place if you're not already well off. I was also surprised that many of the stereotypes about 'one fine city' were not quite on the mark. Jaywalking, crossing against a cross-walk light, and various other little infractions were ever-present which left me feeling a bit odd as when in Rome do what the Romans do, but yeah... not gonna risk that.
Very aged population relative to the rest of the nation and so during the Great Recession a wave of retirees found themselves owning a home but otherwise impoverished and working service jobs out of desperation. Always was a sad interaction, and working alongside them was often worse. You would never hear the end of their misery, understandable bitterness, and regret.
Nowadays, thanks to the same demographic shifts, those jobs are back in the hands of the youth. Except now it’s all folks who grew up on the island that seemingly will live at home with their parents for the rest of their lives working those jobs. They otherwise would not be able to live anywhere close.
I have to ponder what the next shift in staffing there will look like.
Every place is a retirement community now.
---
1 new born ->
2 20-40 year olds ->
4 40-60 year olds ->
8 60-80 year olds ->
16? 80-100 year olds
---
Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.
You can see this visibly playing out in Singapore right now with their population pyramid [1]. They had a nice solid pyramid in the past, so you end up with a very healthy economy and society - lots of young people for relatively fewer older people. But as fertility rates declined you can see it start to flip, so right now it looks a bit like a vase, and in the future it will be an upside down pyramid.
So basically as the old folks move on, they are replaced by even more old folks. And this never really stops until we return to being societies that are having enough children to sustain ourselves.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#/med...
(Serious question)
Where I live, we are going through a lot of this right now (98+% of population growth is from immigration).
Immigrants have more kids than the non-immigrant population, but they do not actually have above replacement rate amounts of kids, so they are going to require more immigrants to take care of them later on. Also, the children of immigrants have non-immigrant level fertility rates. So, it's not a long term, sustainable way to "replace the aging population."
On top of this, immigrants often want to bring their elderly relatives with them when they are possible. I know there are some ways to try to mitigate this (e.g., immigration limits, charging them extra fees on immigration), but at some point there becomes a large enough immigrant voting bloc that this changes. Now you have extra, unaccounted for elderly people that are required to be looked after.
I have no idea what the solutions are, but if we are trying to plug the gap through immigration, it'll require perpetual immigration. Most countries globally are now at below replacement fertility rates, so this opens up a huge can of worms. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem like anything other than a quick band-aid or a solution that's doing anything other than adding "debt" to the issue.
A pretty depressing place, with whole towns and cities abandoned, as the dwindling population huddles closer together. Not just geography though, there would also be a retreat in the arts, sciences, etc as there are simply not enough people to maintain let alone advance these endeavours. Life would be about eking the last out of what was left over from the 'glory days', a sort of slow motion apocalypse.
I wish I had your optimism.
Oh, and killed 145.000.000 people in the process.
Heck, in a country with top-tier public housing (17th most affordable housing in the world) and healthcare (2nd best outcomes in the world, 12th highest life expectancy), how are you even sure those older people working jobs are “low paid?”
Maybe you’re seeing older people working because they live healthier for longer in Singapore?
If you work at McDonald’s in Mississippi you are much more low wage than working at McDonald’s in Denmark, especially considering guaranteed paid time off, healthcare, and other quality of life factors. You literally live 10 years longer on average in Denmark (or Singapore) compared to Mississippi. But those two people wear the same McDonald’s uniform.
How can you tell someone is making a “low wage” just by looking at the job they’re doing?
Endless growth and the inevitable planetary destruction/exhaustion from that process isn’t good for anyone, either.
It’s easier to adapt to a shrinking population than one that is too large to sustain with food and energy.
I hate to say it but tossing bible versus around isn’t going to make your case very well. If we want to talk about things that are grounded in reality maybe let’s not cite a book that says god sent bears to kill children who made fun of a guy for being bald (2 Kings 2:23-24).
Let’s be real: the Christian plan is to trash the earth (Genesis 1:26) until rapture comes around to bail out believers who have been dutifully praying and fucking.
Any day now!
We're nowhere even remotely near our production capacity for food, water, or energy - but we're already facing labor issues in achieving such. And in a low-growth future, which is our future, these labor issues will magnify exponentially. And it's not like you can just pay people more and everybody lives happily ever after - there simply won't be enough people to do everything that needs to be done, even if everybody's willing to work themselves to death. The expectations for what a society can provide will begin to unravel.
And I see no reason not to go sci-fi here because there's every reason to believe it's our future. Earth will not be humanity's only domain. It's practically inconceivable that we won't have thriving off-planet civilizations within a century and realistically - far sooner. And a century of unsustainable growth would be vastly less damaging to society than a century of unsustainable decline.
It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates.
Country boundaries are arbitrary.
And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.
I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria.
The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before.
The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.
A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still.
As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.
Global TFR: 1990–1995=3.31, 1995–2000=2.88, 2000–2005=2.73, 2005-2010=2.62, 2010–2015=2.59, 2015–2020=2.52
Our current 1.6 predicament was just at 2.35
Not if you actually read the verse, it's a relevant, experience driven philosophical statement.
My grandma lived 96 years of a happy, healthy, enriching life. She got her college degree at age 60. She had a beaming smile when she played with her great grandchildren. She enjoyed the company of her husband well into her 90s. She lived independently until the last month of her life.
And there we go with the bible, you gotta read the correct telephone game translation of it and interpret the right way for it to make any bit of sense.
Nobody can just accept that it was written in a human developmental era that most of us wouldn’t relate with in any way.
For example, it was considered a blessing to die young and “go to heaven” in an era before surgical anesthesia. Better than living a long life with ailments that a modern doctor can treat in an afternoon.
We didn’t even get basic antibiotics until less than 200 years ago.
The alternative is that some sort of societal collapse resets humanity to a much lower technological level in which case your grandmother was likely also fortunate to have missed that.
The overall concept is that the only way to get to heaven is to leave earth. Thus, anyone who does that, has, from the perspective of those that remain and inevitably break the longevity barrier, died young.
Think of how disappointed the billions of souls in heaven, experiencing only peace and bliss, would be if their time on earth had increased 10x due antibiotics. It's not the dead who mourn, but the living.
Seems like you're more conditioned by apocalyptical Christian logic than you think
The population went from 1 billion to 8 billion in the last 226 years. So my question to you is: how many more billions do you really think our planet can support? How long can we support 8 billion?
According to the MAHB, the world's oil reserves will run out by 2052, natural gas by 2060 and coal by 2090. Maybe those estimates are sooner than reality, but still, I'd love to hear about how a solution to running out of fossil fuel energy abundance in the next 25-200 years involves growing the population.
It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.
Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?
Can you name one material we are currently mining from space? Maybe mining space junk orbiting earth, that would be a low hanging fruit, right?
$14 per kg to get something to space.
Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US.
So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg).
Okay, fine, we’re just doing space mining to get stuff like precious metals: platinum, gold, etc. not sure what societal problems that solves, but hey, here we are.
Here’s where I stop buying your argument for the sake of it: you’re telling me we are chopping 2 orders of magnitude off the price, but then you’d have to explain to me how sending material to space is going to be cheaper than UPS Ground Saver retail rates.
Elon wants to launch solar panels into space and send power back to earth…sure fine but why is any utility company considering doing that rather than putting them in a former corn field in Nebraska? The amount of acreage the USA blows on fire ethanol production alone is enough land to power the entire country with terrestrial solar power, the cheapest form of energy on the market.
As for how sending stuff to space could be cheaper than sending it by some retail delivery service - it's because the economy is extremely dysfunctional on many fronts, especially in the US. You pay dramatically more for a bottle of water in Michigan, home to a sizable fraction of the entire world's fresh water supply, than you do in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia. [1]
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
If the economy is dysfunctional on earth, why is SpaceX a special snowflake company that is not also dysfunctional? It’s a US-based company. It’s publicly traded just like UPS. UPS has more competitors than SpaceX (FedEx, USPS, DHL, Amazon fulfillment, numerous B2C couriers, international couriers)
Using the price of bottled water is not meaningful to this discussion. Bottled water is a convenience product, the water is not a significant aspect of the retail cost of the product. Bottled water costs $5 inside the airport and $.15 at the Costco 2 miles down the road. The water is not the driver of the cost.
We only have one proven habitable planet and we need to protect it. Multi planetary habitation is some combination of 4 things:
1. Billionaires’ excuse to extract the earth dry for profit.
2. Billionaires’ fantasy to escape the pitchforks at their doorsteps, to build a gated community in the cosmos
3. Billionaires’ pump and dump investment vehicle
4. Billionaires’ science fiction affirmation of their narcissistic belief in their own demigodhood.
SpaceX is not publicly traded. It's privately owned and operated, with Elon's motivation behind the company being consistently ideological in nature. The water prices were apples to apples comparisons - the cost of a 0.33 liter bottle of water in an average restaurant.
A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier.
> It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.
There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels.
> Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?
Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research.
The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa).
There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.
Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. We don’t do that and never have because it doesn’t really make logical sense, we have better options available. It lends the question of “why do that?”
Why? Why do we want to live in space colonies? To what end?
This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it, certainly moreso than the vacuum of space.
If you put one crab in a bucket, it might climb out. If you put many crabs in a bucket, they will actually stop each other from climbing out. This is an extremely common metaphor.
> Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges.
Maybe we’ll do that too someday.
> This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it
With a very limited amount of space and resources. We got into this discussion because of concerns about overpopulation. The Earth has plenty of natural resources and can almost certainly handle a much higher population than it has now, but exploiting the rest of the solar system will make it last even longer and allow significantly more material wealth for every person alive even at a significantly higher total population.
1.theres a constant supply of malaysian chinese who want to migrate to singapore. they're the best, cos they're culturally similar.
2.failing that,a few taiwanese or china chinese can also be allowed to immigrate. singapore is small, and china is huge. only need a few..
wrt living costs.. if u stick to govt subsidised housing(hdb),(public) transport,(hawker) food and healthcare, u shld be spending less as a % of income than the rest of asean on those things. but singaporeans want more, and leave in droves on trips overseas at every opportunity....
Probably because, as the title of the article states, Singapore isn't cool.
Every single such policy in the developed world has failed.
Essentially it's (relatively) easy to get work visas for areas where there's a genuine shortage but difficult to get permanent residency and almost impossible to get citizenship.
That's still a very different policy to what most western countries have right now.
The UAE has the most extreme version of this so the milder Singaporean version is less interesting as an example.
Im not sure if UAE really be an exciting place and thus would someone migrate to it if you care about culture and stuff.
[1]: I mean, in my book consensual trade between two grown up people is closer to consensual sex between two grown up people than it is to murder. That said, there is still some difference.
Either way, I would consider the UAE an exceptionally unsafe place to visit.
The state law in Washington even had a similar issue. Bestiality was prohibited by the sodomy statute, which the state repealed in its entirety as a gay rights thing. After the Enumclaw incident the legislature scrambled to re-criminalize bestiality.
But what is worse: Law which does not matter, because the elite will ignore it anyway or threatening gay men to kill them but currently not doing tit.
anyway, not a place a emigrate.
Generally true for most of the world outside of the West
Unionisation in Singapore is very different than the rest of the world. There is one very large union (the National Trades Union Congress, NTUC) but it mostly works with the government and the PAP and has a bit of a revolving door with some PAP MPs serving as leadership in NTUC. Wildcat strikes are illegal, and striking is generally not allowed. I think the last sanctioned strike by NTUC was in the 80s. The union does still generally represent workers in disputes between employers and the government and does other work on behalf of workers (trainings, some welfare, it runs the largest grocery chain that at least theoretically is supposed to be a social enterprise and a cooperative), so most members I think accept the arrangement, for what it's worth.
They have a jealously guarded media monopoly and viciously crack down on opposition bloggers by suing them into bankruptcy using absurdly strict libel laws.
As a last resort they steal any policies which make the opposition popular. This is actually an underrated means by which Singaporeans exert democratic pressure on the government but it makes it pretty demoralizing to be in opposition.
There is a national union but it is controlled by the government. Striking is illegal iirc, but membership will get you discounts on your shopping.
Singaporeans are pretty apolitical on the whole, which is how the PAP seems to like it. Theyre not like Americans - not split into two herds who are trained to hate one another.
That’s demoralizing if you’re doing party-building. But the flip side is: it means citizens do have leverage, just not always in the form of “replace the government.”
It seems like Singapore uses its immigration system in a deliberate way to maintain the political power of the dominant cultural group.
It’s not really a secret that Singapore uses ethnicity based quotas when granting PR and citizenship to maintain their demographic composition.
It’s not really a secret that Singapore uses ethnicity based quotas when granting PR and citizenship to maintain their demographic composition.
Cheaper gas only for Muslim citizens, not Chinese/Indian citizens. A company must hire Malay Muslim no matter what. Plenty of other rules that favor an ethnicity.
Like bro... you are the wrong race, it's that simple, shouldn't be too hard to understand.
I'm not making a moral judgement on whether that's correct or not but it's just how it works
As a white person, I’d probably never get PR too but I think it’s good that they maintain the current percentages, otherwise the country would turn unrecognizable like Germany or France.
Having been to Singapore many times, I've realized my mental image was pretty accurate. There's no real art scene and even mentioning anything that slightly goes against the grain of Singapore's tight, tidy, and strict regimens doesn't just not appeal to the people, it'll actively infuriate them. A hint of rebellious nature defines cool. Singapore doesn't have a single drop of that within its entire national borders.
It's like North Korea with money and good PR. At least a lot of North Koreans sneak in a little rebellion when they know nobody is watching, even if it's minor stuff like watching illegal foreign TV shows. Singapore is the type of place where your neighbors would report you if such a thing became illegal, instead of saying "Hey bro, let me borrow those DVDs after you're done." It's a great place to make money. Then once you have it, leave to live a little.
The country is so against cool it even has a designated free speech corner that doesn't allow free speech and had its usage hours limited from 7 AM to 7 PM and limits speech to 4 languages only: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner,_Singapore
I never saw this Singaporean soul even in deepest darkest ang mo kio.
It was low key creepy how shallow the locals were. They'd chat about gaming, shopping, grinding and food, food, food but very rarely anything deeper. even after knowing them for years.
I went to some "artistic immersive theater" there one time (there was an event like this maybe once a year?) and even there the first third was a girl monologuing about her love of kpop.
Most countries fit in the middle of these two somewhere but these two countries really stood out to me in their extremes.
Somewhere I read that the government once went around arresting theater troupes and the like that were seen as too leftist, but I can't seem to find the specific info. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
Singapore has none of these. The national pastime is talking about how much money you have and how much you love having money and can't wait to have more money. And the money never goes towards interesting experiences. It's the same as Dubai. Shopping and international chains and thinking that means class. It's boring and makes East Germany seem like a good time.
I haven't heard of many examples of people having profoundly positive impacts on the world being raised in either of those two countries. Of course, this will be impacted by their size and in the case of Dubai, it's recent ascendancy. Still, it makes me very wary of that claim.
Singapore has done extremely well economically.
But it's not cool. That's something else.
Tokyo, for example, is cool, fashion, music, films and computer games come out of Tokyo.
But that's very hard to say of Singapore.
Perhaps it's like Luxembourg and Lisbon.
Admittedly the link at the top is from Marginal Revolution where 'cool' may mean economically successful and interesting for policy makers.
—William Gibson
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...
Barbaric city states like Singapore should be abolished or taken over and reformed.
I think, reading this today, it probably describes what people like about the place.
That is a deeply weird statement to make in 2026.
Technocrats form the foundation of the so-called "deep state" that Trump rails against: unelected bureaucrats - scientists, economists, doctors, researchers, engineers, statisticians - controlling low-level government policy (ideally) on the basis of data and knowledge of their particular field.
What it doesn't mean is "a government run on the insane whims of coked-up techno-utopian billionaire tech CEOs", which is what the current right seems to be interested in.
Yeah no.
In Singapore you have a single party which has used it's constitution, laws, courts and media control to enforce a defacto one-party state for 60 years. Singapore citizens can (and do) vote but those votes have absolutely zero chance of changing anything.
Is it technically democracy? Well they vote so yes? Is there any chance at all of peaceful regime change through voting? Technically yes, in practice? Probably not. I would expect extreme suppression and HK style riot crushing. They have been doing it quietly for decades, targeting and legally destroying/bankrupting any opposition to the PAP.
So the only real difference vs say China is that while both are authoritarian regimes the Chinese didn't bother with a mechanism to pretend you can throw them out.
To be clear, I don't object to their form of government. I think it works for them and thus it's completely ok. If anything I find Singapore a really safe and efficient place and visit frequently.
I do object to people pretending it's somehow a liberal democracy though, that just ain't the truth.
Voting is only a part of the democratic process, but is meaningless taken alone.
To add to what you say, Singapore is not a democracy, Lee Kuan Yew's son ruled the country for 20 years after his death, and his successor was chosen by him.
its a first past the post system.
but fact is they always have majority of the popular vote. i dont think it ever declined below 55%. and at best they get 60+%.
there's always a large proportion of singaporeans who want the change. just never enough of them, yet. and maybe there might never be, if most singaporeans are happy with things as they stand.
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Law_(Temporary_Provis...
[^2]: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/my-views-on-...
You can keep your 1000 different Instagrammable spots, I'd rather go some place that is a little more into democracy and reasonable policing.
Policing SOPs in East Asia (incl. Singapore) is different than policing SOPs in the west. Typically people are warned, often multiple times, that they are in danger of experiencing the less kind side of local law. Once the switch is flipped, this gentle hand becomes an iron fist.
I will bet dollars to donuts that the person who was held without charge for decades (mentioned above) was completely not surprised that they were severely punished. They may not have liked the punishment, they may not have agreed with the opaque process, but they almost certainly can’t say that they didn’t know it was coming.
If someone warns you that they're going to murder you if you post another 5 comments on HackerNews, and keeps you up-to-date with every comment you make, nothing about those warnings makes the subsequent murder after your 5th comment more reasonable than if they hadn't given those warnings.
Being notified that you are or have been breaking the law and being told that there will be severe consequences if you don’t stop seems reasonable to me.
It may not be how we do it in the west, but it’s hard to argue that this can’t be perceived as reasonable.
Let me give you an example that opened my eyes. It’s one of many, but it’s one that you may have heard of.
Michal Fay was caned in Singapore in the 1990s. I was so put off by this, that I swore never to go to Singapore. I thought that the punishment far exceeded that which could be justified by the crimes he committed (petty stuff like vandalizing cars).
Then, within a 6 month period, I met two families who lived as expatriates in Singapore at the same time, one in the same community.
They all said that MF was a pariah. They also both said that he and his family had been given gradually escalating warnings over a short period of time, with the next to last one being “MF needs to leave Singapore now”, and the last one being “you (his family) and MF need to leave Singapore now”. Apparently the job was too good, so the family stayed. We know the rest of the story.
A decade later, I met a woman who worked in Singapore at the time, and she expressed similar sentiments.
While I still think the punishment was excessive (even reduced to 4 lashings instead of 6), I lost all pity for MF and his family. They knew what was coming, and they either didn’t understand the culture they were in, or they didn’t believe what they were told.
I’ve see similar types of policing (with warnings and an explanation of potential consequences) happen in Japan, China, and South Korea. IMHO, it works the way they want it to (mostly as an early deterrent, with very little prosecution actually taking place). This is one reason why there is such a high success rates of criminal convictions in places like Japan — if they make the effort to book you, they have overwhelming evidence, usually collected when the criminal has been warned.
We may not like the laws, we may not like the punishments, but we shouldn’t be surprised by the outcomes.
> If someone warns you that they're going to murder you if you post another 5 comments on HackerNews, and keeps you up-to-date with every comment you make, nothing about those warnings makes the subsequent murder after your 5th comment more reasonable than if they hadn't given those warnings.
Great strawman.
Posting on HN is not against the law (at least where I am).
If my scenario were law, it would still be entirely unreasonable.
Besides, law is an entirely fluid concept in general, including in Singapore, but really anywhere, to varying degrees. The US has recently been making this incredibly clear for even the blindest to see, but it was already the case before.
jb?
e: oh, Johor Bahru, interesting
but that's just an assumption based on stories in the good old Soviet Union.
With the growing fascism all over the world we will see that kind of thing more often.
> This trial marks the first attempt in Britain to treat political property damage as equivalent to terrorism - an unprecedented and dangerous expansion of state power. Under the current Labour government, many defendants will have spent nearly two years behind bars before even standing trial.
https://www.cage.ngo/articles/trial-begins-for-first-six-of-...
"Detention without trial" is a thing in the UK, as well as the US, Canada, and many (most?) other countries, even those considered non-authoritarian or whatever, for lots of crimes, not just politically convenient ones. This isn't a new thing because of growing fascism, it's literally the distinction between "jail" and "prison", or what the bail system is for. Court systems don't have the capacity to try everyone immediately upon arrest, and in various ways, look to balance that with the right to a speedy trial, the right to a presumption of innocence, justice, and public safety.
(I'm not making any judgement on the balance Britain is striking in this particular case, which sounds bad!)
But what OP is pointing out as problematic in Singapore's case is 1) detention without even being charged with a crime, which is what the UK government website linked above says is forbidden beyond a relatively short time frame and 2) the absence of any kind of a right to a speedy trial.
> It's a barbaric totalitarian state that hides it well.
The same can be said about the Us which stirs up wars in other countries, kidnaps other countries presidents and has ICE arresting kids.
I’d pick Singapore over the US any day of the week.
They keep a small, 'racially pure' population, ban any negative press, kill any undesirables....sure it is.
> The same can be said about the Us which stirs up wars in other countries, kidnaps other countries presidents and has ICE arresting kids.
The US under Trump has changed a lot, this is true, but in most states it's not putting people to death for minor reasons and actually allows enough freedom to make love worth living. You'd have to be an NPC to be happy living in Singapore IMO.
In the 90s and 2000s, Singapore's value add was that it could act as a door into China, India, and ASEAN due to expansive trade and investment treaties, but why would I want to build an R&D center in Changi staffed with PRCs and Indians when I could just hire them directly in Shenzhen or Bangalore.
After China committed to being hands-off on HK business and contract law in the 2000s, SG lost some value as it didn't have the same connections that HK had legally speaking to enter the Chinese market.
SG continues to remain the best place to incorporate a business in Asia, but just because your lawyers and holding company is in SG it doesn't mean your operations, operational headcount, and capital expenditures is there.
For a business - it depends on how dependent they are on ExChina capital markets or customers.
If you were a company that was primarily and overwhelmingly operating within China, after the changes there was no incentive not to shift most of your operational and executive staff to Shanghai.
If you weren't one of those, then shifting to Singapore makes sense.
The issue for Singapore is Indian companies have started making the same decisions as those China First companies, so Singapore has lost it's comparative advantage within Asia, as Western FDI remains prominent but is increasingly either routed directly or (in India's case) through challengers like the UAE or London.
That's why I wrote the comment below:
"If you were a company that was primarily and overwhelmingly operating within China, after the changes there was no incentive not to shift most of your operational and executive staff to Shanghai.
If you weren't one of those, then shifting to Singapore makes sense."
Jane Street isn't dependent on Chinese markets. It primarily operates in Western markets with speculative bets in Asian markets excluding China such as SGX and NSE+BSE in India (albeit with a massive regulatory target on their back).
China has done infringed on it's agreement with the HK people, but not all capital in Greater China is Western and is increasingly Chinese originated.
But the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no? Worrying about whether a couple dozen X/Twitter legends are hyping you today feels silly.
That is what MarginalRevolution is. It's fairly heterodox by most standards, but not in the good way.
> the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no
Nope.
If I can now IPO in China or India with Singapore level valuations and attract Singapore level deal sizes, why would I as a Chinese or Indian want to dedicate significant capital in Singapore beyond what is needed to build an operating shell to interface with western capital markets?
Similarly, if I'm GS, JPMC, Citadel, etc and I'm seeing significant dealflows in China and India, I should concentrate on building an organization within their borders as much as possible - which is what they have been doing since the mid-2010s.
Singapore will remain a major financial hub, but it is losing it's relative advantage to other hubs within Asia.
I can say from personal professional experience that historically businesses are domiciled in Singapore primarily for us investors in Western capital markets to enter China, India, and ASEAN.
For capital that is already located in China, India, and parts of ASEAN (primarily Vietnam), that becomes less attractive, especially because China, India, and Vietnam all operate SEZs that have aligned with western corporate law or have BITs signed with major western financial hubs (eg. Pudong SEZ, GIFT City SEZ), so we don't need to route via SG to the same degree we did 20 years ago.
Additionally, if we want to exit our investments in China or India, we have no choice but to list on a Chinese (including Hong Kong) or Indian stock exchange because no other Asian market has comparable trade volume, which makes exits difficult.
Finally, what differentiates Singapore from the Dubai or London? Depending on where you are investing in Asia, you may end up getting much more preferential access from either of those two instead of Singapore.
This is why Singapore has lost it's mojo - it can't differentiate itself as a financial services center and Singapore never really had a strong innovation sector.
Cowen is focused mostly on the US commenteriat, but the trend is similar in the UK, where "we should totally be like Singapore" peaked around Brexit, under the delusion idea that all we needed to do to emulated the success of the city state that founded ASEAN two years after declaring independence was leave the EU.
Meanwhile HN generally forms its opinion from a decades-old William Gibson article lamenting that it wasn't cool enough to write cyberpunk about :)
Thailand was for sex tourism.
Singapore was cool to government/political types because Lee Kuan Yew really did pull off a miracle.
I also think Hong Kong is going through the same thing, plus I believe China is trying to make Shanghai into its main Finance Center, letting Hong Kong's center fade away.
Singapore is pretty impressive.
Same can be said about Sri Lanka.
During the 1990s when there were open questions about HK's status, a lot of the business community (and at least 10% of HKers) immigrated to SG to operate there.
During the 2000s, the PRC made some good faith attempts at assuaging investor sentiment in HK, and that slowed the business and financial services outflow from HK to SG as HK had added linkages to Mainland China that SG would never have.
Now that I can IPO or M&A in China and India with Singapore level valuations, I have no incentive to retain more than a minimal operational presence in Singapore in order to act as a capital funnel to the others.
By 2019, if you were a Chinese company that only intends to operate within China, you had no reason not to move legal and leadership operations to Shanghai.
On the other han, I'd you were a foreign investor, HK de facto become "yet another Chinese territory" which meant it's not a good hedge for an ExChina/China+One strategy which is executed in ASEAN or India, which made Singapore become somewhat attractive.
Basically, the only loser was HK.
That said, this is all business and financial services - no one was actually dedicating serious effort building sustained R&D capacity in either HK or SG when you can hire the people who you would have had to apply PRs (no one who is worth hiring would accept a work visa when they could work for an American company and L1/2 to America) for directly in China, India, and increasingly Vietnam.
Where's the example where you're a Chinese company with most revenue in China (for now) but do sell elsewhere and anyhow, there are lots of reasons to not 100% stick to China,
e.g. gaming companies have moved to Singapore in masses (at least some capacity) due to time and time of gaming crackdowns and censorship
For example, the whole ByteDance/TikTok imbroligo is due to Susquehanna trying to exit it's Chinese investments which are locked within China.
During the 2019-23 period, boards in startups that had Western investors increasingly demanded that either Chinese investors buy them out or that they shift domicile so an alternative path to exit could be found.
(Humidity's high but peak temperatures aren't particularly extreme; it's just never cold)
The author keeps referring to "right-wing" this and that, so presumably he is buried too deep in some weird political subculture to realize that his question makes little sense to the rest of us.
But Tyler Cowen’s calling in particular is ABSOLUTELY to suck up to power.
Huh? I had to look up Helen Andrews. From Wikipedia: "She wrote that wokeness is fundamentally female, as it prioritizes 'empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.'"
(And coincidentally you have "Rice Theory: Why Eastern Cultures Are More Cooperative" on the front page and I can see how in her mind there is a line between "wokeness" and "cooperative".)
That seems like it should make Singapore _more_ cool, at least my personal theory is that this changed a lot of perception of China (at least in some parts of gen z social media, "it's a very Chinese time").
Rule-following, restrictive, collectivist, inclusive, intellectual, anti-corrupt, high-functioning ...
A politician like Donald Trump would never come out of Singapore.
And also Singapore is very much an inspiration for modern day China.
While the ugliness of Taiwanese justice (or lack thereof) makes it unappealing to me, from the other issues mentioned in these threads and the recent 3 year sentence for killing a little girl - https://jakartaglobe.id/news/sixyearold-indonesian-girl-kill..., I'm not sure it rises to the most troubling qualities of NK. eg The population doesn't starve en masse, no familial dynasty, and there is no alternate-fictional history.
many chinese people, it's kind of joke but still..also true on many levels.
> I'm not sure it rises to the most troubling qualities of NK
its run by a dictator from the begining, with many strange laws to tell the people not to do this and not to do that. the major difference is that Singapore is pro-west (and pretend to be neutral) so no trash talk from the western media and its portrayed as a 'democracy'
Please provide sources
Now your turn
you win! this website must make a huge diffrenece for the people all over the world or the western world so people think of singapore as non-democracy sometimes.
Try doing that in mainland China...
i read so many pepople complain the ICE on rednote and on reddit complain Trump and jokes about him, i just don't see the changes. Does Trump retreat any of his major polices? If not, are people just lives in the bubbles?
Or you can use the fact that you basically own the State to pit everything against your political opponents. There are various ways to do this, and at different intensities. SG's PAP is famous for using lawfare against political bloggers, newspapers and political opponents who question their rule.
Western democracies, where the selectorate is currently fearing for a populist takeover has started to do the same: German politicians filed more than 4,000 defamation cases, vague "hate speech laws" allow to selectively try your opponents, the State funds compliant press and NGOs, and so on. The EU functions in a way that democratic oversight and popular will is so dilluted that it isn't a real constraint, while keeping the "democratic" varnish and some legitimacy.
At least in SG, DPRK or China, things are clear and not hypocritical, maybe it's better for everyone.