And then you kind of go on to imply that because they avoid being multicultural they instead are detail oriented and technically competent.
A lack of multiculturalism seems…like a very very nonsensical claim to make about Singapore. Its one of the most celebrated intersectional cities merging the identities of three different major regions.
They have quotas to prevent enclaves, they actively manage immigration to keep it about 3/4 Chinese, there are a lot of restrictions on speech and the ways you're allowed to organise.
The things Singapore does to manage their ethnic diversity 100% would not fly in the west.
1) The countries that are less multicultural than Singapore are more technical?
2) The countries that are more multicultural than Singapore are less technical?
3) The diversity of foods, religions, ethnic backgrounds, and economic backgrounds in Singapore celebrated here [0] is completely fake?
Citizen is a pretty key word there - things are pretty okay for most citizens, damn fine for the elite, and rosy for the well heeled ex-pats and foreign STEM workers.
There's an underside of non citizen day workers that stream back and forth, and a deeper layer of hell for indentured "lesser" Asians of the region that are looked down upon and struggle.
The why of this is not explained by you nor the original comment referring to the lack multiculturism, it is simply asserted. That's why the original comment came off as nonsensical. More than a quarter Singapore's population are foreign workers, and they make up at least 40% of Singapore's entire workforce. Seeing as the workforce that is driving Singapore's economic growth is not a monoculture your claim needs a little tweeking I would think.
I'm not claiming this means Singapore is embracing multiculturalism in the same way I don't claim the UAE embraces multiculturalism due to similar foreign workers dynamics, but not putting a disclaimer involving these stats while talking about the benefits of monoculture and lauding a country for its realism is a ridiculous sidestepping of reality. Both Singapore and the UAE are extremely cosmopolitan.
>Multiculturalism is essentially pacification because obviously this is unpopular
Why would it be unpopular to the dominant monoculture to maintain the monoculture? Who is being pacified when a country embraces multiculturalism? Please explain.
The Chinese population share in Singapore is similar to the white population share in Nebraska (75%). And Singapore has maintained the same 75% Chinese supermajority since 1960, despite Malays having about double the total fertility rate of Chinese since the 1980s.
It's mainly its strategic location and it's always been the the busiest maritime route chokepoint since recorded history between east and west, specifically between India and China two of the most populous nations in the world.
It sit right at the tip of the Strait of Malacca, the busiest and the longest strait in the world. This one famous quote by a 16th CE Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires, who declared: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".
Secondly is the people, and the third is the governance policy. Essentially, you must have be a bone-headed to screw up Singapore, like the one who can bankrupt a central bank.
My original top most comment on the great lie of Singapore was just an obscure fishing village during the early colonial time but it's has already downvoted to oblivion, you can check them out if you want.
My comments point at one time at double figure and then it went south to zero now, but it probably can be negative soon, c'est la vie.
The place that is now Singapore had less than 1,000 people when Raffles got there. So what happened?
There’s lots of places with strategic locations or natural resources or such advantages. The U.S. has the largest contiguous stretch of fertile land connected to one of the largest navigable river systems in the world. But the north american indians did essentially nothing with it. It’s not easy to make a modern civilization out of even a favorable geographical situation.
The British took over Malaya from Dutch with minimum effort, by exchanging some of their Indonesia colonies after an agreement with another colonial power. Fun facts, that's how Batam Islands got under Indonesia.
The first thing they did was to create Strait Settlements with strategic and rich Malayan States including Penang, Malacca and Singapore, definitely any of these was not an obscure fishing village [1]. These are the major trading ports for Asian major empires including Langkasuka, Srivijaya, Majapahit, Chola, Malaccan Sultanate, etc.
[1] Straits Settlements:
LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z.... (Read the whole thing. The first part is about culture, while the second part starting on p. 114 is about how he implemented western economic policies without trying to import western style social policies.) Singapore focused on neoliberalism within a social and cultural framework that accommodates the Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities that compose the country. It focused on anti-corruption and government efficiency, a major weak spot of nearly all developing countries. But it didn’t try to go straight from fishing village to liberal democracy. Like other countries that developed rapidly in Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and now China) development of state capacity and civil institutions happened under soft-authoritarian, one-party rule.
To put it in one sentence: LKY was a bog standard neoliberal who didn’t suffer from the neoconservative delusion that American-style individual rights and populist democracy can be transplanted into any country hand-in-hand with neoliberal economic policies.
edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
A better comparison might be Alexander Hamilton or Abraham Lincoln’s view of free markets combined with an interventionist government. But we don’t really have a neat label for that. In the U.S., free markets get conceptually lashed together with individual rights and limited government.