Why Singapore banned chewing gum | Hacker News Reader

Why Singapore banned chewing gum

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57 pointsLibertatea54 comments

As someone originally from India, also a South Asian country, but where none of these bans ("litter, graffiti, spitting, expelling 'mucous from the nose' and urinating anywhere but in a toilet") are in place or being enforced -- I totally understand LKY's way of thinking, and agree with it.

In India, a lot of people chew tobacco and betelnut leaves, spit them out straight on the street. Litter? No problem, just chuck it out the window. I have seen supposedly educated people throwing their banana peels and empty potato chip bags straight out the window of a bus rather than waiting for the next stop. Want to take a leak? Go against the nearest wall, and pee in the stench of 20 people who have gone before you. People seem to have no concept of keeping public spaces clean. Literally exactly the behaviours described in the Singaporean rules are rampant in India.

All this leads to a fuck ton of garbage, filthy streets, and an image of being an unclean country. I wish we had had someone like LKY in the early 60s who could have prevented this from happening, and had given India an image of a modern country but with an ancient back-culture.

I have often wondered about the deeper reason behind this behaviour; and my hypothesis is that it is related to the concept of the family as the main social unit in South and East Asian culture, rather than the broader society as a whole. So people will keep their own house sparkling clean, but not hesitate to spit against the wall in the street two blocks away. The Singaporean solution ("ban the spitting and enforce it with steep fines") was, in my opinion, the quickest and most pragmatic way of solving this problem for a large, densely populated Asian city. Kudos to him.

I believe it has a lot to do with not shifting with the urbanization. The mindset of most people in India still remains from the earlier times. Think about it, in a rural environment, like a farm land or the woods, would you still look for a trash can to toss a banana peel? or perhaps a toilet to take a spit? Interestingly, even in developed countries when people go camping, they resort to primitive measures [1]. Earth is exceptionally good at recycling, so much so that the things we consider waste: banana peels, pee, poop etc are rich manures to plants aka compost. So it was understandable back in the days to dump things into the environment and heck even to do your business outside. However today with decrease of visible earth, and increase in non biodegradable products such as plastic, what was once a natural process has turned into a mess.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVU5kfTVEiA or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3tBQs-sTf4

Yes, I understand the reason for this mindset, and even sympathize with it somewhat.

> Interestingly, even in developed countries when people go camping, they resort to primitive measures

True that. The stink in the outhouses in the "rustic" campgrounds in the USA is so horrible that I don't go there unless I really, really need to. It's about on par with the stink in (non-flush) rural Indian toilets. Going out in the woods would be so much more preferable.

But anyway, coming back to the point -- this "back to nature" sort of mindset is no use in the densely populated cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Agra, etc. which in some way are the representation of the rest of India to the West. For reasons of sanitation at least, if not image. Ergo, I think an LKY-like enforcement of rules might help a lot.

> All this leads to a fuck ton of garbage, filthy streets, and an image of being an unclean country.

By your description it is not just an image of an unclean country, but actually an unclean country. Just reading your description made me wonder if those people don't realize they subsequently have to live in the mess that they created.

This is straight-up Tragedy of the Commons, isn't it? For each individual, choosing not to spit out their gum on the pavement wouldn't improve the environment to a noticeable degree, because there are thousands of other people still spitting out their gum. And because everyone thinks that way, the pavements are covered in gum.

> By your description it is not just an image of an unclean country, but actually an unclean country

This is more or less true; depending upon density. In Delhi, city with several million people -- yes, it is an unclean place. A place far away in rural Odisha, maybe not so much.

The difference is due to the fact that India is a country more than 70 times the size of the Netherlands, with around 400 spoken languages and a corresponding number of different cultures. So my observations (and the observations of most Westerners) which are mostly derived from large, dense cities might not scale that easily when applied to the whole country.

> I have often wondered about the deeper reason behind this behaviour; and my hypothesis is that it is related to the concept of the family as the main social unit in South and East Asian culture, rather than the broader society as a whole.

Totally agree. That and this attitude: "It's not like the country will be sparkling clean if I stop littering, there are a million others doing it".

When I was a child in the 1960s and perhaps 1970s, there was a major PR push to get people in America to stop littering. The slogan was, "Keep America Beautiful" and it was complete with TV commercials and other vehicles of propaganda.

My impression is that it worked. Not completely, but awareness increased and a majority of people quit throwing their cola bottles our of the car and such.

The one thing that people didn't stop doing so much is throwing their cigarette butts onto the ground.

Chewing gum is still a problem as well. When I would coach baseball (for my then-young kids) I would come home from the field with gum in my shoe.

Just a few weeks ago at an airport I looked around for an outlet at a bar and noticed many wads of gum stuck under the bar.

Why people still do these things is a mystery to me.

I don't chew gum and I don't smoke (I'm also not one of these anti-smoking dipshits), but it seems obvious to me that you're not just going to put gum or fag butts in your pocket until the next bin/whatever. It just isn't the same as sticking a Mars bar wrapper in a pocket. Not if you like your hands in your pockets.

It's amazing how much peer pressure via culture accounts for us being "civil".

There is a link between an individual mostly-harmless action (flick a cigarette butt on the sidewalk) and the very visible systemic effect of a million people doing that same thing. But even for individuals that want clean sidewalks it is actually not a very obvious correlation to articulate in the moment - it takes a collective consciousness to draw the conclusion that a specific harmless transgression might add up across the population.

And so the cultural code-of-conduct could be looked at as a "caching" technique for worldly experience and logic. Very convenient, except when it gets in the way of evolution of the originating logic and experience.

public cleanliness is just a side effect of development. new york and london were the same way in the 19th century. shanghai is rapidly developing and is reasonably clean. tokyo is immaculate because it is fully developed. taipei is very clean also.

in fact cities like london and san francisco still have problems with people pissing and shitting all over the place, except it's due to alcohol and bums and not the level of development. many parts of san francisco reek of piss and shit and there's garbage everywhere after a busy saturday night.

> public cleanliness is just a side effect of development. new york and london were the same way in the 19th century.

I agree, but

a) India's cities are largely unplanned, and way denser than NY. Not sure about London.

b) Waiting for another century's worth of development is not an effective way to make your country an attractive destination for tourism and investment.

London isn't dense at all.

I agree with you, but I do wonder if the destructive acts of the Great Fire and the Blitz had a part to play in that.

Biggest reason is that the soil in London is soft clay, making it incredibly expensive, and until recently, very difficult to build up, and very cheap and easy to build subways. Allowed sprawl to occur earlier than in other cities in the world.

Development does not hurt but that's not the only requirement. I would be hard pressed to find a clean sidewalk in France. Many people just throw everything, from cigarette butts, gums to random garbage. I wonder if following Japan example and having the student clean the classroom would be helpful.

"taipei is very clean also"

Have you ever been to Taipei?

I lived near the city for a little over a year and it wasn't really that clean. Garbage on the streets and people with dogs never cleaning anything up. I regularly had to step over crap on my way to work.

The rats would come out at night in droves, but I'm not sure you can really stop this in any big city.

yes, i've been to taipei. it was clean. i don't know what shithole part of the city you stayed in.

you ever been to mumbai? or rio? or tijuana?

I don't chew as much gum anymore now that I'm old. But even when it was a more common habit of mine, I'm pretty sure that I never just spit it out on the pavement -- not even in my "rebel" teen years. As a matter of fact, I don't understand how you can just not care so much.

But then again, I remember an incident where a friend of mine threw a candy wrap right onto the street as we were walking about. When I asked him what that was all about, he argued that this would keep the people who clean the streets in their job. I just gave him a blank stare.

But then again, we do teach little children that it's not okay to just drop your garbage, and at the same time I've rarely met a smoker who doesn't snick their cigarette butts onto the pavement as a matter of course when smoking outside.

While theoretically speaking it does seem to sense that everybody cleans up their own garbage, reality is not always sensical. I guess we have come to accept that it's just a fact of life that people litter -- that's probably why a chewing gum ban seems like such a weird thing.

And then you have Japan, where tossing your litter (including cigarette butts) or vandalizing property are simply unthinkable. It's all in the culture.

I'm not sure if you've spent any significant time in Japan, but this is certainly not the case for cigarette butts.

I couldn't speak for Tokyo, but it is in Nagoya and many of the smaller townships. There was a massive "smokin' clean" campaign a few years ago, accompanied by sales of portable ashtrays.

The comedian Doug Stanhope has a bit where he talks about how it's OK to drop litter, because the whole City/Town you live in is a giant piece of litter on the natural landscape. He's obviously only kidding, but it's quite a nice (if slightly sad) way to reflect on our impact on the planet.

Louis CK also had the same line of thought about New York City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTH8htzsrX4

It's likely Louis CK I was thinking of actually! Oops

I suspect most people do clean up after themselves, but it doesn't take very many litter bugs to trash a town.

Often in interviews Lee Kuan Yew was quick to point out that Asian cultures were inherently different to their Western counterparts, therefore what worked in one place would not necessarily work in the other.

As a thought exercise, I do sometimes wonder what would happen if gum was banned in New York City or London?

If you banned gum in NY, the first thing that would happen is a significant increase in gum on the sidewalks, gum sales would soar; then after a short rebellion, consumption would fall by half as the more pliant folded. It would also generate a classic soda-ban type media circus, nanny state accusations, and so on.

Lee Kuan Yew would know that Asian cultures vary as much amongst themselves as they do compared to Western cultures. Strikes me as a convenient defensive line to shut down debate.

The manners in China are very different than the manners in Japan for example. Whether we're talking about spitting in public or line queuing. In his same line of reasoning, what would work in Singapore, would not inherently work in the Philippines.

I don't think cultures are that different. It's a question of education and enforcement.

I see people spitting all the time in San Francisco, it's pretty disgusting, and not just homeless people but also techies, hipsters, Marina crowd, they all do it.

Meanwhile in Hong Kong, spitting in the street is quite rare now due to public education (government advertisements and notices) and of course hefty fines which are enforced.

Good point. Reminds me of some research I've seen comparing differences between boys and girls in toy/play preferences. Differences within a gender (between girls for example) were larger than differences across the genders (boys and girls). Even though we're inclined to assume the most obvious "border" is where the most dramatic differences would lie.

Perhaps many would buy chewing gum to be rebellious.

Eric Garner would have been choked over smuggled gum. :-/

No matter how effective it is sometimes, something is fundamentally wrong in banning trivial things like chewing gum. What about raising awareness of the problem? I'd say it's the only right solution to this kind of problem

Is "raising awareness" effective? I spent a fair amount of time in mainland China, where lots of walls were plastered with propaganda signs about not spitting or littering in an exhortation to "be civilized" (their words, not mine). I don't know how much good the signs did.

Opposite of "raising awareness" is almost always some form of implementing totalitarianism. How effective is that on long run?

This is the pragmatic LKY that everyone will be saying good bye to tomorrow. Gum is a problem? Outlaw it.

Honestly, given that you can chew it if you have a medical prescription, no great loss.

Obviously not the American Solution (see how much trouble Bloomberg had outlawing the far more health hazardous soft drinks), but, certainly works well in Singapore.

I don't think the health reference makes much sense when you consider that gum is illegal in Singapore, but cigarettes are not.

I'm skeptical it would have gone over well had Lee Kuan Yew tried to outlaw soda and cigarettes as well (with the understanding that Bloomberg was not trying to outlaw soda). There's a point where people will push back on authoritarianism.

> Honestly, given that you can chew it if you have a medical prescription, no great loss.

This is not accurate. Sugar-free chewing gum (which supposedly has a dental benefit) may be purchased at pharmacies, without a prescription. It is not an offence in Singapore to chew gum, nor is it culturally unaccepted.

> see how much trouble Bloomberg had outlawing the far more health hazardous soft drinks

Well Bloomberg has a vocal opposition to deal with and therefore cannot act like a dictator.

Bloomberg was able to outlaw fizzy drinks, he just couldn't make an exception for the Big Gulp

Except juice, which has the equivalent amount of harmful sugar. It's more because Bloomberg is a typical dickhead politician who makes policy only to further his own power.

Ordering SuperLargeGulps of juice was so rare as to be nonexistent.

Bloomberg was most certainly not trying to further his own power in this situation - he went to his assistants and asked, "What single thing is most harming our population's health right now?" And the thing currently at the top of the chart was super-large-sizes of soft drinks.

But, here is the thing - the United States (with the exception of Seat Belts, in which the NHTSA managed to link federal funding and increased safety), is typically not in the business of being a nanny state. The exception for smoking was that it was second hand smoking that was being legislated.

Except you'll be hard pressed to find actual juice that's cheaper than 10x the price of sugar-water soda.

It's the reason juice is consumed by the occasional glass, and soda by the proverbial gallon, and why the latter is far more harmful than the former. And it's the reason there's a certain class-driven health problem around drinking soda.

It's also the origin of Dave Chappelle's hilarious 'what the fuck is juice?' joke. [0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuTjQLfU6Gk

Stalin had exactly the same approach. People are without work? Split jobs into sub-jobs. People are still without work? Kill them until unemployment falls to acceptable levels.

You'll say that this is a level of inhumane cruelty far surpassing the banning of gum; and I'll agree. But I can't help but feel they're motivated by the same basic thinking.

> People are still without work? Kill them until unemployment falls to acceptable levels.

[citation needed]

I know it's fun to rail on ruthless genocidal dictators, but at least be accurate.

Some western countries have done this for cigarette smoking on beaches, it's not longer the good old days when Singapore was an outlier.

http://www.longwood.edu/cleanva/cigbuttarticles.htm

Do we as human beings want our lives controlled or do we want to be free, understanding that some small part of the population will abuse that?

From a risk management point of view control is bad, it allows for catastrophic damage, where as allowing freedom of the populace has virtually no risks ATM when compared to personal decisions and inequities.

Just to clarify on the ban.

The ban is on the sale and import of chewing gum, not on the consumption of chewing gum itself. The maximum penalty is a jail term, not a death penalty nor caning.

Though the link below doesn't mention about the sale, I do remember that the sale itself is prohibited.

(http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/aol/search/display/view.w3p;page=...)

I wonder if anyone considered estimating the cost of fixing up a gummed up train or cleaning gum off the sidewalk and simply passed that on as a tax.

But then still allows so much smoking in public.

Less and less, and the regulations regarding how far away from doors you have to be are closely folllowed. Also starting to crack down on all the shisha places.

In all my time in Singapore (about two years now) - I've never had to deal with undesired smoke.

Given the number of smokers I knew when I was in Singapore, and that I never saw anyone smoking in the street, I always assumed public smoking was banned. When I heard there was no such ban, I asked a smoker about it. He said he doesn't smoke in public out of consideration for others, and a lack of public ashtrays (but that the latter was likely a bigger factor).

This wasn't the case for me in Singapore. As a pedestrian, I get assaulted with smoke all the time, especially while waiting at a crossing.

What parts of Singapore? I've been on the streets here for the last two years, and honestly don't recall much smoke, as compared to California, or Vancouver - both of which also have strict anti-smoking laws, and which I'm frequently assaulted by smoke - though a lot of the smoke in those cities is cannabis, which obviously isn't a problem in Singapore.

Perhaps it's because the areas I go to (Labrador, Harbor Center, Orchard Road, Woodlands, Holland Village, Botanic Gardens, Newton) are more smoke free?

With that said - I just did a survey of everyone in the room, and they indicated it's no better than anyplace in Canada - so perhaps I've just been missing something.

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