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I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on

I've recently went into a rabbit hole of learning about Singapore. It's fascinating that you can transform a developing country into a country that's almost on the level of Switzerland in 60 years. I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies?

dyauspitr 4mo ago
I would say one of the biggest things is it’s basically the size of a city. But then again, China is basically doing the same thing with a massive country right now.
dunkvg 4mo ago
the prioritization on education has alot to do with it
rayiner 4mo ago
The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then. LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/zakaria_lee.pdf 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.
- IncreasePosts 4mo ago
  It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
  - atlasunshrugged 4mo ago
    I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
  - elevaet 4mo ago
    Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story. edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
  - HDThoreaun 4mo ago
    Singapore's location on the straight of malacca is one of the most valuable resources in the world. #2 in container throughput worldwide even though they barely manufacture anything.
- swyx 4mo ago
  as a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    I’m using “neoliberal” because it’s the closest American term for someone who supports free markets and free trade. He was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s economic ideas while diverging from Hayek’s views on individual liberty. 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.
atlasunshrugged 4mo ago
Shameless plug but you might also be interested in Estonia's story if you want to hear about how a formerly Communist country also became quite developed in a single generation (and churned out startups like Pipedrive, Veriff, Bolt, Wise and partially Skype). I wrote a book about it which of course I hope you check out, but I also went pretty in depth in this interview: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government
kardianos 4mo ago
Lee had a dedication to results, not ideology. Survival is not right; survival must be earned. They explicitly avoid multi-culturalsim and groom technically competent, detail oriented bureaucrats and politicians. In other words, they view reality as real and consequential, and they do what works and take the next step.
- nerdsniper 4mo ago
  Did I misread your thesis? It seemed like your strongest argument is “survival must be earned” and your most immediate claim to this is that “Singapore avoids multiculturalism.” 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.
  - xyzzy123 4mo ago
    It is not "multiculturalism" in the way that word would be used in say, Canada. 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.
  - rrvsh 4mo ago
    It is not nonsensical in the slightest. The government does their best to maintain a monoculture while promoting the farce of multiculturalism, because a monoculture facilitates easier economic growth which is the overall aim of the government rather than cultural development. Multiculturalism is essentially pacification because obviously this is unpopular
    - nerdsniper 4mo ago
      So you're saying what? 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? 0: https://www.sg101.gov.sg/society/multicultural/ https://www.sg101.gov.sg/society/multicultural/
teleforce 4mo ago
> I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies? 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.
- rrvsh 4mo ago
  The reason for your last point is that Singaporeans are taught in school that we were nothing but a fishing village until first colonialism (and Chinese immigrants) arrived and turned us into a major port, then the PAP (Lee Kuan Yew's party) turned us into a first world nation. It's really propaganda, and of course you wouldn't bother looking up information that you were taught to see as truth when you were a young child
  - teleforce 4mo ago
    That explain it, thanks. 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.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    Many post-colonial societies (Arabs, Indians, etc.) puff up their supposed past wealth and success, but that’s the real propaganda. Even when these countries were on important trade routes or whatever, the per-capita GDP of these places never went much above the subsistence level. High estimates of the per-capita GDP of the Roman Empire have it at around half of modern India. These societies were very poor in pre-colonial times.

dyauspitr 4mo ago

I would say one of the biggest things is it’s basically the size of a city. But then again, China is basically doing the same thing with a massive country right now.

dunkvg 4mo ago

the prioritization on education has alot to do with it

rayiner 4mo ago

The location is good, but there are many strategically well located places that are poor today. The people aren’t meaningfully different than the countries around Singapore. A 75% Chinese supermajority, maintained for decades through selective immigration controls. But China itself was as poor as India into the 1990s, while Singapore was rapidly developing long before then. LKY chalked it up to good, pragmatic policies implemented in a culturally sensitive way: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/zakaria_lee.pdf 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.

IncreasePosts 4mo ago
It also strangely helps that Singapore has almost no natural resources to exploit. So, their only resource is what the humans provide. That lead them to invest heavily in professional training instead of using their humans to pull metal out of the ground and ship it off somewhere else.
- atlasunshrugged 4mo ago
  I strongly second this -- this was also one of my main takeaways from my research on how Estonia modernized and became quite prosperous (especially relative to where it started post re-independence from the Soviet Union).
- elevaet 4mo ago
  Not a natural resource per-se, but Singapore's geographic location is very special wrt global trade and strategy, being at the tip of the Malaysian peninsula and in the Straight of Malacca. It's been a port and a nexus as a result for hundreds of years, a huge part of the equation of Singapore's success story. edit: wikipedia says 25% of the world's trade flows through the Straight of Malacca - it's a big deal!
- HDThoreaun 4mo ago
  Singapore's location on the straight of malacca is one of the most valuable resources in the world. #2 in container throughput worldwide even though they barely manufacture anything.
swyx 4mo ago
as a singaporean its actually kinda funny to hear everyone here describe him as a neoliberal. not quite our lived experience
- rayiner 4mo ago
  I’m using “neoliberal” because it’s the closest American term for someone who supports free markets and free trade. He was an admirer of Friedrich Hayek’s economic ideas while diverging from Hayek’s views on individual liberty. 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.

atlasunshrugged 4mo ago

Shameless plug but you might also be interested in Estonia's story if you want to hear about how a formerly Communist country also became quite developed in a single generation (and churned out startups like Pipedrive, Veriff, Bolt, Wise and partially Skype). I wrote a book about it which of course I hope you check out, but I also went pretty in depth in this interview: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government https://www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-digitize-the-government

kardianos 4mo ago

Lee had a dedication to results, not ideology. Survival is not right; survival must be earned. They explicitly avoid multi-culturalsim and groom technically competent, detail oriented bureaucrats and politicians. In other words, they view reality as real and consequential, and they do what works and take the next step.

nerdsniper 4mo ago
Did I misread your thesis? It seemed like your strongest argument is “survival must be earned” and your most immediate claim to this is that “Singapore avoids multiculturalism.” 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.
- xyzzy123 4mo ago
  It is not "multiculturalism" in the way that word would be used in say, Canada. 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.
- rrvsh 4mo ago
  It is not nonsensical in the slightest. The government does their best to maintain a monoculture while promoting the farce of multiculturalism, because a monoculture facilitates easier economic growth which is the overall aim of the government rather than cultural development. Multiculturalism is essentially pacification because obviously this is unpopular
  - nerdsniper 4mo ago
    So you're saying what? 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? 0: https://www.sg101.gov.sg/society/multicultural/ https://www.sg101.gov.sg/society/multicultural/

teleforce 4mo ago

> I wonder what's the responsibility of various factors behind their success. Is it mainly the people? Strategic location? Great governance and policies? 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.

rrvsh 4mo ago
The reason for your last point is that Singaporeans are taught in school that we were nothing but a fishing village until first colonialism (and Chinese immigrants) arrived and turned us into a major port, then the PAP (Lee Kuan Yew's party) turned us into a first world nation. It's really propaganda, and of course you wouldn't bother looking up information that you were taught to see as truth when you were a young child
- teleforce 4mo ago
  That explain it, thanks. 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.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  Many post-colonial societies (Arabs, Indians, etc.) puff up their supposed past wealth and success, but that’s the real propaganda. Even when these countries were on important trade routes or whatever, the per-capita GDP of these places never went much above the subsistence level. High estimates of the per-capita GDP of the Roman Empire have it at around half of modern India. These societies were very poor in pre-colonial times.