That is straight out wrong. Migrant workers are forced to live in terrible, cramped conditions (a big contributor to the spread of covid in singapore): https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2020/opinion/why-si...
You're talking about non-Singaporean migrant workers, who are poor but not "destitute", since they have paid jobs, food and shelter.
I'm talking about the poorest Singaporeans, often unemployed and/or elderly who are entitled to meager but survivable benefits, including cash handouts and heavily subsidized housing. It's not an enviable life, and SG could and should do better, but neither is it "destitution" on the scale of street beggars in (say) India or Indonesia.
https://msf.gov.sg/Comcare/Pages/Short-to-Medium-Term-Assist...
https://msf.gov.sg/Comcare/Pages/Public-Assistance.aspx
Here's the BBC on what this looks like in practice:
It's been pointed out already, but pretty much every word in this part of sentence is wrong. You may want to learn a bit more about Singapore HDB. Ah, I beg your pardon, you're absolutely right about tiny part.
Short answer: not everybody, not entitled, not anywhere nearly free (where is this even comes from?).
So basically if you're a SC/PR, you won't go without decent housing in Singapore. That's actually quite impressive for countries in SE Asia.
He's popular in the Western media because he treated foreign investors like kings. They're happy to trumpet the successes and sweep the uglier side under the carpet and indulge the cult of personality he built.
Singapore's geography, meanwhile, is not given nearly enough credit. It had probably the world's most strategically located deep water port and being a city state helps keep the government on its toes and avoid corruption (in stark contrast to, say, Brazil/Myanmar) :
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19027/w190...
This is why a lot of its success is not really replicable elsewhere.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/9814266248/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...
It's entirely possible that the ruling elite have nothing to hide but they hardly act like it.
- the highest-paid politicians in the world [1];
- political offices with poorly-defined job scopes [2]; and
- a track record of installing PAP (the dominant party) members in government-linked positions if they somehow fail to win an election [3].
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/04/21/20-highest-p...
[2] https://mothership.sg/2021/02/pritam-singh-cdc-mayors/
[3] https://www.straitstimes.com/politics/ntuc-reaffirms-support...
Though perhaps worth mentioning that the Fabian Society has long been influential in the British Labour Party, so plenty of Labour party members or folks in unions will have a passing familiarity.
I found this [1]:
> Before he left home, friends and relatives who had worked in Singapore told of a dream city where the roads were clean, people were friendly, and everyone followed the law.
[1] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/singapore-mu...
Singapore, of course, is nothing like this.
When the bus drivers tried to strike against explicitly racist pay policies they imprisoned and beat them: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-SEAB-2274
They don't substitute. Unions are basically illegal.
There are people earning ridiculously low wages.
https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/gia/article/singapore's-hidden-hom...
A friend of mine said it was coz they were homeless and the police were aware.
In other countries they'd probably be moved on by police trying to make them some other department's problem. This could be the place where they ended up where they caused the least headache coz they did somewhat blend in.
It wasn't just east coast park either. There were several who slept on benches outside of my HDB in Clementi and Tiong Bahru. They tended to wake up early.
In 2014 and 2018, the government finally introduced a set of meager benefits for those born in the 1940s and 1950s, but it's almost entirely focused on medical expenses and far from a "real" state pension.
As boomers were entering adulthood in 1970, the GDP per capita in Singapore was US$900, in Australia it was $26,000.
Australian pensioners are the wealthiest of that cohort on the planet. Due to rampant property gains and incredibly favourable tax laws, technically you can live in a $10M mansion and still collect a full pension + benefits.
The two countries took wildly different trajectories and as such have very different attitudes by the generations that grew up in that time.
For a thousand dollars or so you can get setup and run your own hawker stall a couple hours a day in Singapore, lower that cost to a few hundred if selling sundries. The only equivalent I could think of for Australians is weekend markets which are full of oldies, but those are transient tents on some grass which are usually quite competitive to get and are once a week/month things.
Undoubtedly there's many who do need the income even in old age, but there's also a big cultural difference and many don't really consider retirement a thing. They may work a lot less, but have no plans to stop until physically unable, this is pretty common attitude to see.
Also, you're off by a factor of around 20x on your estimate of the costs of setting up a hawker stall: https://blog.seedly.sg/how-much-to-be-hawker-singapore/
I think too many young people are quick to forget that there are many boomers who didn't get the opportunity to own property back in the day, and they're fucked over by the bubble even harder than we are.
All that said, I do agree that Goh Keng Swee (who?) doesn't get nearly enough credit for the economic policy that make Singapore possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goh_Keng_Swee
They set up his body on display in a way that's eerily reminiscent of Kim Jong Il did when he died.
He said he didn't want a personality cult (more likely he didn't want to be seen to be having one) but still set one up anyway.
The press (notoriously one of the least free in the world) lionized him frequently and enthusiastically and attributed the various successes to his keen intelligence and vision, etc. Meanwhile he bankrupted detractors with libel lawsuits with savage abandon in an attempt to quash any criticism.
If anyone wanted to set up a cult of personality around him, it would be his heirs.
GNP PPP/capita #2 (USA #7)
Corruption perceptions index #3 (USA #26)
Life expectancy #5 (USA #40)
they must have been doing something right. I'm sure the US was way ahead on all of those back in 1965. Also I was in that part of the world last year when the race riots broke out in the US and it looked terrible - Singapore is one of the most racially mixed countries in the world and seems to deal with that much better.
They've also had race riots - there was one while I was living there in 2013 on race course road.
After leaving Malaysia it ranked right down the bottom on basically every economic and social measure, unemployment was at 10% and many lived in slums. Plenty of third world countries had better GDP per capita numbers.
Also my estimates are just fine according to that clickbaity link and a minute of research:
Upfront:
$10 tender application
$39 three year hawker license
$321 Basic Food Hygiene Course
$260 Stainless steel cart + delivery From JB [1]
$49 a month for a stall at Mei Chin Road
$600 a month in cleaning/service fees
$1000 a month in raw materials for say 100 chickens + everything else. Serves 1000 dishes.
[1] https://www.carousell.com.my/p/second-hand-stall-stainless-s...
That got my interest. Apparently there's a HDB lease buyback scheme, basically a reverse mortgage I guess? Though with stronger family ties over there I'm not sure how popular that would be when considering children, inheritance, and all that.
https://www.hdb.gov.sg/residential/living-in-an-hdb-flat/for...
But yeah, you basically sell whatever years of your 99 year lease you don’t need (calculated off the youngest occupant, so a 40 year old only needs 50 years of housing). Government gives you lump sum for your CPF, which you convert to an annuity at retirement for an income stream.
But you’re right, with family, typically the kids take over the HDB and living expenses for their parent. They get the HDB when the parent passes.
I left ~5 years ago so I'm not going to guarantee they're still there.
I'm pretty sure the HDB void decks still have their fair share of homeless tho.
Can confirm. I wrote about this in another thread 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26811554
Police doesn't care just because Sentosa is pretty much desolated at night, so noone complains or sees them.
There are few other places to mention, way far from HDB/condo settlements in order to maintain a nice picture of homelessness absence.
I think arguing that it wasn't about race and bore no similarities whatsoever to America is stretching it just a bit. Don't you think?
There is a racial hierarchy among migrant workers in Singapore (as well as among citizens). Mainland Chinese are at the top, people from the subcontinent at the bottom. This is partly what inspired the riot. They are the lowest "caste" in Singapore - even below other migrant workers. their friend died in front of their eyes largely because he, like them, was at the bottom of the ladder and they (police,first responders,the govt) could not give a shit whether he lived or died. So he died.
It also inspired the bus driver strikes - partly because this racial hierarchy was encoded into pay.
American racism is often more subtle (you won't get lower published pay rates for blacks) but tends to be more brutal at the same time (routine police beatings). Not fun being part of either system.