I have yet to see a city of comparable splendor, organization, and ostentatious beauty like Singapore. Perhaps if I ever travel to the oil-rich cities of Doha or Abu Dhabi, I will see opulent gardens among glamorous skyscrapers. Until then, Singapore eats the cake.
What made my visit even more jarring was its contrast to its Southeast Asian neighbors. Unlike Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos, Singapore boasts an expansive social safety net, pristine streets, and manicured lawns, and, barring the busy lunch hour at hawker stands, a lack of the gritty hustle that comes with its lower-income neighbors.
I could spend most of this article discussing Singapore’s material wealth, as exemplified by its award-winning urban design, arts culture, or man-made beach paradise island. However, I’d rather address two of the threads weaving through each of my blogs thus far: the issues of development and democracy.
A quick history
Singapore was inhabited by indigenous peoples and pirate kingdoms until being invaded by a Malaysian kingdom in the 13th century. Its geographic positioning made it an ultra-important port in the East Indies trade. Unsurprisingly, British elites captured much of the wealth while local merchants emerged and fell.
Sounds familiar, right?
As part of Japan’s aggressive World War Two campaign, it briefly captured Singapore for two years and installed an oppressive government, before Allied Forces liberated the territory.
Similar to Vietnam, a group of progressive intellectuals began to see decolonization movements across the world as a sign that Singapore deserved independence after centuries of economic exploitation. In 1959, Singapore held its first elections, ultimately choosing the anti-communist People’s Action Party (PAP) to the disappointment of Communist intellectuals and student organizers.
Why is this important? Because it’s the decolonial playbook that dozens of countries and peoples followed, especially the ones I’ve written about so far.
With a per-capita income higher than the United States, economic analyses always use Singapore as an example of a highly developed country that developing countries should aspire to. So, I spent my time in the city-state investigating how Singapore accomplished this miraculous development when its neighbors “failed.”
The National Singapore Museum was a good place to start.
Much of the museum was dedicated to expounding Singapore’s rise, and they came up with a few reasons to show the recipe for its success. Bear my economic jargon if it doesn’t make sense, because it will come into play later.
The Natural Resource Curse and the Miraculous Port
Industrialization, Foreign Investment, and the Playbook for Economic Growth
Guided Democracy and Investing in Social Infrastructure
After Singapore seceded from Malaysia in 1965, it was faced with a series of policy choices. Without natural resources or agricultural land, where could it look for economic development?
Quite literally, they adopted their own version of Keynesianism.
“Rather than follow the precepts of eighteenth-century economic liberalism, Singapore has carved out its own way, testing what works and designing its own solutions. Taxes are low, but as Vasagar puts it, whereas in Hong Kong the tycoons used to dictate to the government, “it is the government that is supreme in Singapore.” 1 (Tim Colebatch)
For better and for worse, Singapore may be the most effective at following the government's economic agenda to a T. Because it lacked agricultural lands, minerals, or any extractive industries that many of its neighbors relied on, it sought to advance manufacturing and get as many people as possible employed in industry.
“The first two periods, 1965-80 and 1980-90, were characterized by government efforts to use export-led industrialization and rapid capital accumulation to promote quantitative growth. In the first period (1965-80), the government's main policy objectives were to promote growth by attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), create jobs and expand productive capacity (Peebles and Wilson 1996).” 2 (Khuong M. Vu)
It worked.
If we use the conventional metric of well-being, GDP, Singapore is one of the most developed countries in the world.
As Singapore became richer, it chose to invest heavily in physical and social infrastructure for its population.
“In the case of Singapore, which gained independence peacefully in 1965 after over a century of British colonial government and a few years as part of federated Malaysia, three wise policy decisions were made early on that have had continuing influence on Singapore’s ethos and social environment.
The first is to emphasize education…Primary education in Singapore is universal and free; both secondary and pre-university education are heavily subsidised and virtually free for lowincome families; and undergraduate education is also highly subsidised for students from low-income families…
The second fruitful decision by Singapore’s early leaders, made over a period of years preceding and following independence, was to build the nation’s social policy around pensions, healthcare and housing. Unlike most capitalist nations, Singapore established a pension system in the 1950s based on defined contributions rather than defined benefits…
The third emphasis of Singaporean social policy is housing, now administered by the Housing Development Board (HDB), which is responsible both for overseeing the construction of public housing and the sale of units to the people of Singapore…Whether housing actually achieved this purpose is difficult to measure, but there is no question that this policy created a nation of homeowners and avoided the growth of slums and the incidence of homelessness that plague many other capitalist countries.”3 (Ron Haskins)
“Guided” Democracy and the Underbelly of “Effective” Government
Singapore is awesome! So what is the point of this specific blog?
Barring that this post gets taken down because it offers some sort of critique, I present two main tradeoffs/problems/dilemmas/issues/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that I’ve found with Singapore’s growth model and success story.
The Political Implications of Singaporean Democracy.
Broader Implications for what “Economic Development should be”
Shades of Democracy: Singapore’s Authoritarian Utopia
After touring the National Museum to see Singapore's meteoric rise, my friends and I went to a bookshop. I distinctly remember the conversation we had with the bookstore owner, a native Singaporean with silver hair, an impressive knowledge of American politics, and strong opinions about Singapore.
Me (paraphrased): “So, is Singapore perfect? Isn’t there inequality? Mistreatment of migrant laborers?
Him (paraphrased): “Ya, it’s pretty nice if you’re a Permanent Resident or Citizen of Singapore.
Me: “What about all the menial jobs that keep Singapore so clean?”
Him: “The foreign laborers do the work that we don’t want to do.”
But what struck me most were his opinions about Singaporean democracy. When I asked him about political repression, the fact that one party has been in power since Singapore’s founding, or that public criticism of the government is banned, he responded with the following:
“You Westerners have your own idea of what democracy is. If you consider a democracy to be one in which everyone participates fully on the local level and all free speech is legal, then yes, we’re not a democracy. But in truth, there are shades of democracy.”
As reported by Amnesty International,
“The Singapore government continues to silence human rights defenders and other critics ahead of upcoming elections, Amnesty International said today. In recent months, well-known activists and critics of the government have been subjected to further investigation and harassment by Singapore authorities, solely for freely expressing their views and opinions. In addition, the introduction of new legislation on 8 May, the Online Criminal Harms Bill, threatens to further decrease the space for free speech in the country. Singapore is due to hold Presidential elections by September, which is setting the conditions for a wider crackdown.”4
Singapore is less a democratic project of collective will than the “ideals, convictions, and prejudices”5 of one brilliant man: Lee Kuan Yew. Through his leadership (and coercive strong-man politics), Lee guided Singapore’s economic, cultural, and political development to create a prosperous, patriotic, yet obedient Singaporean population. His family continues to dominate Singaporean politics today.6
“Every institution with power in Singapore is effectively an arm of the government. There is no free press: the media is either government-owned or controlled by the government’s right to appoint its boards, and the opposition has little access to it. There is no independent judiciary; no minister has ever lost a defamation case in Singapore’s courts. There are no trade unions independent of government. The relatively few NGOs must operate warily to avoid incurring the wrath of the ministers and officials whose decisions they comment on.
There is no right of assembly: to hold a meeting of five or more people requires a permit from the police. There is no ombudsman, no charter of human rights, no freedom of information legislation. Singapore has world-class engineering infrastructure, but little of the infrastructure of democracy as we know it.
It does have free elections. But even they are held on boundaries drawn up by the government to maximise its chances, including a strange system of dividing most of the city into seventeen winner-take-all wards electing four or five candidates on a single ticket. (That partly backfired at last year’s election when the Workers’ Party won two of the wards, and opposition slates came close in two others.) And those elections are held in an environment in which the government has all the power, and has shown ruthlessness in using it to maintain its control.” (Colebatch)
I can offer all the criticism about the state of Singaporean democracy (or at least from sources that haven’t been scraped off the Internet). But at the end of the day, many Singaporeans are happy. If you have access to cheap goods, accessible and affordable services, and safety, then chances are that you may agree with what the bookstore owner ended our conversation with: “Why would we want to be like you Americans?”.
The ultimate question that Singapore asks us is: “Is protecting individual freedoms in a dysfunctional democracy more valuable than an effective, controlled, autocratic bureaucracy? I may have my answer, but it is not my right to assert that one response is universally better than another.
The Shaky Foundations of A Prosperous Society
My second point has less to do with democracy and more to do with the hidden sacrifices that come with a prosperous society: the necessary underclass and the costs of modern economic development.
Poverty discourse in America has fascinated me precisely because of its parallels to the Singaporean context. In America,
“The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.” (Ezra Klein)7
In Singapore,
“Singapore…hosts a vast underclass of “non-resident” workers on temporary visas. Some are in well-paid jobs (and resented by locals for that), but many others do dangerous or low-status jobs as construction labourers, factory hands and domestic servants.
There are about 1.5 million of them among Singapore’s 5.5 million people, more than a quarter of the population…These workers reside in Singapore…but they have no path to permanent residency and are expected to return to their home country when the job ends…
[T]hese temporary workers, mostly men from China, India and Bangladesh, and women from Indonesia and the Philippines, make up three-quarters of the construction workforce that builds Singapore’s world-class transport infrastructure and apartment towers, and most of the workers on its factory lines: relatively low-paid jobs that Singaporeans don’t want. The migrants the locals resent are the skilled ones who take the well-paid jobs they do want.” (Colebatch)
Klein’s thesis is that American poverty is a choice that can be fixed by strengthening labor regulations, expanding unemployment insurance and universal childcare, and other efforts that give more power to workers at the expense of consumers and capital.
Unlike the U.S., Singapore has a robust social safety net and lower levels of inequality. However, like the U.S., much of its material prosperity is dependent on a working class denied the benefits afforded to its citizens.
Across the developed world, we see a similar out-sourcing to foreign laborers—Qatar, the United States, and even Nordic countries—to grow our food, clean our streets, do all the jobs that we don’t want to do that make our countries function. My argument is not that we should get rid of foreign labor, as remittances sent back home have many benefits (as well as drawbacks).
Rather, we must ask ourselves a moral, political, and economic question: What are we willing to sacrifice as citizens to give these workers some of the riches that we reap from their labor? To provide them with healthcare, stable housing, and a chance at building wealth rather than renting their labor for below-market wages?
Democracy, Capital, and Development
Lee Yuan Kew and the People’s Action Party have crafted Singapore’s political, economic, and social path to one of material prosperity, guided democracy, and limited social freedoms. And in many ways, it works. It’s a successful experiment of a multiracial democracy not united by a common language, religion, or history.
In the typical fashion of trying to tie too many themes together through my Substack rants, I end this piece with a hint of the themes I will be exploring over the next year as I move to La Guajira, Colombia, to study sustainable development. While I will explain the work in future pieces, Singapore’s economic development success story poses the following questions:
What are the different ways of developing?”
What happens when communities on the ground have different priorities than national governments?8
What does sustainable development truly look like?
Singapore may have one answer, and my thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Colombia deserve another.
Cheers to the cluelessness of a tourist just trying to figure things out.
https://insidestory.org.au/the-singapore-grip/
Vu, Khuong M. “Sources of Singapore’s Economic Growth, 1965-2008: Trends, Patterns and Policy Implications.” ASEAN Economic Bulletin, vol. 28, no. 3, 2011, pp. 315–36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41445396. Accessed 10 June 2024.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/social-policy-in-singapore-a-crucible-of-individual-responsibility/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa36/6788/2023/en/
J.S. George, the Far Eastern Economic Review
“At every level, the inner core of meaning has been hollowed out from Singapore’s parliamentary democracy and replaced with a state ideology now shaped almost entirely by one man.” (Chris Lydgate) https://insidestory.org.au/i-thought-that-dawn-had-come-to-the-political-landscape-of-singapore/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/stimulus-unemployment-republicans-poverty.html. I also recommend listening to his interview with Matthew Desmond.
To see a piece I wrote a while back on my incoherent thoughts around this very question, see this pessimistic piece I wrote earlier.