02.17.11
Singapore, the famous wart on Malaya
Some US commentators, most notably Tom Friedman, are not infrequently fond of holding up Singapore as a model for the US.
Why can’t we be more like Singapore, it’s the model of the future, Friedman thinks. Their kids can do fractions and stuff. And everyone shits money, they are so great.
There are allegedly no useless no-skill sitting-around people in Singapore, like here and everywhere else.
However, Tom Friedman is always wrong.
Singapore is a small island. Think of it as a wart on Malaya, always held up as an alleged beacon of progress. With little to support any such annoying claims other than it’s a place, much smaller than soCal, where the kids do far better on tests and the beggars are a bit less obvious or something. In other words, progress that looks a lot like the progress that holds sway here, only in infinitely smaller and more confined geography.
Today, from AP, good ol’ Singapore, why can’t we be more like it:
Singaporean Ramzi Mohamed is tired of sleeping in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his mother and older brother.
His problem is that housing prices in the city-state are up almost 70 percent since 2006 while the 29-year-old gym administrator’s monthly salary of 1,200 Singapore dollars ($938) hasn’t budged in five years.
“When I was 20, I thought I’d have my own place by 30,” Ramzi said. “Now that I’m almost 30, I wonder if that will ever happen.”
Like tens of thousands of others living in the tiny island nation that boasts one of the world’s highest levels of GDP per person, Ramzi’s failure to realize his modest ambitions is no accident.
A flood of cheap immigrant labor — and stiff competition for manufacturing jobs from Asian neighbors like China and Vietnam — has kept wages stagnant for many and widened the gulf between a very wealthy minority and the island’s poorest. Housing prices have skyrocketed as rapid population growth outstrips supply.
At the same time, ostentatious signs of the wealth enjoyed by the elite have multiplied. That has put the government under pressure to loosen its tightfisted stance on welfare in the next national budget Friday as it tries to defuse criticism its policies have worsened the plight of ordinary Singaporeans.
New motto: Visit Singapore! It eats it unless you’re rich there, too!
I was asked to give a talk at a tech university in Singapore once. They wanted it for free and the plane ride was way too long in coach.