What Would Singapore Do?
Three Things #138: September 29, 2024
I just returned from an epic week in Singapore for a bunch of conferences and meetings. Every time I visit Singapore I fall in love with it all over again. I spent some time there a few years ago, then ended up going back again, and again, and again—from New York, which is no short trip.
There’s so much to like about the place. The architecture is beautiful. It has amazing food. It’s diverse in a really unique way, and it has an ideal balance of East and West. It’s not cheap, but it’s pretty reasonable coming from the USA. The standard of living is among the best in the world: it’s extraordinarily safe and clean, and it’s a functional city where basically everything just works as it should.
Nic Carter captured my sentiments perfectly when he tweeted that flying from JFK to Changi is flying from the world’s worst airport to the world’s best: from “third world to first.” It got me wondering: as a thought experiment, what would we have to do to be more like Singapore? Is that even possible?
Thing #1: Safe and Clean 🧹
One of the first things that strikes first time visitors to Singapore is how safe and clean it is. Singapore is ranked as the fifth safest country and the second safest city in the world. It’s the kind of place where even small children commute to and from school by themselves. It’s the kind of place where, if you leave a wallet or a phone on the table in a restaurant, someone will come chasing after you to return it—and if you go back the next day, it will still be right where you left it. Murder and other major crime is so rare that it all fits on one Wikipedia page.
It’s also one of the cleanest big cities in the world. The contrast is especially visible when you cross the border from Malaysia, since the two places are so alike culturally, or when you compare Singapore to any other major Southeast Asian city. The chaos and messiness of street scenes, hawker centers, prostitutes and red light districts, night markets, loose garbage, stray dogs, etc. give way to absolute order. When you finish a meal at a restaurant or hawker center in Singapore, someone inevitably appears within seconds to wipe the table clean and prepare it for the next guest. People always bus their own tables, and there are fines if you don’t! Trash cans are emptied promptly and aren’t allowed to overflow; trash doesn’t pile up. Bathrooms are absolutely spotless, not only in high end hotels but also in shopping malls and train stations. Yes, there are public restrooms everywhere, including inside the train stations. I sort of understand why chewing gum is banned.
There’s a unique combination of forces at work that make Singapore so safe and clean. The place isn’t homogenous in the way that small, safe northern European countries tend to be, composed as it is of a diverse population that blends four different cultures (more on this in a moment). Singapore is growing, but only very slowly. Singaporeans recognize that too much immigration, or a big shift in the racial and ethnic breakdown, could lead to instability, whereas maintaining this stability is one of the government’s main priorities and its mandate. It’s not a place that has experienced the sort of rapid demographic transition, successive waves of immigration, and constant reinvention that a country like the USA has, at least not in recent living memory.
It’s also a place that people take care of. Partly this is the collectivism of Asian society in general: people look out for one another and they take pride in keeping their home clean, safe, and welcoming to guests. This would be totally unremarkable in homogenous Japan or Taiwan, but it’s a bit more surprising in Singapore, where the culture is both extremely diverse and extremely westernized. Partly, I think, it’s a positive example of the broken windows theory at work: when a place is neat, clean, and safe to begin with, and when a society has proven that it’s capable of keeping it that way, people everywhere feel like they, too, have a stake in keeping it nice.
Could we achieve this in the USA? What would it take? It’s an interesting question. It’s definitely possible at the level of a company, a campus, or a neighborhood. I’m not sure it’s possible at the level of a big city, much less a state or a country. There’s too much diversity and not enough social cohesiveness and shared cultural affinity. And the USA is just too big.
Scale matters. I’m very interested in keeping my home neat, tidy, safe, and presentable. I’m somewhat interested in keeping my neighborhood this way, too, because I know some of my neighbors and feel invested there, because I spend time there, etc.. This unfortunately breaks down rapidly at the level of a large city: I don’t feel terribly motivated to keep the other side of town clean since I’m rarely there, I don’t know anyone there, and I have very little in common with the people there. This is yet another benefit of smaller, more local governance.
Rights and freedoms probably matter even more than scale and diversity, and there are clear tradeoffs between freedom and order. Singapore is technically not a free country, whereas at home we put a much higher value on freedom than on orderliness. There are potential solutions to a lot of our big problems at home, such as gun crime, homelessness, and immigration, that would require sacrificing many of the freedoms that we care so much about. This is a fundamental tradeoff that most Americans wouldn’t be willing to make, and I if we made these tradeoffs we’d lose the very thing that makes us Americans.
So, for now anyway, we’re stuck with a lot less cleanliness and security than a place like Singapore can achieve. We made our bed, and we should sleep in it.
Thing #2: Functional 🤸🏼♂️
Singapore isn’t just neat, clean, and safe, it’s also highly functional. Things just work as they should, and they’re surprisingly affordable considering how well they work.
The first thing you notice upon arrival is that Changi is the world’s best airport. It’s beautiful and easy to navigate. It has a ridiculous number of shopping and dining options. Immigration is quick and smooth: you use a machine and it takes about 60 seconds. It takes around 30 minutes and costs around USD $20 to get to and from downtown to the airport by taxi. The airport is well connected both regionally and globally. (It also has the world’s largest indoor waterfall because, well, Singapore.)
In contrast to where I’m from, public transportation in Singapore is excellent. While taxis are affordable and plenty, I nevertheless found myself taking the train for the vast majority of trips because it’s so quick, easy, convenient, and cheap. Both the trains and the stations are spotless and run on time, every 2-5 minutes. Stations are spacious and well lit. They have shopping and dining options, and public restrooms. You simply tap your card, phone, or watch to pay on both trains and buses, and rides cost less than they do back home. I felt PTSD thinking back on the state of the NYC subway: filthy, decrepit, poorly lit stations with no air conditioning or air circulation, lots of homeless people and people afflicted with mental illness, trains and infrastructure that constantly break down and cause delays and, oh yes, crime. Once you’ve experienced public transport in pretty much any modern Asian city, it’s embarrassing to think of the sorry state of affairs back home.
All of this makes Singapore extremely pleasant, but it’s still just the tip of the iceberg.
Still on the topic of transportation, there’s hardly any traffic to speak of. Singapore was the first city in the world to successfully implement time- and demand-based congestion pricing, way back in 1975. My week in Singapore coincided with F1, so there were a ton of road closures: most of the Marina Bay area was closed to cars and pedestrians. I assumed that this would mean absolute chaos on the roads, as it would in a major US city.
In the event, while a few parks and pedestrian bridges were closed to foot traffic, everything flowed smoothly. The few times I did end up in a taxi, I barely noticed the road closures. This is because Singapore is the most expensive city in the world to own a car. It severely discourages car ownership with high vehicle registration fees, licensure fees, and congestion pricing, not to mention excellent public transportation.
All of this appears to be working. It’s the least congested large city I’ve visited. Somehow, this is as true of public transport as it is of roads. Even at the height of rush hour, the trains and train stations aren’t too crowded. They’re extremely well-designed, with designated flow paths and direction arrows throughout the stations, hallways, staircases, and entrances and exits, which keep people moving smoothly. (This is something else you see in all modern Asian cities.)
In summary, Singapore is small, efficient, and well-connected. Getting anywhere rarely takes more than 20-25 minutes, which makes it very easy to do lots of things, take many meetings, etc. in a single day. Everything feels very close together and tightly integrated, which is a wonderful feeling and precisely what you want to feel in a modern, well-designed city.
What’s more, the Internet is fast and the infrastructure overall is great: I saw very little construction (unlike once-great European cities), and, unlike back home, the roads, bridges, etc. didn’t appear to be crumbling. There are lots of excellent hotels. It’s obnoxiously hot and humid outside pretty much all the time, but the indoors temperature just about everywhere seems just right—and not too cold. I carried an extra layer with me, but basically never used it, and spent the entire week in a t-shirt and shorts.
Singapore is a city that just works, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask of your city. I don’t expect my city to do everything for me. I’m not asking for paradise, for free massages or fancy meals or even zero taxes. But I want to live in a city that doesn’t get in my way, and lets me live my life the way I want to. I want to live in a low-friction city, one that allows me to exist and move around quickly, cheaply, efficiently, and safely. I want to live in a place with roads that are well maintained and aren’t full of potholes, one without horrendous traffic around the clock.
I’m sure there are smaller, second- and third-tier US cities that are efficient and well run. But what’s remarkable about Singapore is that it’s a diverse, globalized, connected, world city.
What would it take to achieve this back home? The answer here is less obvious. While safety and, to a lesser extent, cleanliness are difficult to achieve when freedom and diversity are paramount, it’s not immediately obvious how those values conflict with functionality.
I suspect this is largely a cultural difference, as well as a question of priorities, values, infrastructure, and budgeting. We Americans are allergic to paying for good infrastructure. We prioritize freedom and individuality over the collective, which in general tends to translate into low taxes and low infrastructure spending. On top of this, we’ve severely lowered our standards. Americans have gotten used to living in a place where half of everything is out of commission half of the time. Democracy probably isn’t as good at maintaining the roads as authoritarianism.
This wasn’t always the case. In previous generations, we built amazing things and we did so fast: skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, dams, the interstate system, and spaceships, to name but a few. But construction in the USA has become too slow and too tied up in bureaucracy, red tape, lawsuits, and environmental studies. We’re capable of doing these things again if we put our mind to it, but it would require strong leadership, stronger than we have today, and big social and economic changes. It would require sacrifices and tradeoffs that we appear incapable of making right now.
It’s a good thing that Singapore exists, because it serves as a shining beacon for what’s possible.
Thing #3: Diverse 🤹🏼
It’s very important to me that I live somewhere reasonably diverse. There are tons of otherwise wonderful places that I wouldn’t live long term because they’re too homogenous. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with homogeneity. I understand that many people prefer to live around people who look, sound, and think the way they do, and I respect their preference, but it’s not my personal preference.
In this respect I’m quite spoiled, having lived in some of the most diverse places on earth, including New York City, California, and Cambridge, MA. There’s many reasons diversity in one’s community is important, and there’s a lot to say about the subject, much of it probably quite controversial. For the purposes of this issue, let me just say that I find regular interactions and conversations with people who see the world quite differently than I do to be extremely interesting and stimulating, and I find diverse places to be much more interesting in general than homogenous places. They also tend to have better food!
I’ve lived or otherwise spent a meaningful amount of time in seven or eight Asian cities. I wouldn’t consider any of them meaningfully diverse, other than Singapore. There’s a typical pattern in most Asian cities: the vast majority of the population is a single race/ethnicity, and there’s a small core of expats and other foreign workers. Hong Kong, for instance, which is comparable to Singapore in many ways, is well over 90% Chinese.
The other reason diversity is important is that I want my son to grow up in an environment with kids who don’t look, sound, or think the way he does, as I did. This sort of challenge and mental stimulation is important from even a very young age, and there’s scientific evidence that kids who grow up in a diverse environment do better later in life.
In this respect, Singapore does well. It has a unique history, governance, and ethnic composition. The city is around 76% Chinese, 15% Malay, and 7.5% Indian, with a smattering of other nationalities and ethnicities making up the rest. The government has kept these numbers more or less stable for the past 35 years and intends to continue to do so. One need only spend an hour pretty much anywhere in Singapore to experience this ethnic and cultural diversity. There are Chinese, Indian, and Malay restaurants and shops on almost every street, all around town. There are Hindu temples in Chinatown and Chinese villas in Little India! There are also racial quotas on every housing estate to encourage integration and diversity, and the office of president is guaranteed to rotate regularly among the major racial groups. I personally think this unique ethnic composition, and the fact that Singapore, with its four official languages, is thoroughly diverse, is one of the most charming and interesting things about the city.
Unlike the previous two things, diversity is one area where the USA probably comes out ahead of Singapore, although of course this isn’t equally true for all parts of the country. The thing that Singapore does uniquely well, however, is maintaining balance and promoting stability and harmony among its diverse population. I’m not aware of any other place, past or present, doing this so well, and so effectively.
This is, as above, yet another example of how Singapore trades freedom for stability. I can’t imagine any country as large and diverse as the USA enacting strict racial quotas today (although it of course happened many times before). These policies wouldn’t work on the national level, nor on the state level, and it would be wrong to restrict immigration on the basis of race as Singapore does. It would be antithetical to the American experiment and what this country stands for.
However, things that don’t work at large scale are sometimes more palatable and more feasible at local scale. It makes me wonder what such an experiment would look like at the level of a city, or a campus, and whether such an experiment would be worth trying. The freedom-loving American in me has a reflexive negative reaction to the idea, but Singapore suggests that it’s not all bad, and there’s a lot we can learn from the successful Singapore experiment, too.