Perhaps the most critical aspect of Lee Kuan Yew’s success was meeting the requirements of multinational companies:
Designating English as the national language was a primary advantage. Due largely to Lee, Singapore is a primarily English-speaking country, and global business tends to go where it is understood, and where its nationals can most easily function.
As a result, efficient, globally focused Singapore now boasts more than twice as many regional headquarters of foreign firms than far-larger Tokyo, not to mention Asia’s less affluent megacities. They provide expats working for multinationals with sanitation, parks, trees, clean housing, an educated workforce, and low corruption not readily available in the rest of south Asia. Anyone who has spent time in India, or even Vietnam, marvels at the relative ease of life in Singapore.
Singapore may be in spiritual crisis though:
The fertility rates in Singapore have fallen almost 50 percent below the replacement rate of 2.1. Overall, Singapore-based demographer Gavin Jones estimates that up to a quarter of all East Asian women now entering their 20s — including those in Singapore — will still be single by age 50, and up to a third will remain childless.
“People increasingly see marriage and children as very risky, so they avoid it,” notes Singapore based demographer Gavin Jones. “Even though there’s a strong ideology in Asia to have a family, it is fading.”
Jones and others see this trend as something of a spiritual crisis, coupled with high housing prices and an overemphasis on work. In the old Chinese world, children were seen as essential to economic stability and social status. Now those values have drowned in a tsunami of materialism and global culture.
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The tendency to put off marriage and child-bearing, as well as the focus on material gain, works against the fundamental values of patience and persistence that animated Lee Kuan Yew’s career, and also shaped Chinese civilization. A society that is increasingly single and childless is likely to be more concerned with serving current needs than addressing the future.
As reported on Heartiste a couple days back, the 2013 US Census reports that 70% of all men from 20 to 34 years of age are unmarried.
The civilized parts of the world have simply stopped having children. The uncivilized parts (Yemen, Pakistan, Nigeria for example) are having far too many; far more than they can support with their own technology and know-how.
The two bounds of possibility I see here are on the one hand that technology somehow bridges the problem; or on the other, in a hundred years or so the civilized world has collapsed from simple lack of people with qualified genetics, while the uncivilized world is in the midst of a slower-motion collapse involving mass starvation and emigration/invasion of less populated regions.
“The biggest impact on these change has been among women, who are playing an increasingly critical role in the local economy. Although most senior executives in the government and outside are male, the middle ranks, and many of the fastest up and comers, are female. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz notes that while Singapore may have strong pro-natalist policies, it still operates an economic system that encourages, even insists on, long hours for employees, many of whom are women.”
So, basically, Singaporean women are marrying corporations.
Interesting. But the 5 whys techniques requires that we keep asking.
Why are they choosing to marry corporations? Why is the income so important to them, vice finding a husband and becoming a family? (And we’re still only at why #2).
Singapore wants to sign onto TPP. TPP is bad news. If Singapore embraces TPP, the USA’s plutocrats might “embrace and extinguish” Singapore.