The Singaporean Dream
Adrian Ganic
According to the Malay Annals, a prince of the Palembang kingdom was shipwrecked and washed ashore on an island in the 13th century. There, he saw a creature he believed to be a lion. The prince named his new settlement after the animal, calling it Singapura — the Lion City in English.
Today, Singapore is a highly developed country. Since splitting from Malaysia in 1965, the island nation has seen astonishing economic success, averaging 7% GDP growth since independence —well above the global standard. In 2023, it was the fifth richest country per person in the world.
Rapid growth has transformed Singaporean society. “When I was young, we had no sewer system, no electricity, no piped water in the house. I tell my children and my students, can you imagine living in a condition like that? Impossible. It’s impossible,” Lim Yeow Khee, an aerospace engineer and former executive for Singapore Airlines, told me. He currently teaches at Nanyang Technological University. At 76 years old, he has lived through Singapore’s metamorphosis.
The country’s success is often attributed to the shrewd policies implemented by the country’s first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, and his government. The instituted reforms borrowed from across the political spectrum. On the one hand, Singapore used a state-led approach to develop manufacturing industries, including aerospace and electronics, to make up for a lack of natural resources. The city-state also invested heavily in education and built a robust welfare system centred on pensions and housing: Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) provides accommodation for over 80% of the population, of which some 90% own their home. By comparison, as of July 2024, 53% of UK adults are homeowners. On the other hand, particularly since the 1990s, Singapore has introduced tax and regulatory incentives to attract international financial services firms and other foreign businesses.
However, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew ruled Singapore as an authoritarian strongman from 1959 to 1990 (1959-1965 as part of Malaysia), repressing the opposition, the press, and organised labour. For example, in 1963, under what’s known as Operation Coldstore, the Internal Security Act (ISA) was created and used to arrest up to 150 left-wing activists indefinitely. In 1986, a group of 22 activists were arrested under ISA for alleged subversion. Preaching what he practices, Lee Kuan Yew said in 1980 that whoever governs Singapore must have “that iron in him”.
The human rights situation has improved, but Singapore is still criticised for practising press censorship, limiting freedom of expression, and for possibly having the world’s highest execution rate.
Yet, Lee’s People’s Action Party (PAP) has never lost an election and remains in power. The majority of Singaporeans - including Lim Yeow Khee, an admirer of Thomas Hobbes - subscribe to the notion that sacrifices were needed to achieve development. “Our generation, we were fighting an invisible wall, together fighting the wall to get out of poverty. Whatever the government does, as long as they are winning this battle with poverty, we accept it willingly,” Lim said. On the English philosopher, he notes: [Hobbes] had a great model of the world. The whole world of politics is about power, number one. For a stable society, a hierarchical power structure is needed.”
Lim’s train of thought is not shared by all. A 26-year-old Singaporean woman currently living in London, who has asked to remain anonymous, told me: “I don’t even think the trade-off with civil liberties was worth it. I don’t think they were necessary. I think that’s a comforting myth that the People’s Actions Party has fed to people in order to justify things it did for its own survival.”
Another woman in her twenties, a management consultant from Singapore, is equally sceptical of the island nation’s rags-to-riches story. “Singapore was a strategic trading hub for the British throughout the 19th century. It’s not like it came out of nowhere and burst onto the map. It’s just that things got even better,” she told me.
Indeed, the younger generation is increasingly turning away from the PAP. In the 2020 general election, the governing party received its lowest vote share since independence, with the post-election coverage emphasising how young people voted against the PAP. A poll from the campaign trail showed that 75% of Gen Z (21–24) and 67% of Millennials (25–39) agreed that more plurality is needed in Singaporean politics—compared to 58% among those aged 60+.
Nonetheless, the two young women I talked to believe things will improve. They agree that Singaporean governments have a great track record on economic policy and that social change is coming, albeit slowly. Homosexual intercourse was, for instance, decriminalised in 2023. It is not for nought that Singapore consistently ranks as the most optimistic country in the world, according to polling by Ipsos, a market research firm.
Such optimism sets them apart from their contemporaries across Europe and North America. In the same Ipsos survey, over half of respondents across the sampled Western countries expressed pessimism about the future. In the UK, 68% of people believed their country was heading in the wrong direction. There are reasons to be concerned. The vicious cycle of increasing inequality and neoliberal policies have created antagonistic societies, ripe for exploitation by populist leaders.
A crucial difference is that Singapore’s developmental narrative, although flawed, remains credible. The country’s transformation has occurred over the last 60 years—many people alive today have felt the effects. The American Dream seems less realistic by the minute; Elon Musk is now worth over $400 billion. Meanwhile, poverty increased in the United States between 2021 and 2022, from 7.4% to 12.4%. Most adults in Australia, Europe, the US, and Japan believe their kids will be worse off than them.
The question posed by these contrasting trajectories is an abstract one: isIs capitalism necessary to transition to something better in the future, or will the system create a class so clothed in power and wealth that further progress is suppressed?
It is hard to argue with the results capitalism has achieved in Singapore. More generally, there is no denying that our current economic system has thrust people out of poverty by driving growth. Driving economic growth for its own sake, however, eventually becomes absurd. Now a developed country, Singapore faces similar challenges to many Western nations. Inequality in the city-state is increasing, and young people have expressed concerns over rising house prices. Whether the People’s Action Party retains control in this new environment remains to be seen.
Some form of conflict is likely to arise. Singapore’s political institutions, like those in more democratic societies, are part of the global capital accumulation process. To be sure, the PAP curtailed or deregistered Singapore’s strong labour unions after they helped get the party elected in 1959. Capitalist states, authoritarian or democratic, subsume and promote the normal conditions of exploitation of labour power for the production of relative surplus value, spurring inequality. As seen elsewhere, once deprived of its developmental flair, capitalism’s inherent contradictions will force a confrontation.
Thus, a crucial problem with Thomas Hobbes and his political philosophy is exposed—they are products of their time. Hobbes wrote his treatise during the English Civil War in the 17th century, calling for strict hierarchies amidst the chaos. His view of human nature could only be negative.
Technological and financial capacity now exists to feed and house every individual on Earth. Yet, people are portrayed in politics and the media as selfish, excusing policies that continue to prioritise profits over human welfare.
It does not have to be this way. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an article called Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, contending that humanity would change after eliminating scarcity. An excerpt reads:
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals[…]All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
The story of Singapore’s rise reminds us that remarkable change is possible, but we must dare to think we can do better still.
“ When I was young, we had no sewer system, no electricity, no piped water in the house. I tell my children and my students, can you imagine living in a condition like that? Impossible. It’s impossible,”