Doing a quick search for Singapore on Wolfram Alpha, the internet’s hottest new search engine, brings up some interesting (accurate?) information on Singapore.
- Our island is shaped somewhat weirdly
- Our population grows 1.24% yearly
- Chinese languages is interestingly split up into “Min Nan”, “Yue” and “Mandarin”. Where did they get this info from?
- The population of our “largest city” called “Singapore” is 3,547,809!
- Our “local currency conversion” is an exercise in simple mathematics ($1 = $1)
- We’re rather rich for a small country, but our Gini index is quite embarrassing
Update: Looks like Wolfram Alpha regenerates their date very often and invalidated the images we’ve originally embedded, so they’re removed from this post. Do a search and see the surprising results for yourself!
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In an interesting article in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America, Richard Florida writes this about Singapore:
Singapore remains for the time being a top-down, socially engineered society.
Its a loaded sentence and a rather interesting view of our country, to say the least.
Some key words from the sentence:
- for the time being
- top-down
- socially engineered
Some big-picture questions:
- Is that good, bad or both?
- Is the country run by an exclusive class of people who are deemed more worthy?
- Are the people benefiting from this system, and their voices heard?
- Does this increase/decrease our effectiveness and competitiveness?
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“ They [residents] should thank the Town Council for working hard to come up with a diversified portfolio to generate income so that residents do not have to fork out more money.
Teo Ho Pin, co-ordinating chairman for all the PAP town councils, after losing millions of dollars collected from HDB residents via conservancy charges
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Our Prime Minister recently posited that the people are not ready for a non-Chinese PM.
But the Singapore Prime Minister is chosen by the cabinet, not the people.
Our government has always selected their cohort via a merit-based process, so shouldn’t they choose a PM who has the capability to lead the country, regardless of race?
Singapore’s political system allows it to implement “bitter medicine” policies for the good of the country, even though it is against the majority of public opinion.
Rather than say “not ready”, this is a chance for the government to make a stand on this issue and send a message that we are moving towards the goal of a truly multi-racial and cosmopolitan society.
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