The rich are always with us

MEASURED BY ITS Gini coefficient, Singapore is among the world’s most unequal countries. The comparison is unfair: Singapore is also a city, and Hong Kong, New York and London all have higher Gini coefficients than it does. But Singapore measures its coefficient rather differently, excluding shorter-term foreign workers and non-working families. And, understandably, it includes employers’ CPF contributions as income. Since these are capped for higher-paid workers, that narrows the income gap.

Egalitarians are troubled by Singapore’s reliance on several hundred thousand low-paid foreigners. They are ubiquitous on building sites. Many live in crowded dormitories or worse. The frustrations some suffer were exposed by a riot in December 2013 after an Indian construction worker, on his Sunday off, was run over and killed by a bus. But such events are highly unusual.

Lee Hsien Loong thinks Singapore should not fret overly about its inequality rankings. “If I can get another ten billionaires to move to Singapore,” he said in 2013, “my Gini coefficient will get worse but I think Singaporeans will be better off, because they will bring in...

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Many spokes to its hub

THE COMPARISON WITH Hong Kong is inevitable. Both are thriving ports and financial centres; both have Chinese-majority populations and legal systems inherited from the British. But in the past 30 years Singapore and Hong Kong have trodden very different economic paths. With the opening of China, Hong Kong’s manufacturing industry shifted over the border, falling from about 20% of GDP in 1980 to just 1% now (see chart). In Singapore, it has dropped from about 28% a decade ago, but only to 19%. That is far below the 30% or so seen in places such as China, South Korea or Taiwan, but far above the levels in other developed countries such as America, Britain, France or Spain, let alone Hong Kong.

Yet Singapore faces many of the same pressures as its main regional rival: land scarcity, a tight labour market and competition from lower-cost neighbours. The decision to retain a manufacturing base has been the government’s. It provides 420,000 jobs, many of them high-skilled. Rolls-Royce, for example, a British aerospace and marine-engineering firm, has what it describes as its most modern manufacturing, training and research facility in Singapore. Of the 2,...

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The social contract

ON A RAINY Sunday morning, Chong Boon market is buzzing. This is “heartlands” Singapore, a housing estate in the district of Ang Mo Kio, row upon row of 12-storey blocks of flats with the usual playgrounds, shops and a market with a food court, where stalls serve local favourites at S$3-4 a meal. One stand serving char kway teow (stir-fried rice noodles) is so popular it gives people a queue number.

This is the group constituency of the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, though some in the food court say they were not aware of that. Many, however, feel the government has done well by them through two linked policies, on housing and retirement security. Since the 1960s, when the new country inherited a housing crisis, the government’s Housing Development Board has built over 1m flats. Now some 80% of Singaporeans live in HDB estates like these, overwhelmingly as owner-occupiers. The estates tend to look alike and they certainly pack people in. But Singapore has no slums and virtually no homelessness, the estates are generally clean and well-maintained, and property values have soared over the years....

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The Singapore exception

AT 50, ACCORDING to George Orwell, everyone has the face he deserves. Singapore, which on August 9th marks its 50th anniversary as an independent country, can be proud of its youthful vigour. The view from the infinity pool on the roof of Marina Bay Sands, a three-towered hotel, casino and convention centre, is futuristic. A forest of skyscrapers glints in the sunlight, temples to globalisation bearing the names of some of its prophets—HSBC, UBS, Allianz, Citi. They tower over busy streets where, mostly, traffic flows smoothly. Below is the Marina Barrage, keeping the sea out of a reservoir built at the end of the Singapore River, which winds its way through what is left of the old colonial city centre. Into the distance stretch clusters of high-rise blocks, where most Singaporeans live. The sea teems with tankers, ferries and container ships. To the west is one of Asia’s busiest container ports and a huge refinery and petrochemical complex; on Singapore’s eastern tip, perhaps the world’s most efficient airport. But the vista remains surprisingly green. The government’s boast of making this “a city in a garden” does not seem so fanciful.

Singapore...

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Seven million is a crowd

WHEN SINGAPORE SEPARATED from Malaysia, says Tan Kong Yam, an economist at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, it was as if a brain had been deprived of its lungs and legs. An urban centre with a hinterland became a country with none, depending on Malaysia for its water supply and on the outside world for its food. As a country, it was acutely short of space. One solution has been to add some: since independence Singapore has expanded by over one-fifth, from 58,000 hectares (224.5 square miles) to nearly 72,000, by filling in the sea with imported sand. Marina Bay Sands itself, a number of massive office blocks and a golf course are all on land that used to be sea. The government expects the land area to grow by a further 8%, or 5,600 hectares, by 2030. But there is a natural limit to this growth.

Another option—to seek a hinterland elsewhere—has proved tricky. Wong Poh Kam, an economist at the National University of Singapore’s business school, points out that Johor, the Malaysian state just over the strait, could be to Singapore what southern mainland China has been to Hong Kong, offering land and labour at far lower prices. Johor and...

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Performance legitimacy

The late, great Mr Lee

DISCONTENT ABOUT IMMIGRATION contributed to an election result in May 2011 that was seen as a watershed, even though the PAP as usual romped home, securing 60% of the popular vote and 93% of elected seats in parliament (see chart). After more than half a century in continuous office, an incumbent government could have figuratively shrugged and asked where else in the world a ruling party could secure such a ringing endorsement in an unrigged vote. Instead it acknowledged the result—its worst since 1965—as a serious rebuke.

Lee Hsien Loong promised some “soul-searching”, and indeed the government seems to have listened to Singaporeans’ biggest concerns, introducing some curbs on foreign labour and improved benefits for the less well-off and the elderly. It hopes this will help it at the next election, due by early 2017 but expected earlier, perhaps in September or October this year. The PAP may hope that the lavish celebrations to mark its birthday, dubbed “SG50”, will remind everyone what a good job it has done; and the patriotic glow that followed Lee Kuan Yew’s death in March will not have faded...

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The years that were fat

FIFTY YEARS OF breakneck growth have left Singapore’s economy in a position of enviable strength. Since 1976, GDP growth has averaged 6.8% a year. The past decade has seen vertiginous swings, from a slight recession in 2009 as the global crisis battered a very trade-dependent economy to a 15.2% leap in GDP in 2010. Since then growth has stabilised in the range of 2-4% a year, which the government expects to continue for the next few years. Unemployment is low, just under 2%, and prices are subdued without stoking worries about deflation. The national finances look just as robust. Thanks to the CPF, Singapore enjoys a very high saving rate: nearly 50% of GDP. With investment averaging a still impressive 30% or so of GDP a year, the country has a structural surplus on its current account which last year reached 19% of GDP, a higher proportion than in any other developed economy. It also maintains a consistent fiscal surplus in conventional terms. The constitution mandates that the budget must be balanced over the political cycle, but ring-fences half of the projected long-term investment income earned on the government’s reserves. When all the returns were added in, estimated the IMF, the surplus for the fiscal year ending March 2014 was 5.7% of GDP, compared with the official figure of 1.1%.

The full extent of the country’s reserves is a closely guarded secret. They...

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A little red dot in a sea of green

KISHORE MAHBUBANI’S MOST recent book was called “Can Singapore Survive?”. Singaporeans are never allowed to forget that their country is small and its future fragile. If it does not remain exceptional, said the prime minister in that May Day speech, Singaporeans will be “pushed around, shoved about, trampled upon”.

Fifty years ago the city state was born out of a row with one of its neighbours, Malaysia. The other, Indonesia, had been waging a campaign of konfrontasi—just short of open warfare—against Malaysia and Singapore. Those days seem long gone. The Association of South-East Asian Nations, formed in 1967, boasts of its success in lowering regional tensions. Singapore’s relations with Malaysia and Indonesia are excellent. But for how long? The neighbours sometimes give Singapore reason to fret. In 1998 the then Indonesian president, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, was quoted in a newspaper article as saying he did not see Singapore as a friend. Pointing at a map, he went on: “It’s OK with me, but there are 211m people [in Indonesia]. All the green [area] is Indonesia. And that red dot is Singapore...

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The age of unreason

IT ALL BEGAN when she lost her head. According to legend, Dimpna, a 7th-century Christian heroine, fled her native Ireland when her father, mad with grief at the death of his wife, developed an incestuous passion for his daughter. The father came after the girl and, rebuffed once more, beheaded her in the flatlands of what is now northern Belgium. Dimpna was canonised, and in medieval Europe developed a reputation for divine intercession that could heal madness. Her cult centred on Geel, a small Belgian town that forms one point of a triangle with Brussels and Antwerp. By the 19th century Geel had developed a system of foster care for the mentally ill in which patients, or guests as they are referred to, are adopted by families. It continues to this day. When at the turn of the 20th century the Belgian government threatened its existence with a decree that the insane should live in institutions, the whole town designated itself as an asylum.

Geel’s system can make heavy demands on the host families. Not everyone is deemed suitable for a foster placement—a high suicide risk and a penchant for pyromania are two counter-indications—“but the list of...

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From neurosis to neurons

BECAUSE THE WORKINGS of the brain are less well understood than those of any other organ, it is quite common in psychiatry for useful drugs to be stumbled upon. Chlorpromazine, the first drug used to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia, was originally marketed as an anaesthetic before being tried on psychiatric patients. Iproniazid, the first antidepressant, was originally used to treat tuberculosis. For those who view the DSM’s 300-plus mental disorders as brain problems with a biological basis, this is a source of frustration.

As director of America’s National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s biggest funder of mental-health research, Thomas Insel is responsible for deciding how it spends its dollars. He likes to say that we do not even have a parts list for the brain, so he has set about acquiring one. In 2013 the federal government launched the BRAIN initiative, which aims to identify and categorise the different types of neurons in the brain and map the connections between them. This is a giant undertaking. Brain cells come in a bewildering number of shapes, and their number is daunting: a human brain has about 86 billion neurons,...

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Second childhood

FOR MOST OF the 1980s, foreigners looked to Japan as the country of the future. In one respect it still is: it has the highest proportion of elderly people of any large country, a distinction which is accompanied by an exceptionally high rate of dementia, a broad term for defects in memory and cognition concentrated mainly among the elderly. These are diseases of the brain as it ages. After the age of 65, the risk of getting dementia doubles every five years. According to the World Health Organisation, 47.5m people suffer from the condition, of whom about 4.6m are in Japan. The most common form, accounting for more than 60% of all diagnoses, is Alzheimer’s disease.

By the middle of this century, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International, the global total number of people afflicted by the condition will triple to 135m. This is going to cause much suffering, impose a heavy burden on the families of the demented and cost a lot of money. Even America, where the disorder is much less common than in Japan, spent $109 billion on dementia care in 2010. The burden imposed on family and friends adds about half as much again, and the figures are set...

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Youthful folly

THE REBECCA SCHOOL for autistic children occupies all five floors of a building in midtown Manhattan. Its rooftop playground has a fine view of the Empire State Building. It features colourful classrooms and lots of places for children to lie down and recover from the sensory overload often suffered by autistic people. “My body doesn’t feel safe,” says one boy curled up in a corridor, asking to be left alone.

Sufferers from autism focus inward, sometimes so much so that they are unable to speak. Some children at the Rebecca School point to pictures to express anything from emotion to the need to go to the toilet. In about half of all cases autism is associated with learning difficulties; in the other half sufferers’ IQs are average or higher. Autism is much more common in boys than in girls; four-fifths of the pupils at the school are male.

To an autistic child, the world seems “relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space”, writes Steve Silberman in “NeuroTribes”, a forthcoming book about the syndrome. Autism has been around in various guises...

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Making cruel unusual

A COUPLE OF miles from Congress in Washington, DC, sits a large complex of buildings in a redbrick Italianate style with terracotta roof tiles. It might be mistaken for a college, were it not for the ironwork in front of the windows to stop people from jumping out. This is the old St Elizabeths Hospital, once one of the largest asylums in America. It now stands empty, awaiting redevelopment for the Department of Homeland Security.

The hospital’s walls contain a potted history of the way severe mental illness has been treated over the past 200 years, in particular schizophrenia (whose victims hallucinate and withdraw from society), bipolar disorder (which causes frequent mood swings from mania to despair and back again) and severe personality disorders (a catch-all term for people who behave in various abnormal ways). Their incidence varies little from country to country, affecting 1.5-3% of the population over the course of a life. They most often emerge between the ages of 18 and 25.

In the West the asylum movement, which began in the first half of the 19th century (and was the inspiration for giant hospitals like St Elizabeths...

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After oil

A mixed blessing

IN THE DAYS before Mr Buhari’s inauguration, wags in Abuja’s watering holes were joking that the new finance minister would find a note on his desk: “Sorry, there’s no money left.” They had a point: lower oil prices and the profligacy of Mr Jonathan’s government have hit Nigeria’s finances hard.

Oil contributes only about a tenth of Nigeria’s GDP, but directly accounts for around 70% of government revenue. Add in indirect taxes, and its contribution rises to about 85%, government officials say. When oil prices were high, there should have been plenty of money to run the country while also saving for a rainy day. Yet over the past two years the government spent when it should have saved.

Government officials are now frantically trying to plug the gaping hole in the public finances that the fall in oil prices has opened up. The value of Nigeria’s oil exports is expected to drop to about $52 billion this year, from $88 billion in 2014. Government revenues will decline by about 40%, and spending will slump. Economic growth is expected to slow to about 4.5% this year, from an average of over 7%...

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Can’t spend, won’t spend

TO UNDERSTAND THE impact of Nigeria’s hopeless infrastructure on its businesses, look at Gloo.ng, a fast-growing startup that has already become the country’s largest online supermarket. In a crowded office young programmers huddle around MacBook computers, designing the website and intelligent-mapping systems that look for the most efficient routes to guide delivery vehicles through the perpetual gridlock which Nigerians call “go-slows”. Its slick website is hosted in the “cloud”, the massive international data centres run by internet behemoths such as Amazon and Microsoft. Yet at the back of this cutting-edge office sits a pile of fuel cans to keep delivery vans on the road during the regular shortages. And near the front is a sparkling white generator, neatly branded with Gloo’s logo, chugging away to keep the lights and the computers going. “This is my primary source of power,” says the firm’s founder, Olumide Olysanya, adding only half in jest: “The grid is my backup.”

Nigeria ought to be able to generate about 5.5 MW of electricity, but because of breakdowns, gas shortages and decrepit transmission lines, it struggles to churn out more than...

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The only thing that works

“WHAT HAVE YOU got for me this Sunday?” says the policeman, using his flashlight to tap on the window of your correspondent’s car at a roadblock in downtown Lagos, his AK47 dangling menacingly from one arm. Less than an hour earlier, an immigration official at the international airport had asked: “What have you brought me?” From the moment a traveller sets foot in Nigeria, he is confronted with the corruption that has afflicted the country for decades.

Nigerians are thankful for small mercies, and there has been some progress on fighting petty corruption. In the past travellers often faced harassment by policemen and officials if they refused to pay bribes, but your correspondent was told “you are welcome in Nigeria” whenever he politely declined to grease palms, including that of a guard at the central bank.

The improvement has several causes. First, the government has been trying to end the pervasive culture of impunity. Immigration officials’ names are now prominently displayed on counters, for instance, and documents are often scrutinised by two different people. Technology and social media play a part, too....

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Miracle in Abuja

“THEY RIGGED AND rigged right until the very last moment,” says one Western diplomat of Nigeria’s March election. A variety of techniques were employed. First, the police and the army insisted on the election being postponed by six weeks, arguing that they needed extra time to ensure security. But most people believed that the delay was instigated by the ruling party, which feared it was at risk of losing and hoped that this would give it more time to buy votes. More blatantly, states around the Niger Delta saw ballot-box stuffing and submission of false counts, and across the country bags of cash were being handed out to prospective supporters. As a result the local currency, the naira, weakened as politicians converted it into dollars. These came in high denominations, taking up less space in the suitcases used to cart them about on the campaign trail.

To be fair, both sides were guilty of malpractices. Observers in the north say that supporters of the governing PDP were threatened, and many stayed at home. Some also reported seeing large numbers of children voting for the winning APC. All the same, the outcome broadly reflected the will of...

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Down on its luck

CAMELS AND GOATS jostle with cars and motorcycles on the narrow roads cutting though the dry scrub of Sokoto, Nigeria’s northernmost big city. The state, of the same name, is a long way from Lagos, the commercial centre, not just geographically but in almost every way.

Where Lagos has lush jungle lining the roads, Sokoto has desert. Where Lagos has bustling commerce, Sokoto has miserable destitution. About eight out of every ten people in the state are classified as living in poverty. Local government is on the verge of collapse. Electricity supplies are intermittent, even on good days. No water has flowed through the city’s taps for the past three years, residents say, although officials still try to collect charges, threatening to cut off people who do not pay. “Cut me off, please,” said one resident. “Nothing comes out anyway.” Only about a third of the state’s children attend primary school, and less than a quarter finish it. Only one in five adults can read or write in English, the country’s official language, although by some estimates 70-80% of northerners can read some Arabic. By contrast, in Lagos state four out of five adults can read English.

Such desperate conditions provide ample tinder for ethnic and religious conflict. Nigeria’s population is roughly half Muslim and half Christian, but the faiths are not evenly spread. Muslims...

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Can he do it?

“THIS IS A wonderful day, and it is all the more wonderful because we have awaited it with increasing impatience, compelled to watch one country after another overtaking us on the road when we had so nearly reached our goal.” It might have been Mr Buhari speaking at his inauguration on May 29th, a colourful ceremony attended by more than 20 heads of state.

In fact, the speaker was another Nigerian leader at an equally hopeful event, the country’s independence celebrations in October 1960, which Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the first prime minister, hailed as Nigeria’s “great day”. Yet little over five years later a military coup set off a slide towards bloody civil war. Ever since then, every time Nigeria seemed to be getting close to fulfilling its enormous potential, it suffered yet another crushing disappointment. Various civilian governments elected amid great optimism soon degenerated into instruments of patronage and graft. They, in turn, were overthrown by military dictators promising to root out corruption and restore Nigeria to greatness. Yet the generals, too, soon discovered a taste for the good life and found that greasing the right palms...

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Keep it calm

Where are our girls?

THE GRAINY IMAGES looked like relics of a bygone era: white mercenaries riding on armoured vehicles through burned-out African villages. In fact, it was the characters themselves who were military relics. Many of the men recruited to fight Nigeria’s war on Boko Haram were in their 50s, veterans of apartheid South Africa’s bush conflicts in the 1980s. A good proportion were thought to have come from Koevoet, a special-forces unit in the South African police that ruthlessly hunted insurgents in what is now Namibia. Age may have wearied them, but not through lack of activity.

Many have been fighting on, more or less continuously, in almost every big conflict in the past three decades, including Angola and Sierra Leone and more recently Iraq and Afghanistan. This “army-in-a-box” was the thin khaki line that helped the Nigerian forces hold Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. Only in January Boko Haram militants fought their way into the city, which has seen its population swelled by refugees to around 2m. That it did not fall also had much to do with Boko Haram’s strategic incompetence.

...

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