Name: The Best-Run Dictatorship in History: Singapore
Uploaded: 2026-02-01T17:06:37.000Z
Duration: 53 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In many ways, Singapore is a pretty small country.

Adverbs of manner

Out of all of the 195 UN member states and observers, Singapore is ranked as only the 176th largest country in terms of land, with only a handful of tiny microstates who are smaller.

Adverbs of degree

With only 736 square kilometers of land, Singapore is smaller in land size than even New York City is.

But just like New York is, Singapore is a very densely populated place, and

it's really the only true functioning city state that exists today in the modern world.

There are roughly 6 million people who call Singapore their home today, which is large for a city, but

Singapore's population would still only rank it in 113th place on the same list of the UN's 195 members and observers, with an amount of people that's roughly equivalent to Denmark.

Within its immediate geographic neighborhood in Southeast Asia, Singapore was once pejoratively referred to by its much larger neighbors as the Little Red Dot, a tiny independent nation that was surrounded by giants.

On a physical map, you can barely even notice Singapore amongst its peers unless it is explicitly highlighted and pointed out for you.

And even when adjusting for a population weighted map, Singapore's size of people still pales in comparison to all of its neighbors.

Its immediate neighbors, Malaysia and especially Indonesia, have orders of magnitude more people in their countries.

And other than the very tiny Brunei, Singapore has the smallest population in the whole region of Southeast Asia.

But when you look at Singapore through a different kind of lens, beyond geographic size and population, with an economic lens, Singapore will suddenly appear as a relative colossus, especially in relation to its smaller physical and human sizes.

Through this lens, the Little Red Dot is no longer so little.

And that's because, with a nominal GDP of US$548 billion as of 2025, Singapore is, astonishingly, the world's 26th largest economy today, ranking its economic size far, far higher up in the rankings than its geographic and human sizes.

To put this into perspective for you, the Singaporean economy these days is roughly the same size as Thailand's, a much larger country that is owed to 11 times as many people.

Singapore is in fact, the 10th largest economy on the entire Asian continent when excluding Russia, despite it being only the 36th most populous country in Asia.

Which means that Singapore's economy is larger than all 25 of these other countries in Asia who have a larger population, including some notably very large countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, and

Perhaps most interestingly, Singapore's economy today is significantly larger than Malaysia's is its immediate next door and much larger neighbor.

And Singapore is the second largest economy in all of Southeast Asia via only the gigantic Indonesia.

However, despite Indonesia having a giant population of 274 million people, a whopping 45 times more people than Singapore has, the Singaporean economy is still about 38% the size of Indonesia's economy anyway.

Consequently, as you'd expect, the Singaporean GDP per capita today is absolutely Insane.

As of 2024, it stands at an incredibly impressive $89,000 and ranks Singapore with the fifth highest GDP per capita in the entire world, remaining only behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, Ireland and Norway, and

putting Singapore even ahead of the United States.

And perhaps even more astonishingly, Singapore's GDP per capita is now significantly higher than what is seen in the United Kingdom, the former colonial era overlord.

The median wage in Singapore also currently stands at an impressive US$46,000 a year, which is also higher than the median wages that are currently seen in the United Kingdom that stand at only around US$44,000 a year.

In comparison, Singapore has also emerged today in the 2020s as the first fifth largest concentration of the world's wealthy people, with more USD millionaire residents than anywhere else on earth other than New York City, Tokyo, San Francisco and London.

With a current millionaire population of around 240,000 people, roughly one in every 25 people who lives in Singapore today is a millionaire, among the highest ratios of wealth seen anywhere in the world today.

And according to the Global Financial Centers index, since 2023, Singapore has managed to position itself as the world's third most significant global financial center, remaining only behind New City in London and outclassing every other city to be Asia's leading center of finance in the 21st century.

This is all what makes Singapore among the most overpowered countries relative to its physical and population sizes anywhere in the world.

But it wasn't always like this for Singapore.

And Singapore's current gigantic outsized economic power and influence is in fact only a very recent phenomenon.

And it was never guaranteed to have turned out this way only 20 years ago, back in 2004, the Singaporean GDP per capita was only half of what occurred certainly is today, and

just a little further back in history to the country's independence in 1965.

Only 60 years ago, the country was deeply impoverished and its GDP per capita was even lower than contemporary countries like Jordan and South Africa that both remain relatively poor today.

Back then, just 60 years ago, Singapore's GDP per capita stood at only a poultry $511.

The country's unemployment rate stood at a high 14% of the labor force.

Half of the population was considered to be illiterate.

70% of the pop lived in hopelessly overcrowded conditions, and

around a third of the population were squatting in slums.

Singapore had zero natural resources of any kind to offer and had zero natural freshwater resources to sustain its population of what at the time stood at about 1.86 million people.

And yet, despite these humble origins, after independence, in only the 60 years of history since that time, within the span of a single human lifetime, Singapore went from those unlikely beginnings to becoming one of the most fabulously wealthy, successful, influential, and

And it transformed itself into what I would argue is the most overpowered country relative to its physical size, located in the whole of Asia, if not the entire world.

And in order to understand how Singapore got to where it is today and how it managed to pull off what's arguably the most radical societal transformation ever seen in human history within a single person's lifetime, we have to go back a bit further into history and then build back up to the present.

For most of human history, the island of Singapore was basically a sparsely populated village until its geographic potential was realized by Sir Stamford Raffles, a colonial official of the British Empire.

He managed to secure control over Singapore in 1819 and turned it into a British colony and into what is known as an entropot, an intermediary port where goods are brought to from elsewhere in order to be collected and shipped off somewhere else.

Raffles and the British both understood Singapore's strategically valuable location directly along the Strait of Malacca, the shortest maritime trade route between China and the east and India and Europe.

Further to the west, Singapore was built up as a free port by the British during the colonial era, meaning that there were no taxes or customs duties imposed on ships and merchants doing business there.

Which, combined with Singapore's strategic location between the east and the west along one of the world's most valuable trade routes, caused its population to quickly begin soaring as merchants and traders from across the region and from across the world all sought out their fortunes there.

As a result, Singapore developed throughout the colonial era into a bit of a cultural melting pot, with large numbers of ethnic Chinese, Malays and Tamils from India all settling there.

While the ethnic Malays were the indigenous community of Singapore and of Malaysia, by the early 1960s, when the colonial period on Singapore was starting to come to a close, about 75% of Singapore's population were ethnic Chinese residents.

Due to the past several decades of trade and migration patterns under British rule, While only about 15% were ethnic Malays and the other 10% were ethnic Tamils who had come from India.

This made Singapore a uniquely Chinese majority and ethnically diverse territory at the tip of the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia.

And save for a brief period between 1942 and 45 when it was occupied by Japanese forces during the Second World War, Singapore was continually under British colonial rule from the time of raffles arrival in 1819 until a century and a half later in 1963.

After World War II, though, as the British Empire entered into a period of sharp decline and collapse, the British granted Singapore a significant degree of autonomy and self rule in the 1950s, which ultimately led to a local election and the rise to power of a man named Lee Kuan Yew as Singapore's first prime minister in 1959, who would go on to prove himself as one of the most incredibly competent statesmen of the entire 20th century, and

who would become the man most singularly responsible for the incredible direction that Singapore would ultimately take after it became independent.

Lee understood well that in the era of decolonization, Singapore was a small, impoverished and resource poor island located in a geopolitically dangerous neighborhood.

As a result, Lee initially believed that Singapore's greatest odds at survival were going to be through a merger with the other British colonies in the region, which at the time consisted of Malaya, North Borneo and Sarawak.

Malaya gained its independence from Britain first in 1957 and then it united with North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore in 1963 to form the modern country of Malaysia that we know today.

But Singapore's own membership within Malaysia would ultimately be very short lived.

At the time, Singapore was the most heavily populated state in Malaysia, and

though it was geographically small, it already made up 20% of Malaysia's total population.

As such, the political and economic influence of Singapore within Malaysia was very large for its small size, and

unlike the rest of Malaysia, which had a majority ethnic Malay population, Singapore had a significant majority of ethnic Chinese residents.

Ethnic, political, ideological and economic tensions between Singapore and the Malaysian central government quickly mounted, and

despite each of their previous assurances not to do so, Lee's People's Action Party, or pap, based in Singapore, and

the United Malays National Organization, or UMNO from the mainland both entered into each other's respective political spaces, which sparked significant race riots in Singapore in 1964.

Due to the Umno's support for affirmative action for Singapore's minority ethnic Malay population.

Then, fearing the Lee and the PAP from Singapore would gain more influence in central Malaysian politics.

And fearing his own loss of power and influence as a result, Malaysia's then Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, made a curious and highly unusual decision.

He decided to just expel Singapore out of Malaysia against their will in 1965, only two years after they joined to form Malaysia, which left Singapore as an unusual country in history that did not declare or even seek out their independence, but

had independence forcibly thrusted upon them.

To most Singaporeans at the time, the expulsion from Malaysia was viewed as being effectively a death sentence.

The country's future was deeply in doubt and uncertainty, and

there were almost countless problems that seemed insurmountable to overcome.

Singapore was a small and overcrowded island, home to more than 1.84 million people.

They had no available room to build out into, and

the infant country was rocked with high racial tensions between the various communities who call the island home, the Chinese, Malays and Tamils.

Singapore had never been its own country at any time in the past, throughout all of human history, and

it was entirely a product and legacy of British era colonialism, meaning that there was initially no sense of patriotism or common identity to keep the country's population together.

The unemployment rate stood at about 14% of the country's labor force.

Around half of the population was considered to be illiterate, and

a third of the population were squatters in slums that had been built out on the fringes of Singapore.

The country had absolutely zero natural resources of any kind, including any freshwater resources.

It was critically dependent on water imports from Malaysia, the country that had just kicked them out to be on their own.

And it had to import virtually the entirety of their energy resources from abroad as well.

Their infrastructure was still heavily damaged by the fighting of the Second World War.

And to top all of those problems off, the British Navy, which had once been the main driver of the island's economy with their major naval base there, had already fully withdrawn from Singapore after it had merged with Malaysia and was no longer there to offer any further economic aid.

Singapore was left on their own, with all of these internal problems and a hostile Malaysia immediately to their north, along with an aggressive and potentially expansionist Indonesia immediately to their south south, both of whom had vastly larger populations and resources available at their disposal.

Little wonder then that most Singaporeans at the time believed that their ejection from Malaysia was a death sentence.

And hardly anybody back then could have ever predicted just how spectacularly Singapore would overcome all of those formidable laws that were stacked up against it.

But Singapore's Greatest early strength was its strong leadership through Lee Kuan Yew and his papa.

Shortly after, Singapore was ejected from Malaysia, much to Lee's dismay, his resolve to keep Singapore alive and thriving despite the odds was summed up when he was quoted as saying, in a world where big fish eat small fish and where small fish eat shrimps, then Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp in order to survive.

An early foretelling of the often fanatical survival instinct that was forced onto Singapore and which became a deep part of the new nation's psyche and culture right up through to the present.

Other than that sheer will to survive, Lee Kuan Yew and the early PAP knew in 1965 that Singapore really only had two other things going for it.

One, from an international trade perspective, Singapore enjoyed an immensely strategically valuable location directly at the entrance to the Strait of Malacca, the trade route that represented the shortest possible maritime distance between China in the east and Europe in the west through the Suez Canal.