Lee Kuan Yew is known to have strict authoritarian and disciplinarian policies. He basically forged Singapore from a couple square miles of swampy marshland with no natural water or resources into what is is today.
It's no longer that way, but it's been molded that way that it's a Brave New World sort of life. It's quite strange over there. Very clean and safe, but there are tons of extremely strict laws.
Do you have another description for a society where you can't buy chewing gum, caning is a punishment meted out by courts, and making a video criticizing Lee Kwan Yew can land you in jail? Where there is no freedom of association and the press freedom ratings are consistently poor? I don't think the idea that Singapore is an authoritarian state is even controversial.
Well where you are is presumably better than El Salvador when it come to terms of crime and wealth, and better than Singapore in terms of freedom.
If you were currently living in El Salvador with a family, would you move to Singapore for freedom? Conversely, if you were currently living in Singapore with a family, would you move to Singapore for safety and money?
The two places are so different I don't know what the point of the comparison is. It's not like you turn up the authoritarianism meter and it becomes a safe place to live. Many countries combine authoritarianism with high rates of violent crime and poverty.
Because the post I'm replying to made the same equation, referring to "strict control" and naming places under such rule. In a discussion about what to do about US suburbs I don't think El Salvador, a poor country whose civil war ended in 1992, is even the least bit relevant.
No, the post you responded to says that density without strict oversight leads to all the bad things you were talking about. I cannot think of a counterexample.
Density with strict oversight seems like it could lead to a flourishing society, which is what has happened in those other examples.
It's very easy to have density with strict oversight lead to bad results, but some form of strict oversight seems like a prerequisite to prosperous density. Anything else it seems like you're reading what you want to read out of the statement.
Well, increased density is off the table without massive forced birth control/a massive die off. The population of the world has massively spiked in the last fifty years, the trend is continuing especially in poor countries, and all these people have to go somewhere.
A dense city is the only place for them to go and try to support themselves, since there isn't enough good land around for subsistence farming. Density is a given, in the future. Whether or not it makes people happy is an entirely other thing.
This article entirely concerns the United States and changing policy to encourage more density in its cities, so I'm not seeing the relevance of third-world birth rates. Prosperity does tend to significantly reduce birth rates.
> Prosperity does tend to significantly reduce birth rates.
Ah, so you support closed borders? "Shithole" countries tend to make lots of babies that want to come to non-shithole countries. So you think the United States should shut down more immigration and move towards a more rural and dispersed society?
