To be clear, I am not blaming Singapore on this one.  But it is striking to me how much Americans do not talk about Singapore any more.  They are much, much more likely to talk about Europe or England, for instance.  I see several reasons for this:

1. Much of the Singapore fascination came from the right-wing, as the country offered (according to some) a right-wing version of what a technocracy could look like.  Yet today’s American political right is not very interested in technocracy.

2. Singapore willingly takes in large numbers of immigrants (in percentage terms), and tries to make that recipe work through a careful balancing act.  That approach still is popular with segments of the right-wing intelligentsia, but it is hardly on the agenda today.  For the time being, it is viewed as something “better not to talk about.”  Especially in light of some of the burgeoning anti-Asian sentiment, for instance from Helen Andrews and some others.  It is much more common that Americans talk about foreign countries mismanaging their immigration policies, for instance the UK and Sweden.

3. Singaporean government looks and feels a bit like a “deep state.”  I consider that terminology misleading as applied to Singapore, but still it makes it harder for many people to praise the place.

4. Singapore is a much more democratic country than most outsiders realize, though they do have an extreme form of gerrymandering.  Whatever you think of their system, these days it no longer feels transgressive, compared to alternatives being put into practice or at least being discussed.  Those alternatives range from more gerrymandering (USA) to various abrogations of democracy (potentially all over).  In this regard Singapore, without budging much on its own terms, seems like much more of a mainstream country than before.  That means there is less to talk about.

4b. Singapore’s free speech restrictions, whatever you think of them, no longer seem so far outside the box.  Trump is suing plenty of people.  The UK is sending police to knock on people’s doors for social media posts, and so on.  That too makes Singapore more of a “normal country,” for better or worse (I would say worse).

5. The notion of an FDI-driven, MNE-driven growth strategy seems less exciting in an era of major tech advances, most of all AI.  Singapore seems further from the frontier than a few years ago.  People are wishing to talk about pending changes, not predictability, with predictability being a central feature of many Singaporean service exports.

6. If you want to talk about unusual, well-run small countries, UAE is these days a more novel case to consider, with more new news coming out of it.

Sorry Singapore, we are just not talking about you so much right now!  But perhaps, in some significant ways, that is a blessing in disguise.  At least temporarily.  I wrote this post in part because I realize I have not much blogged about Singapore for some years, and I was trying to figure out why.

Addendum, from Ricardo in the comments:

Bryan writes:

Tyler tries to cure my immigration backlash confusion, but not to my satisfaction.  The overarching flaw: He equivocates between two different versions of “backlash to immigration.”

Version 1: Letting in more immigrants leads to more resistance to immigration.

Version 2: Letting in more immigrants leads to so much resistance to immigration that the total stock of immigration ultimately ends ups lower than it would have been.

Backlash in the first sense is common, but no reason for immigration advocates to moderate.  Backlash in the second sense is a solid reason for immigration advocates to moderate, but Tyler provides little evidence that backlash in this sense is a real phenomenon.

Do read the whole thing, but I feel I am obviously right here.  Bryan should read newspapers more!  If I did not provide much evidence that backlash is a significant phenomenon, it is because I thought it was pretty obvious.  A few points:

1. I (and Bryan all the more so) want more immigration than most voters want.  But I recognize that if you strongly deny voters their preferences, they will turn to bad politicians to limit migration.  So politics should respect voter preferences to a reasonable degree, even though at the margin people such as myself will prefer more immigration, and also better immigration rules and systems.

2. The anti-immigrant politicians who get elected are very often toxic.  And across a wide variety of issues.  The backlash costs range far wider than just immigration policies.  (I do recognize this does not apply in every case, for instance Meloni in Italy seems OK enough and is not a destructive force.  She also has not succeeded in limiting migration, and probably cannot do so without becoming toxic.  So maybe that story is not over yet.  In any case, consider how many of the other populist right groups have a significant pro-Russia element, Russia being right now probably the most evil country in the world.)

3. If immigration runs “out of control” (as voters perceive it) in your country, there will be anti-immigrant backlash in other countries too.  For instance in Japan and Poland.  Bryan considers only backlash in the single country of origin.  In Japan, for instance, voters just handed their PM a new and powerful mandate, in large part because of the immigration issue.  The message was “what is happening in other countries, we do not want that happening here.”  The globalization of communications and debate increases the scope and power of the backlash effect considerably.

Most of all, it is simply a mistake to let populist right parties become the dominant force in Europe, and sometimes elsewhere as well.  You might think it is not a mistake because we need them to limit migration.  Well, that is not my view, but I am arguing it is a mistake to get to that margin to begin with.

In short, we need to limit migration to prevent various democracies from going askew.  Nothing in that argument contradicts the usual economic (and other) arguments for a lot of immigration being a good thing.  And still it is a good thing to try to sell one’s fellow citizens on the case for more immigration.  Nonetheless we are optimizing subject to a constraint, namely voter opinion.  Why start off an intertemporal bargaining game by trying to seize as much surplus (immigration) as possible?  That to me is obvious, more obvious every day I might add.