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Comment by taink | Hacker News Reader

Singapore remains an authoritarian state, not a democracy. It allowed for massive progress in a difficult political climate but it does so at the cost of a good amount of political freedoms. That might be fine, but not in all cultures.

I also challenge the notion that higher pay leads to less corruption. If so, then why are Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway ranked higher in the corruption perception index[1], when they are paid much, much less annually (especially Finland)[2]?

[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 (https://archive.ph/fabjP)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_salaries_of_heads_of_s... (https://archive.ph/XGbpO)

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Crazy that you've been downvoted for this. The single ruling party of Singapore for the past 70 years, the People's Action Party, is overtly fascist. But I guess people are eager to overlook that because they like the results? Seems like a barely warmed over reformulation of 'they make the trains run on time.'

But that is a perceptions index. People are going to answer based on what they heard about the previous year's index.

Of course it's hard to find the "actual corruption" figures, but that doesn't mean the perceptions index is of any value.

This is the best authoritative source that I could find. The few assertions I've seen that Singapore is less corrupt than most european and north american countries quote Transparency International as a source, so I assume it might be an acceptable one. They also supplement their findings with a "GCB" survey[1] (which is less recent), and given enough time I guess there are other sources one could find.

These are surveys, so there's a limit to how reliable their results can be. However, I find surveys are a pretty good start when you need to get a general idea on how something does and you can't just measure it. How you value that is up to you, that's why I quote it in my comment.

[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/gcb

Yeah it's not entirely crazy when you are talking about something to quote whatever you can find.

But on this particular index, I strongly suspect it is simply continuing existing biases. It's the thing people quote and by quoting it you get reinforce next year's rankings. Plus it's the kind of thing nobody can ever verify due to its nature.

Assuming what you say here is true (which in my opinion is a pretty high leap), one could then ask why those biases exist in the first place. I expect authoritarian states to enable corruption but it's the contrary in the case of Singapore. Why? Because I doubt it boils down to the salary of the ministers.

On a side note, it might be interesting to see the evolution of this index over the years for any given country; that might lead to interesting conclusions on the bias confirmation you're talking about!

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