Japan is also one of the least diverse developed countries with well over 90% of inhabitants being Yamato Japanese. It is unsurprising that it would be safe, clean, and functional.
Is it really that unique? I just looked up the Czech Republic to find that it is 95% Czech[1] but nobody goes around writing articles about whether it is possible to replicate how safe, clean, and functional the Czech Republic is.
Finland also appears to be about 90% Finnish (with 5% Swedish).
Portugal appears to be 95% Portuguese.
South Korea is also over 90%.
Ireland is 85% Irish.
I'm tired of Googling but the more I look, the less I think your point has any validity at all.
Finland and South Korea are absolutely held as a model of civilized society. Very low crime rates, very clean and very orderly. Don't know about Czech but it's possible that being culturally homogeneous is a necessary but insufficient condition, after all I'm sure most of us can name some very homogenous countries that are an absolute nightmare to live in. That said, Dubai and Singapore are also very safe and orderly but they are very culturally diverse, so who knows...
Does anyone know what Australia is like? I hear good things about it, and it is very homogeneous.
> Does anyone know what Australia is like? I hear good things about it, and it is very homogeneous.
Never been there, but Australia has a very low murder rate (0.9 homicide victims per 100k people). But it's also not what I'd call homogeneous, as 30% of residents there were born overseas, higher than the US (14%). Not as much ethnic diversity nationwide, but some of its cities are extremely diverse. 43.2% of Sydney is foreign-born, the 3rd highest percent of any city in the world, with there being Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, Fijian, Korean, Nepalese, Ghanaian and several other communities located inside it.
Canada is another very safe place (murder rate is 2.0 per 100k) and 23% of residents are foreign born. It's also somewhat ethnically diverse as well, with 30.2% of the population being visible minorities. There's also linguistic fractionalization between Quebec and the rest of the country. 49.0% of Toronto is foreign born, the 2nd highest percentage in the world, and Vancouver's not far behind at 42.5% (4th highest in the world).
So Singapore, Australia and Canada are 3 examples of diverse countries with incredibly little violent crime (Singapore actually has slightly less murder per capita than Japan). That's not to say diversity can't result in conflict, but those examples do show that it doesn't have to result in it, and that diverse, peaceful societies can and do exist.
It's not a race thing, it's a trust and culture thing.
There are diverse countries that have similar levels of safety like Singapore.
If your government sucks, laws are poorly enforced or even maliciously enforced - there is low trust among the people, no respect for public spaces and no one follows the social norms.
Singapore's achieves "harmony" in their diverse city-state through severe authoritarian control. There's harmony because the state dictates their vison of harmony which all must abide by.
Make no mistake. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Eventually the outcome of authoritarian harmony comes actual harmony as people become used to the rules and follow those rules regardless of whether or not they exist.
The freedom to shit on the street in San Francisco shouldn't be a freedom that is valued At all.
Let's not conflate people being clean because the government is notoriously lethal and is tracking your social standing with people being clean because they've been taught from a young age to be respectful to the environment.
Authoritarian 'harmony' doesn't imply any sort of longevity.
Sure. But make sure you also conflate freedom with people dying from the opioid epidemic, the huge drug problem in San Francisco and homeless encampments everywhere and the complete and utter failure to build one rail line connecting LA and SF.
All of these problems occur because the US values individual freedoms over central authority. You will note:
Freedom doesn't imply any sort of longevity Either.
The problem with the west is that freedom is viewed as a sort of moral truth.
People assume that an authoritarian society is bad and that a society with freedom is good.
The truth is far more complex. What I say is an aspect of the truth, as is what you say.
What truly should absolutely never be conflated is the idea that one of these truths overrides the other.
Benjamin Franklin said it best imho: "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
A lot of the modern emphasis on explaining away people's behaviour as an inevitable outcome of their poverty/race/culture/history (depending on who you ask) is a leading cause of a lot of the problems we see imho.
One of the core beliefs our society is based on is that God gave us free will so we can make choices. While some degree of corrective was maybe necessary as current and historical wrongs do impact us today, it has gone too far imo. Someone at some point of time has to break a cycle by making a choice to be a better person.
Maybe at first. Singapore had to make lots of tough decisions early on, and they fixed it early. Problems which still plague their neighbors to this day.
I say today, the base economic situation of the people and the disparity of wealth is a bigger factor to what makes a country -overall safe or unsafe, which is what the thread is about and what I was replying to.
When measured by income or accumulated wealth, Singapore has huge inequality.
When measured by things like access to good education, infrastructure, housing, things look more equal.
A big temper to any real authoritarian tendencies in Singapore is that it's easy for our inhabitants to vote with their feet: people can and do leave. Thanks to some special diplomatic deals, Singaporeans have special access to working visas for the US, too. So Singapore can only be as authoritarian as McDonald's: there's no vote for what goes onto a Big Mac, but if you don't like it, you can always go to Burger King.
I'm a big fan of subsidiarity and local decisions making, exactly so that when people vote with their feet, they don't have to travel too far to get meaningful change.
It sounds like a boring, middle-of-the-road principle; but it gives you such radical sounding conclusions as 'a federal minimum wage is bonkers, why couldn't the counties (or even cities) handle that issue by themselves?'
Singapore routinely cracks down on any sort of “racial disharmony” and has zero issues with race based rules like banning public drinking in Little India.
The government fully admits the racial mix creates unique problems they always have to be on top of.
I’m sure it would be messier and less safe without that but every other supermajority East Asian city is also very safe compared to Western Europe or North America. Hong Kong before and after handover, Seoul, Beijing, all safe. All far poorer than Chicago which is much more violent.
I live in Singapore. Yes, it's also incredibly safe, clean, and functional. It's a very different place from Tokyo, though.
Chiang Mai in Thailand also seemed safe and trustworthy when I was there a few months ago: eg the locals casually left stuff outside and on their motorbikes, petty theft of unattended items seems to be no problem.
Our neighbour Malaysia seems to have more problems with these issues. Looking into the causes of the differences between countries would be interesting. I suspect in Singapore our development is at least partially the result of deliberate social engineering by LKY.
I can also tell you that after 40 years of 'actually existing socialism' vs 'social market economy', that East Germany had markedly lower trust and safety than West Germany. And the wounds still haven't healed. Switzerland has even higher trust.
You can see similar gaps in Taiwan/Hong Kong vs mainland China.
The Japanese government, like France, does not track ethnicity stats. When you see a number like this it means Japanese citizens, not “ethnic Japanese”.
(Ethnic Japanese are nearly the same people as Koreans too, but that doesn’t stop them being racist against each other, so it is all kind of made up.)
There’s also very many more immigrants in Tokyo these days.
At least in America it’s the combination of racial diversity and racial inequality. That certainly creates a lot of justification for some crimes (when the system is perceived to be rigged against you anyways).
Japan was just as monoethnic as it is now when it was sending their own soldiers to die in the Philippines, when its guards murdered a British merchant for not yielding the way[1], or when it executed christians by thousands. Any long-lived country ends up with a list of great or terrible achievements, regardless of its ethnic makeup. It's a silly argument.
> Students for Fair Admissions, accuse Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants in order to boost representation from other groups.
Why does this argument need to be framed entirely as discrimination against Asian Americans? Affirmative action clearly harms White people too. Are White people so incapable of advocating for themselves that they can only point out a policy is bad when it harms another minority group?
Well when the narrative is that all white people are at least slightly racist and that only white people can be racist to begin with, white people aren't really allowed to advocate for themselves, and any instance of it would immediately be designated as a hate group.
I'm waiting for the day that "caring about discrimination against asian americans" is listed by the ADL as a dog whistle for white supremacy.
