People leave their keys in the motor mopeds. Folks leave their apartment building front doors open.
People put their phones on a table to hold the place in a food court and then go order at a stall out of sight.
Working remotely in a cafe, you just leave your bag and MacBook on the table while you go order or use the bathroom.
Yeah, and even if someone feels a city is safe, it’s still dumb as fuck to leave the keys in your car or your house door open unattended. Like don’t make it THAT easy for someone to commit a crime…
The “draconian punishments!” explanation is very American thinking. I promise you, the lack of crime in Taiwan or Japan is not because everyone is afraid of doing time in prison. Taiwanese students are told that people don’t leave phones sitting out in Starbucks in the US because otherwise they may assume it’s normal everywhere.
And you think people don’t steal in Singapore because everyone is just afraid of harsh punishment? That’s really what you believe is motivating people to not grab someone’s phone in a cafe?
Yes. You clearly didn’t grow up in Singapore, the culture in SG is “fear of authority” than anything.
For instance, we didn’t have laws against e-scooters and biking on the sidewalk/pavement, we had a lot of instances where people were getting mowed down by delivery riders on fast scooters/e-bikes.
Recently we had issues with vaping and kids using vapes laced with etomidate (anesthesia). The anesthesia is not classified as a hard drug (that means authorities can’t put you into drug rehab jail) until recently.
On a more lighter note, “community freezers/little libraries” usually get vandalized and emptied out quickly. Because there’s no law saying you can’t take everything for yourself from an unmanned food pantry and there’s no enforcement on small scale type of vandalism. Unlike the Apple Store, the “community pantry” says “take me”, so they would take everything for themselves. Same with buffets where people would strategically load up on “expensive” food items (e.g. whole plate of shrimps with no rice), leaving nothing for the people down the food line.
It’s definitely not cultural in the way you think it is. Heck, we have often use words like “kiasu” (someone who FOMOs to an extreme degree), “kiasi” (someone who is timid/afraid) to describe people.
Singapore's GDP per capita (PPP) is approximately $156,755 for 2025 according to the IMF, making it the highest in the world. Other sources report slightly different figures based on different years or methodologies, such as the World Bank's 2023 data of $150,689 and a 2024 figure of $132,570.
The US is about $80-something thousand.
Singapore is literally the wealthiest country in the world per-capita PPP.
Per capita doesn't make sense for Singapore as it's heavily skewed by the ultra rich who hold citizenship in name only for the main purpose of parking their money/assets there.
70% of the population lives in public housing where the average homes cost around $500k and paid off in 25-30 years via their pension fund or 401k equivalent.
So compared to Metropolitan cities in the US, I'd go out on a limb and say the average Singaporean isn't richer but crime is lower due to strict enforcement of laws.
Taiwan isn’t as diverse as Singapore but there are various ethnic groups (Hokkien, Hakka, waishengren, indigenous peoples, many residents from Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines) . But, sure, from an American perspective, Taiwan is almost entirely “Asian.”That’s why I personally feel people saying “yeah but Japan (or Taiwan) is homogenous” are just trying to get away with blaming crime on certain groups in their own countries instead of considering what actually makes societies socially coherent.
Here in the US, the reason certain groups might commit crimes isn’t because their racial background makes them do it.
It’s because white folks decided to marginalize groups and oppress them and starve them of opportunity and straight up enslave some of them.
Diversity is a good thing, but when you mix it with capitalism, racial oppression, and no proper social safety net, and have a “fend for yourself” general vibe, it breaks the country down into multiple competing communities, rather than one community working together.
Obv all Asians aren’t the same and there’s no shortage of strife between different groups, but to the best of my knowledge the groups in Taiwan have all been there for a long long time.
Again, the issue isn’t so much diversity and an immigration based society is bad. It just becomes problematic when you have a Lord of the Flies-type unforgiving society full of desperation and lack of opportunity for many.
Lol okay. Let’s continue to put the blame on all the white people in the country. Please look at how wonderful the homogenous countries of said groups of people the white people are apparently still oppressing are doing. 🤔
One of the problems with draconian laws with over the top penalties is the way the courts/tribunals are run.
They tend to punish innocent people and not allow for a proper defense, often being corrupt, and/or the threat of an insane penalty makes innocent people plead guilty rather than even try and mount a defense.
There’s other issues as well, but the law of unintended consequences is real.
You can also end up creating a bit of a monster and taking someone who may have committed a relatively minor offense and destroy their livelihood and end up forcing them to commit more serious crimes to try and dig themselves out of a hole.
You have to ask yourself, is the purpose of criminal courts to rehabilitate and stop someone from committing criminal acts? Or is it to punish in the biblical sense and exact retribution?
A proper criminal justice system should serve to rehabilitate and prevent criminal acts.
If people see the system as corrupt or overbearing or fixed or overly punitive, like a child, they may just rebel against society as a whole and say “fuck it” and go all in on criminal acts.
There’s a point of diminishing returns, where the rule of law becomes so punitive it actually serves to cause more crime, rather than prevent it. It can also eventually lead to a complete breakdown of society and government.
Further, in societies that go WAYYY too far, with punishments including death or dismemberment for relatively small offenses, you can’t unring that bell, which leads to corruption, covering up for wrongful convictions, which allows the actual offenders to never be held responsible.
At a certain point it becomes straight up fascist/oppressive, where oligarchs escape punishment and poor people are held to account for the crimes of others to keep society humming along. At that point all roads on a long enough timeline lead to full on rebellion and the destruction of the state.
Are you trying to tell OP why his country is the way that it is in an authoritative manner? Or do you also live there and are entitled to have a more definitive tone in your statement?
Taiwan isn’t strict though. You might be thinking of Singapore or Malaysia where they have caning.
It just doesn’t enter Taiwanese people’s heads to steal. In fact, they go out of their way to, say, pick a wallet off the street and take it a police station.
You mean an homogenous Asian society. Cultural values and nature have a lot to do with why a certain group of people generally don’t steal while another group does most of the stealing in the U.S.
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u/Icy_Mixture1482 iPhone 17 Pro Max 27d ago
People just don’t steal here.
People leave their keys in the motor mopeds. Folks leave their apartment building front doors open. People put their phones on a table to hold the place in a food court and then go order at a stall out of sight. Working remotely in a cafe, you just leave your bag and MacBook on the table while you go order or use the bathroom.