He was an overrated thug. What good he did (e.g. HDBs) was largely a result of arm twisting and fear - of domestic communists, and being smart enough to listen to Albert Winsemius (attracting foreign investment).
He's popular in the Western media because he treated foreign investors like kings. They're happy to trumpet the successes and sweep the uglier side under the carpet and indulge the cult of personality he built.
Singapore's geography, meanwhile, is not given nearly enough credit. It had probably the world's most strategically located deep water port and being a city state helps keep the government on its toes and avoid corruption (in stark contrast to, say, Brazil/Myanmar) :
You can criticize LKY for many things, but a "cult of personality" is not one of them. Even after his death, and his will was very clear about this, there are precisely zero statues or portraits of the man, and neither are there any airports etc named after him. Hell, there's an ongoing legal dispute among his heirs about how serious he was about bulldozing the rather modest bungalow where he lived, instead of converting it into a museum. The only thing named after him is the Lee Kuan Yew Institute of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.
All that said, I do agree that Goh Keng Swee (who?) doesn't get nearly enough credit for the economic policy that make Singapore possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goh_Keng_Swee
What's an airport name when you can get a week of mourning declared when you die?
They set up his body on display in a way that's eerily reminiscent of Kim Jong Il did when he died.
He said he didn't want a personality cult (more likely he didn't want to be seen to be having one) but still set one up anyway.
The press (notoriously one of the least free in the world) lionized him frequently and enthusiastically and attributed the various successes to his keen intelligence and vision, etc. Meanwhile he bankrupted detractors with libel lawsuits with savage abandon in an attempt to quash any criticism.
They've had some good results though. From poor and third worldy they now rank
GNP PPP/capita #2 (USA #7)
Corruption perceptions index #3 (USA #26)
Life expectancy #5 (USA #40)
they must have been doing something right. I'm sure the US was way ahead on all of those back in 1965. Also I was in that part of the world last year when the race riots broke out in the US and it looked terrible - Singapore is one of the most racially mixed countries in the world and seems to deal with that much better.
They did a number of things right. Nonetheless under less fortuitous circumstances Lee Kuan Yew would still be ruling a third world country with an iron fist.
They've also had race riots - there was one while I was living there in 2013 on race course road.
It was urban unrest driven by anger against systemic discrimination against people with dark skin triggered by a fatal accident caused by a perpetrator of a different race who wasnt punished.
I think arguing that it wasn't about race and bore no similarities whatsoever to America is stretching it just a bit. Don't you think?
You're looking at this through a very American lens. The riots were kindled by the many frustrations of being a migrant worker in Singapore, which are much more about class/poverty than skin color (for one thing, there is a very large Chinese migrant worker contingent as well), and it was triggered by a traffic accident, not (eg) police brutality.
There is a racial hierarchy among migrant workers in Singapore (as well as among citizens). Mainland Chinese are at the top, people from the subcontinent at the bottom. This is partly what inspired the riot. They are the lowest "caste" in Singapore - even below other migrant workers. their friend died in front of their eyes largely because he, like them, was at the bottom of the ladder and they (police,first responders,the govt) could not give a shit whether he lived or died. So he died.
It also inspired the bus driver strikes - partly because this racial hierarchy was encoded into pay.
American racism is often more subtle (you won't get lower published pay rates for blacks) but tends to be more brutal at the same time (routine police beatings). Not fun being part of either system.
He's popular in the Western media because he treated foreign investors like kings. They're happy to trumpet the successes and sweep the uglier side under the carpet and indulge the cult of personality he built.
Singapore's geography, meanwhile, is not given nearly enough credit. It had probably the world's most strategically located deep water port and being a city state helps keep the government on its toes and avoid corruption (in stark contrast to, say, Brazil/Myanmar) :
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19027/w190...
This is why a lot of its success is not really replicable elsewhere.