At lunchtime today, I walked five minutes to a café across the street. While waiting at the traffic light at the Le Duan - Hai Ba Trung intersection, I stood next to several delivery drivers whose shirts were soaked with sweat.
An opinion piece recently published on VnExpress described scenes like this as a form of "cooling poverty" and proposed several remedies: A national heatwave plan, public cooling centers, and greater obligations for delivery platforms.
All of those ideas deserve serious consideration.
But looking at those drivers, I found myself thinking that the issue goes beyond the redistribution of comfort, that it is not primarily a welfare question but one of national productivity evaporating hour by hour on roads that reach 50 degrees Celsius.
Singapore rose from a poor colonial outpost to a global financial center within a single generation. The usual explanations are industrialization, public housing, education, and anti-corruption reforms. But there is another piece of the story that receives far less attention, despite Lee Kuan Yew placing it alongside those achievements.
