Someone was lecturing a group of us on the differences between Malaysia and Singapore, and he characterised them like so: In Singapore, you get ahead on the road by obeying traffic rules (not strictly true, but fair enough), but in Malaysia you need to break every rule and take every shortcut in order to do so.

Fair enough, but then in the latter case, while you yourself might get ahead, others are delayed and a few might even crash in swerving and/or braking to a halt in trying to avoid your dangerous and illegal manouevres.

So I guess it is an appropriate analogy in more than one way.

The same person also boasted of how Malaysia has more millionaires (or was it billionaires) per capita than Singapore (despite its per capita GDP being a third of the latter, according to geekgeek), and this gels with the traffic analogy - everyone thinks they have a chance to beat or lead the pack, but in the end the country as a whole lags behind.