I'm sure you saw some wonderful places. I was amazed by Singapore, for example. On the other hand, seeing the nicest part of the capital of Thailand is not really looking at the whole picture in a wide variety of ways.

As Legolas pointed out, these wonderful new infrastructure projects in Asia are built at a cut rate because the labor is so inexpensive. When I was in Beijing last they were building a new highway and had thousands upon thousands of people working on it. It's easy to gather a huge workforce that lives in poverty - cargo container barracks, in some cases, working hideous hours. And then let's not forget that the permits that they need to get the project done are issued with record speed, and whoever happens to be on the land it takes up is moved off quite unceremoniously.

In many countries, these lovely projects aren't just meant to showcase the rising economic power of the nation in question, but also to justify the insane cost of building them, which cost helps mask the massive kickbacks, bribes and corruption that underlie it all. Oh, we have that, too, but not on the same scale or level of audacity.

And, even if you discount the miserable parts of town that you didn't see, you also discounted the poverty of the areas around the capital and deeper into the countryside. You probably also didn't have to worry about the ground, water and air pollution that the project created in those poorer areas, because the food and drinks that you had were cleaner to keep the tourists safe.

Those poorer areas are everywhere, though. If you had been to Manila you wouldn't be able to miss the beggars, the people who set fires in disused oil drums to burn trash to stay warm at night, the running filth of open sewers that children play in and the shanty towns. You wouldn't be able to miss them because the city grew in chaotic ways and you notice it on the ride from the airport to the Makati Shangri-La, where your hotel room is large enough to house three families and the staff is, as everywhere in Asia, incredibly friendly, polite and helpful. You would notice it in Hong Kong if you had flown into the old Kai Tak airport because it flew through some poorer parts of Kowloon (between the buildings) when landing. If you had flown in back in the 1980s, you'd even see the decrepit tenements of the Walled City of Kowloon, an area that was outside any law due to some odd international arrangements (it was the only point of Chinese sovereign territory in the British colony and the PRC refused to let Hong Kong police enter, but also refused to exercise their own sovereignty, partially to spite the UK). As it is, there are still plenty of filthy sections of Hong Kong (and by "filth" I don't mean Failed in London Trying Hong Kong, the acronym for so many slumming expats), and it almost always smells like hot garbage in even the nicer areas of Central. So I'm assuming you didn't go to Hong Kong, either.

I'm also assuming you never went to Jakarta, which is a city that, while nominally clean in most places, is brutally poor and run-down in many places, particularly Kota (the Indonesian word simply means "city" but it means the seedy red light district).

I also would guess you didn't go to many industrial cities in China, some of which are so polluted that one wonders if it will ever be clean.

Ultimately, places like Bangkok and Singapore are clean and nice because they can rely on cheap labor, cultural dispositions that keep society orderly, and also a certain level of authoritarian control. Don't forget how clean the USSR was when you lived there.

For what it's worth, just meditate on this: every year, thousands of wealthy families from Asian countries buy green cards through the EB-5 program because they worry about the safety of the air, water and food over there, because they worry about the safety of their money in nations that don't respect the rule of law to the same extent we do, and because they want their children to be free to express themselves.

But yes, New York could be cleaner. I've always suggested taking the homeless, boiling them into soap, and cleaning the streets with said soap.