Wednesday, May 21, 2014

CPF: Experts tunnel vision


The trouble with experts is that like lumberjacks they think everything is a tree to be cut down. And it was just superficial and unsophisticated for ST to just come up with a piece like this. No one is wiser and policy makers must be upset too.

I am also unhappy with the CPF even as I read a couple of days ago the astute NYT op-ed writer David Brooks praising our system. He is right relatively speaking because the American system is more broken. That doesn't mean ours is good; it is less bad. This goes to my the hobby horse that we are just top students is a class of failures.

What we are forced to do is to keep working for as long as possible. This message is politically impossible to sell and so the government is allowing it to be drip fed to the public. Woe to those who get the message very late.

Retirement is for the lucky few. It is just unaffordable.

The most rational and practical approach is to try your best to navigate yourself into jobs that you love to do. You have a lifetime to become wise and achieve this. When work life balance is just life because work is so enjoyable, it beats retirement hands down. But people are myopic and cannot see beyond their present drudgery. In fact the older people even wish the same misery on the younger generation asking for better work-life balance. The old forgot they never ever worked nearly as hard in school as the youngsters these days. They enter work life tired. Fourteen to eighteen years of school is a sentence they could serve, but few have appetite for a lifetime of toil that they just survived.

Zuraidah Ibrahim and many bosses like her just don't get it. We have to reorganize work especially beginning with stop wasting time in the office like the Germans and Swiss have succeeded.

The young insistence in a work-life balance is a source of secret strength we have failed to see. The young aren't lazy but they are asking for a sustainable compact.

I think we should keep trying to give them what they want so that we also have what they are going to get and finally we stop thinking of retirement because we have succeeded at making work enjoyable. The financial experts tunnel vision will never think up such possibilities.

Ban retirement for most and we will also have a much less serious population problem. A government projection of a population of many old and sick people is just unrealistic. Meanwhile insurance companies will be making a huge pile from pessimism when the claims turn out to be far less than projected.








1 comment:

  1. Cpf is huge pile of stink things that when u start to dig it the smell so stink that u want to cover ur nose with all ur limb. But then u use up all ur limb, u cant dig.

    So people go, nobody dare to dig the stink things. Only the piler

    Laughing

    ReplyDelete