For me nothing shouts as loudly the short term pressure we face to keep this place going, to have positive GDP growth every year than charts like these. I mean, you can really feel how the numbers might go down and how hard it is to grow them.
And this one is even more intimate. You can walk into any branded shops along Orchard Road look at our current sticker prices disdainfully because we are losing competitiveness.
So even as I press on and off that we really need to think and act long term, I am not unsympathetic to the short term pressure the government face and can appreciate whey the PM and his ministers often talked about balancing the various push and pull.
Nevertheless these aren't good enough excuses for not working for the long term. However this government has become so used and smug at optimizing the short term it is not willing to become sub-optimal for the long term especially when it has lost the ability to craft a long term objective function to optimize. On the other hand the hard core supporters of Singapore are all long term thinkers because they are always factoring their children and their old age in their analysis. Unfortunately most people cannot work these hard stuff out all on their own. They can recognize a good long term plan though, not something like the population white paper of course.
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