What I am going to write next has nothing to do with river water pollution in Canada or the Singapore River. We are doing much better than them if that is one take away from reading the story, a pretty typical Singaporean observation.
It is the thoughts which surfaced in my mind from reading the story that I want to record (as usual not so much share, but record). It is about the choice we made regarding public housing ownership and perhaps paying our ministers million dollars packages. More to the point, I am thinking of the educational choices we allow the government to make for our children and the environment we have created to bring them up.
How do you link up home ownership, ministers' pay and education?
Home Ownership & Education: This girl had a sense of ownership of her country because she could do something about it. In their culture such initiatives are encouraged. We pretend to do the same because when we discover what others are doing, we can't disavow that but what we do is that we neglect and starve those possibilities because we choose "our way" i.e., how we compete in school and then for jobs and success which is always narrowly defined here. The decision looked good at the beginning but all good choices have some ways to turn bad over time and we are there now.
Two trends. There is a shift in developed societies to move away from owning to sharing/renting. It is further along in Japan, America and Europe but it should become increasingly prominent here as home schooling is becoming. The other is a wake up call to what a 99-year lease means, which the public is presently quite unhappy about. This is not the government fault but they took advantage of people's misunderstanding of a leasehold when it was convenient for them to win elections.
When we use home ownership to anchor our sense of belonging, in a top down society we are, other forms of ownership are neglected and perhaps heavily discouraged. The consequence is we will not produce kids like this 11-year old Canadian. In fact we educated our kids not to be like her but pretend we did not and could even point to features of our education system supporting that as evidence. But that is missing the point. Beyond the first two or at most three top priorities, the other priorities are practically as good as absent. Simply after you have focused the lion's share of your time and effort on the top priorities (mostly exams outcomes) the rest are often a chore unless they help you to succeed on the recognized path.
Home ownership will no longer anchor Singaporeans to this place like before and we did not bring up our kids to be like this young Canadian. We have crossed the bridge and there is no turning back. How to deal with this challenge? Since we are a top down society, we look to the government for solutions and this bring us to ministers' pay and quality of leadership.
Ministers' Pay and Quality: We pay them to perpetuate the past but not preserve the status quo. What does this mean? It means keep things the same with small adjustments. Following this economic growth can only become slower and limited. The law of diminishing return is an iron law in Economics. However our leaders do not suffer the same life situation that we all do. They pay themselves first and they play heads they win, tails we lose, which I often wrote about here back in 2011. There is no need to repeat them.
The apt metaphor is that government under LHL is flogging an old horse. When he says "work harder" that is exactly what is needed because the horse is old. Exiting the metaphor, it means the paradigm of governing Singapore is tired and cannot produce many new ideas. Once we seized opportunities now we face limitations. Typically such limitations are overcome by taxes and they warned us it is going up.
They also play it very safe. That way their positions are secure. But the total risk the country faces is like a pie. If the government assume less risk then the bulk of the risk must fall on the rest. Big business also has the power to transfer risk to workers and between them they form the elite. That is the conceptual underpinning to heads they win, tails we lose. All these come about because we have a pay system which rewards caution and self preservation. At the end of the day ministers look after themselves, their families and their party first as the proxy for putting Singapore first. We ranked last especially when you fall outside their plans. And this will happen to practically everyone since all must eventually grow old. What have they done about the growing problem of ageism. They only appear to try very hard but there are no results. We should only pay for results and not hard work. In this sense they are overpaid for what they are delivering. They are mostly delivering for the elites. The ranks of billionaires here will grow.
GIC as an example of transferring risk: GIC invests CPF monies but a huge chunk of the returns is used to fund the budget together with contributions from Temasek. It is actually a deep indirect taxation on the CPF member for it explains why he/she isn't getting higher returns. Unless you are a high income earner and frugal at the same time you will not leave enough in the CPF for retirement because as the income was made, a large chunk went to finance the budget. Sure, taxes are low but indirect taxes are high. In other words real taxes are high. They pull wool over our faces when they say their good administration keep taxes low.
We can't go back and choose differently but growing unhappiness will produce viable options eventually but it takes a lot longer to happen here than elsewhere.
Update: Aug 20 7:45 am
Yes, what the PM proposed at the NDR yesterday regarding housing was innovative. It is the linchpin for anchoring Singaporeans to this island. This is the road we must travel as long as we are still able to lay new road. It is scary when we run out of road but for now the PAP is confident it would be good for the next twenty years at least.
The government has near total control of real estate and so the power to make things happen. On issues which we are price takers the problems are nearly impossible to solve e.g., replacing good jobs aging PMETs lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment