PAP's New Strategy - will it work?

[eremarf]

Re: ECB and IMF - so you think they knowingly went with austerity, with full knowledge that their actions would harm society but enrich themselves? Or were they blindly obeying neo-liberal ideology and orthodoxy (like some person on this forum)? In any case - I don't know if the European people themselves were against ECB recommendations (seems like those who would benefit did support ECB right? e.g. Germans, French, etc - it's the victims of austerity who didn't, as we can see from all the public protests in Greece, Spain, etc). In England it seems the press/media is much more willing to criticise banks, and as a result politicians are more able to act against banks.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012...ssold-swaps-what-excuse-does-the-us-have.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012...n-and-northern-ireland-from-mrs-n-turner.html

There are two things. To keep up our level of prosperity at the level of the individual is important. Too often, we are given the GDP for the entire nation, and that fudges a lot of things: population growth, the distribution of wealth. It is not that wealth is bad, but they are pretending the question of who has the money is not important. The solution is extremely simple: we should report GINI figures and GDP. Not only must the economy expand, but also the distribution of wealth must improve. Failure to achieve either one would mean it's a bad year. But do you think they will ever do anything like that?

In other words, the KPIs or metrics of "good performance" ought to be widened. Notwithstanding Khaw Boon Wan's slurs about happiness in Bhutan, I think and hope our government is moving towards such metrics (a little belatedly and behind not just advanced nations like those in Scandinavia, but also Thailand which tries to measure national happiness and well-being levels).

Well, the National Conversation is not over and I hope this gets addressed. But like you I'm not really optimistic that it will. The PAP is good at distracting people, changing the topic of conversation, hearing only the good things, etc. We've given them lots of chances but they seem to be their despicable old selves (when it comes to representing the people who elected them).

And maybe I fear that most Singaporeans' happiness is built on money rather than other things (love, physical and mental peace and security, good social relations, access to nature and space, etc). Maybe I'm just in the wrong country, and should leave Singapore for the "real" Singaporeans.

It is hard to tell. There are 2 arguments. First, if you take away safety nets, then people will all be forced to work harder. The opposite argument is that you need to provide people with all the basic neccesities, and after that they feel free to take whatever risks they want to take. Since there are merits to both, it's hard to tell either way. But the facts on the ground is that the US is ahead when it comes to innovation. Not only now, but for the last 100+ years. Nobody has ever managed to catch up with them in this respect, except for Japan during a short period of 20-30 years. And today, nobody will ever say that Japan is more innovative than the US.

Yup - so we perceive two different things at work here. Taking away safety nets generates one sort of incentive. Providing safety nets generates another sort. So at least we know safety nets aren't just dis-incentiving.

Well, really about innovation and the US, there're plenty of rebuttals of Acemoglu et al - which I can't really evaluate. But here's one (not too technical, with various metrics of innovation) for sample, so you can judge whether the US is really innovating well compared to other countries.

One thing which is sure is - the US has managed to maintain higher levels of GDP per capita than most other countries (especially if you exclude city-states without rural sectors). If the end-goal really is JUST to make money - probably the US is doing something right. What's not so sure is whether they're doing it through innovation or there're other factors involved (some historians/anthropologists think the US' hegemonic position (not just military-politically but also in finance), tributary/client state relations, etc are important). Not really an easy model to imitate - which is why I distrust Acemoglu et al judging the US to be more innovative just because of GDP.

At least I think one thing we both agree on is - technology (a broad sense of technology to include processes and practices) is good for us. The question we don't have an answer to is - how is innovation/technological progress related to varying degrees of social welfare via redistribution of wealth? (I'm not going to try to say social welfare or redistribution are good - that's for Singaporeans to decide - but Singaporeans need to know how social welfare and wealth redistribution affects other aspects of life and society to decide.)



Re: innovation and creativity

Well, I'm no expert on these. Let's stick to your definitions so we can talk coherently.

I think adult Singaporeans aren't very creative, by and large, although it's changing very quickly (the digital generation seem to be much more creative and unbounded by older ideas of limits). But workplace culture is very much set by un-creative un-open-minded leadership - so like you said - innovation doesn't happen much.

Yes I was referring to Chang Ha-Joon commenting on S. Korea - he gave the example of everyone wanting to be a doctor (leading to a shortage of talent going into "risky" jobs e.g. engineers). Which doesn't seem to have hurt Samsung's ability to make great products - and S. Korea is also leading the way in a few industries (LCD screens, batteries) and competing well in many (cars, heavy industries, etc). ASUS in Taiwan also strikes me as being rather innovative. Japan has long had many innovative industrial giants (but are not competitive in terms of costs now). Singapore and Hong Kong are the only Tigers who don't have manufacturing success (and at least HK exported film and music for a while - Singapore has never exported creativity or innovation). We seem really "Uniquely Singapore". (I suspect a few things - maybe our education system failed to keep pace in the 1970s to 1990s - such that our later workforce was affected - or maybe our GLCs weren't well-managed - a lot of Korea's successful firms were state-backed, as were Japan's (with exceptions like Honda though) - but again - I don't have details - just making wild guesses.)

In particular, American style materialism is something interesting. Everybody is already wealthy to some degree, but they want to be even richer. And their wealth was a little more spread out - not in the GINI sense, but in the sense that even the lower middle class were doing pretty OK. Until a few years ago, of course.

Well, I wouldn't trust Paul Krugman to be entirely free of political agendas (he's Democrat biased), but if you read Conscience of a Liberal (the book, not his blog), he claims that America's growth today was founded on the huge middle-class among post-war baby boomers, created by the redistributive policies from FDR's New Deal and war-time policies. Something might be lost in translation - but I think his point was - you get good growth after periods of equality - because equality creates certain good conditions - a big middle-class equals a big consumer market, and people growing up in middle-class backgrounds grow up to be more productive adults than people from impoverished backgrounds. And he thinks America is hurting itself with all the tax-cuts since Reagan up to today, destroying the middle-class, under-investing in education, health, infrastructure, and paving the way to an unproductive era. (And he's not alone right - other people like Stiglitz say somewhat similar things.)

The interesting thing about such things as education, infrastructure, and healthcare are the very long lag times between investment and results. These are the kinds of things that multi-party democracies aren't very good at doing because they're always attending to voters' current desires. Which an authoritarian PAP didn't have to deal with. But they didn't do the job very well anyway, did they?

The connections between the rich in Singapore and the elites? Ever noticed that the beneficiaries of asset enhancement are all the property magnates? How many of them are in the list of richest Singaporeans?

I really don't know. Can you provide some figures or examples? (But do try not to get sued!)

I do know that our GLCs always get a good deal on previously public assets - e.g. POSB, Changi Airport, transport companies, etc were always let go very cheaply to GLCs (but I think the same things happen in Korea and Taiwan and probably Japan - maybe they did the right thing by leaving out the GLC bit - and just directly giving good deals to "favoured industries" - it certainly is more privatised?). But anyway in Singapore it's not politicians serving the moneyed class - it's politicians enriching themselves (because who works in GLCs? all ex-civil servants, people with political links, etc).

How about the casinos? How about the fact that Singapore is posturing itself as a great global financial centre? Who's going to come if you don't start sucking on their dicks? How about all the offshore financing that Singapore is getting from the rich elites of our corrupt neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia? (well maybe that one can close one eye because it does benefit citizens by giving them nice cushy jobs in the financial sector, yah?) How about the multinationals who can squeeze the PAP's balls by saying, "you cut my taxes or I lay off 1000 workers"?

I'm not sure too. Re: casinos, and firms which can threaten to pull out - I have no information. I remember after SMRT strikes some angmor from Singapore International Chamber of Commerce made some statement about being very concerned. Kindof similar to Chavez and Venezuela's oil right? Before nationalisation - they had higher profit margins, more production, but less money went to the country. Now it's nationalized, less efficient, but at least the profits stay in Venezuela. Same thing with giving corporations tax holidays in Singapore (I mean - let the MNCs leave and replace them with local firms - they might be less efficient in the short-run, but more of their profits will stay in the Singapore economy - and in the long run - that's the only way to get home-grown firms, right?). I remember the old argument was technology transfer. Are Singaporeans solid enough in technology and management to run our own businesses today? Or are we still at the mercy of footloose trans-national corps?

Re: running a tax haven - well that's good and bad. It's good money, but it's frowned on and borderline legal, and it's just finance. (And re: being so finance focused,) Somehow I have this weird idea that finance isn't real industry. It produces no real goods, and it is prone to swelling up and collapsing (bit like a casino). And in disastrous times, it's really worth nothing, unlike factories. But I don't think Singapore banks are likely to need a bail-out? So long as they don't need bail-outs and don't need public subsidies - we don't need to be too concerned?

So - the first way to get around this problem is to have a free and independent press (like mentioned earlier - look at how UK's freer press environment leads to more political will for legal action against banks - while in the US, with their co-opted media, banks are forgiven for all sorts of shit, and mind you both countries' banks have gotten taxpayer funded bail-outs), and a free and independent academy. I agree with you it's probably better to have Yale-NUS here than not to (just thinking about the freedom and independence of the academic situation) - but I think it's good to kick up a fuss to rattle some sabres to get more awareness out, to bargain for more rights, more academic and civic freedoms.

 

[metalmickey]

Re: ECB and IMF - so you think they knowingly went with austerity, with full knowledge that their actions would harm society but enrich themselves? Or were they blindly obeying neo-liberal ideology and orthodoxy (like some person on this forum)? In any case - I don't know if the European people themselves were against ECB recommendations (seems like those who would benefit did support ECB right? e.g. Germans, French, etc - it's the victims of austerity who didn't, as we can see from all the public protests in Greece, Spain, etc). In England it seems the press/media is much more willing to criticise banks, and as a result politicians are more able to act against banks.

I have limited understanding of what happens during financial crises but a lot of loans start becoming non-performing loans. When things go wrong, the finger is either pointed at the person who took the loan who shouldn't have taken the loan in the first place. Or the banks who pimp their loans to the loaner during good times (because you always want your money to be earning more interest that way) because they are greedy. So one of them is at fault. The austerity measures are likely to be favoured by the banks who don't want to admit responsibility and write off the debt. And they don't really care of the debt is crushing. So there are two kinds of moral hazards: forgive the debt, and those people who took debts they shouldn't have taken get away with it. Or don't forgive the debt, and the banks who keep on pimping loans on people think they can continue in this fashion.

I don't know if England's banks are more accountable than the US. But in the US they have more suspicion of the government than in the UK, they have a black president who will be called a socialist anytime he tries to take the banks to task, they have tea partiers and powerful lobbies who speak on behalf of all the banks.

Well, the National Conversation is not over and I hope this gets addressed. But like you I'm not really optimistic that it will. The PAP is good at distracting people, changing the topic of conversation, hearing only the good things, etc. We've given them lots of chances but they seem to be their despicable old selves (when it comes to representing the people who elected them).

I haven't figured out the national conversation. I think it's just there to stall for time. But time to do what? Surely they realise that stalling all your problems until 2016 would be a terrible idea for them. I think they're also trying to figure out what to do. But they're sorda not very happy about having to revise their base assumptions about things.

I actually believe they're willing to change. But I don't think they'll change enough to keep people happy. The PAP is not static, I'm sure you know that it's a very different animal from what it was in the 70s and the 80s. I believe that they are pragmatic, and what I mean by this is you should understand the nature of their "pragmatism". They're perfectly willing to change their ideology. What they're not willing to change is the power structure. I think they're thinking, we might have to do things differently, but we'll keep the power here, thank you.

One thing which is sure is - the US has managed to maintain higher levels of GDP per capita than most other countries (especially if you exclude city-states without rural sectors). If the end-goal really is JUST to make money - probably the US is doing something right. What's not so sure is whether they're doing it through innovation or there're other factors involved (some historians/anthropologists think the US' hegemonic position (not just military-politically but also in finance), tributary/client state relations, etc are important). Not really an easy model to imitate - which is why I distrust Acemoglu et al judging the US to be more innovative just because of GDP.

I think the US start-ups have a few great advantages. First, they deal with English, which is the language spoken all over the world. Then, they have the best universities. They have a great venture capital system, and also a big local market. Perhaps these two are related. It is a great advantage that they can just focus on the local markets for a long time, and by the time they're ready to break out internationally, they'd already have grown to a substantial size.

Singapore and Hong Kong are the only Tigers who don't have manufacturing success (and at least HK exported film and music for a while - Singapore has never exported creativity or innovation). We seem really "Uniquely Singapore". (I suspect a few things - maybe our education system failed to keep pace in the 1970s to 1990s - such that our later workforce was affected - or maybe our GLCs weren't well-managed - a lot of Korea's successful firms were state-backed, as were Japan's (with exceptions like Honda though) - but again - I don't have details - just making wild guesses.) .....

The interesting thing about such things as education, infrastructure, and healthcare are the very long lag times between investment and results. These are the kinds of things that multi-party democracies aren't very good at doing because they're always attending to voters' current desires. Which an authoritarian PAP didn't have to deal with. But they didn't do the job very well anyway, did they?

That's not true. Did you live through the 90s? Singapore and Malaysia were leading electronics manufacturers in the 90s, until rising costs, the rise of China, and the Asian financial crisis. I remember thinking about 2 things 10 years ago. First, how is Singapore going to survive? Second, are they really going to carry out that stupid plan to raise the population to 5.5 million? OK, we know the answer to the second question now. The first question, though I have to give them credit. Did none of you realise that in the last 10 years, Singapore has to a large extent reinvented its economy? That 20 years ago everybody was pushed to go into engineering, and then now everybody's pushed into going into life sciences? We lost 1 sector and gained another. That's why I don't 100% condemn the PAP because I don't think they were lazy, I don't think they were standing still. They made plenty of mistakes, but they were mistakes of commission, not omission. If a lot of people don't know what the government is going to do next, at least they're trying a lot of newfangled stuff.

So you see it's very hard to plan things ahead in Singapore. When one sector fails, you can try to replace it with another sector. But it also means you will have to retrain all your workers. The question is, are you workers up to the task? In a larger country, when the industry moves to another city, the workers follow. In Singapore, when one sector dies, the workers will have to switch careers. And we all know how hard it is to switch careers, especially when Singaporeans are so narrow minded and set against employing older workers with no experience.

So the thing is: you're a teacher. You are suppose to mould the new generation. But do you know what futures they're going to have? Or do you think that your duty extends to teaching them the syllabus and that's it? How are you supposed to do your job of preparing them for the future when you don't really know what the future is going to be?

Yes, we know that we're severely lagging behind in being a start-up nation. But do you as a teacher know how to teach your kids to be entrepreneurs? Or do you know why we are failing at entrepreneurship?

I think the education system in Singapore has its priorities wrong. And those people who are measuring Singaporean students as the best in the world also have their priorities wrong. There is a great difference between a student who fails, and a B student. There isn't a great difference between B students and A students. All that time spent pulling all the students from B to A is better spent teaching them real life lessons, teaching them to think for themselves, teaching them to be tough and to ask questions that are much more open-ended than can be administered in exams. What's taught in school is even more restrictive than book knowledge. At least, for book knowledge you can pick up any book you want, and you can pick and choose. For the school system, if somebody in MOE doesn't think it's relevant, it literally doesn't exist. We should just cut down all the stuff we teach by half, and tell them to go out there and find something useful to do the other half of the time. But if any civil servant is brave enough to suggest that, I'll eat my shorts.

I really don't know. Can you provide some figures or examples? (But do try not to get sued!)

I do know that our GLCs always get a good deal on previously public assets - e.g. POSB, Changi Airport, transport companies, etc were always let go very cheaply to GLCs (but I think the same things happen in Korea and Taiwan and probably Japan - maybe they did the right thing by leaving out the GLC bit - and just directly giving good deals to "favoured industries" - it certainly is more privatised?). But anyway in Singapore it's not politicians serving the moneyed class - it's politicians enriching themselves (because who works in GLCs? all ex-civil servants, people with political links, etc).

Do I have to tell you who the richest people in Singapore are? It is not a secret, and anything that is not a secret is available on the internet.

You may be right in the sense that politicians in Singapore do not really enrich themselves. Maybe that's why they're finding it so hard to attract people to go into politics. Especially on the PAP side, since the PAP is so unpopular these days. Those schoolmates of mine who are in parliament right now, they weren't the highest caliber people in my school anyway. I didn't find them to be inspiring people during JC.

All those people in here complaining about the government, ask them how many of them are willing to go into politics. Half of them will say no. The other half are already in politics.

The problem with everybody kaopehing about the government, and looking to the government to be their saviours is that you will turn a lot of capable people away from politics. Then what's left will not be a lot of good people to choose from. Then the standard of government will go down.

I remember the old argument was technology transfer. Are Singaporeans solid enough in technology and management to run our own businesses today? Or are we still at the mercy of footloose trans-national corps?

Singapore has never been able to exist independently of the outside world. To close the doors to the outer world would be suicide. First and foremost, it is a hub, or a trading post. Our people originated from China and India. And Malaysia. We don't have natural resources, but we are a finance and trade centre for 2 countries which have a lot of natural resources (Malaysia, Indonesia). The only thing that differentiates us from the average other city in Southeast Asia is our connectivity to the outside world. To cut that connectivity would be economic suicide.

For many years Singapore has had a strange existence. We used to depend on the rest of the world, but we were oblivious to their presence, because Singapore was so closed. Now what is happening, with foreigners coming in and slowly starting to take charge - that is more reflective of the real situation. The nationhood thing was something artificial. For most of its pre-independence history, Singapore has always been a city state.

We should have structured our economy to depend less on the outside world, but no - PAP was too fond of centralised control.

 

[zhihau]

The PAP is good at distracting people, changing the topic of conversation, hearing only the good things, etc.

Surely they realise that stalling all your problems until 2016 would be a terrible idea for them. I think they're also trying to figure out what to do.

managing public perception is the thing politicians do, make things look good, make you feel good, even when things are terrible! they manage the publics perception so they get voted into power again. :p:p:p

by any chance could you guys quote the appropriate sentences and/or points instead of quoting the whole chunks? learning a lot from you guys and keep posting

 

[metalmickey]

managing public perception is the thing politicians do, make things look good, make you feel good, even when things are terrible! they manage the publics perception so they get voted into power again. :p:p:p

by any chance could you guys quote the appropriate sentences and/or points instead of quoting the whole chunks? learning a lot from you guys and keep posting

I guess what I meant was, when you manage perceptions in 2012, you make people feel good in 2013/2014, but then in 2016 they will realise that nothing substantial has changed, and you've only delayed your problems to a later period. And then the govt will be fucked.

You know all this stuff that I say - I just read things here and there as a hobby, I don't really claim any real insider knowledge, and most of what I say is deduced from other stuff you can read on the internet.

Want to add to the earlier post: apparently entrepreneurship in Singapore is just not working out: http://www.reuters.com//article/2012/12/20/us-singapore-startups-idUSBRE8BJ19I20121220

 

[eremarf]

I think the US start-ups have a few great advantages. First, they deal with English, which is the language spoken all over the world. Then, they have the best universities. They have a great venture capital system, and also a big local market. Perhaps these two are related. It is a great advantage that they can just focus on the local markets for a long time, and by the time they're ready to break out internationally, they'd already have grown to a substantial size.

I think I said somewhere the US is exhausting its store of capital. English as world language - that's legacy capital - and it might get eroded (or not). Best universities - again that's legacy capital - continue to exhaust it without replacing it - and you won't have any left. I mean - the US might lead in innovation now - but it's also basically hurting its long-run prosperity by falling back to pre-Great Depression levels of inequality. It's so bad people are calling it neo-feudalism. I think the US' system of wealth and power distribution will reduce it's power in the long run. Like how the accumulation of wealth and power in leading citizens in the Roman Republic (Marius, Sulla, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, etc), and the increasing impoverishment and even slave bondage of formerly free citizens led to Rome's decay. The Roman Empire didn't collapse immediately too - and neither will the US. But systems of huge inequality don't seem to make for strong societies.

So the thing is: you're a teacher. You are suppose to mould the new generation. But do you know what...

I suppose you're asking these questions to the profession. The answer is - not really, IMHO. I think there is currently a misalignment of incentives and goals. Teachers, principals, MOE officials, etc are rewarded for achieving narrow KPIs, such as getting good results at national level exams, winning prestigious competitions (SYF, BUC, what-have-you), and awards (Sustained Achievement (Academic, CCA, etc), People Developer Award, CHERISH award, National Education Award, etc). How do these achieve our goals (I think MOE publishes a "Desired Outcomes of Education")? Do they do it well?

I believe we can thank Ng Eng Hen for this. The good news is - Heng Swee Keat is dismantling this. The current news I have from friends still in school is that it hasn't changed how they do things yet. A lot depends on how HSK is going to assess education and educators. He's only dismantled the old frameworks, but we don't know what the new ones are. I mean Tharman had good ideas but it didn't translate well to practice. (I think Tharman was good as MinEd, but NEH was lousy, we regressed with him, and HSK looks promising.)

BTW, from my own perspective - this is why I quit the service. And I think I wasn't a great teacher (while I lasted). For one I'm not a person who can handle the kind of workload they dish out at school. I spend maybe 70 hours a week on work most of Term 3, and about 60 the rest of the terms (granted - I spend more time because I was acquiring skills) - and still I don't feel I've done my job well. I can't finish marking the quantity of assignments on time properly - and so had to sacrifice on quality, I can't give good feedback, I can't always make lessons worthwhile and interesting (where is there time to plan? - and other teachers are not planning "worthwhile" lessons - they're aiming for exam scores - no help from that direction - and they're overloaded with work themselves), it's not easy to achieve things with a class of 40 (the doctrine is that expert teachers are more important than class size - according to Hanushek - but the problem with MOE and especially in EL and Hum depts are that we lack experienced teachers!). And I left after building up my skills - burnout? And you can see doing the "right" things doesn't get you promoted, that "scoring points" does instead, etc. Which in the long run leaves MOE with a hierarchy of hardworking, competent, but co-opted, non-critical, yes-men. This is not good for innovation and self-reflection within the civil service. Don't get me wrong - a lot of my colleagues are great teachers. But the ones with their hearts in the right place tend to get passed over for promotion (all else being equal).

But this problem shouldn't surprise you. I think the entire civil service has gotten too corporatised and fixated on narrow and short-term KPIs. Look at how ministerial performance is judged based on GDP growth (instead of so many other possible measures!). It starts right from the top and goes all the way down.

About teaching students to be entrepreneurs, or to dare to pursue their dreams - I'm proud of my students who did it - but I'm not sure if I have harmed or helped them. Singapore is a place where the cost of pursuing your dreams is very high - because of lack of safety nets, because of social attitudes. What would you tell your students if you were a teacher? It's not easy to give career advice when you know some careers are dead-ends. I was proud of my student with good grades who went to nursing, but it's not a cushy job. And have you read Taleb's Black Swan - entrepreneurship is one of those winner-take-all things, right? Lots of people trying, failing, unrewarded - except for the winners. It's an especially harsh system when society scorns losers and worships winners, when we have no safety nets.

We should just cut down all the stuff we teach by half, and tell them to go out there and find something useful to do the other half of the time. But if any civil servant is brave enough to suggest that, I'll eat my shorts.

They did cut the curriculum in 2001 (under Tharman) with the Teach Less Learn More thing (I wasn't a teacher yet), by about 15%. The problem is - things got lost in translation. The letter of the policy gets carried out, but the spirit is lost (in spite of less content, the attitude towards learning is similar). I have thought since 2006 that given the product-oriented nature of things here, the best thing we can do is change the exam system - make it harder to mug for, test skills more, examine coursework more, rote-memory less. To some extent that's changing (SPA for science, D&T, F&N, EBS are coursework assessed, Project Work is too - and the independent and through-train schools are of course doing these - a better education for the rich, eh?) - but the usual bugbear is cost - it takes manpower and money to do non-conventional assessments.

You may be right in the sense that politicians in Singapore do not really enrich themselves. Maybe that's why they're finding it so hard to attract people to go into politics.

I think they do so more than people in other places - and that's not really a bad thing if they have the right KPIs (at least they're not beholden to others). But I think it's just the natural cronyism and patronage that develops in entrenched systems of power. It's a slippery slope - you help a friend here, a friend there, and you end up becoming inefficient.

Also, very importantly, I don't think you need to attract the best technical talent (those people should go to the civil service - and if you argue the civil service needs to pay well - I'm with you). You want to attract the good communicators, the ones who can sell ideas, present ideas, to people. You want people who can understand the electorate, so that you don't get voted out when you don't serve them well.

And ultimately - there're costs and benefits (like PAP ministers like to say - there is a trade-off). Do you want moral hazard or do you want not-so-capable politicians? Very hard to judge, right? Because how do you know how much moral hazard there is? Or how bad the alternative politicans are (after all, Chen Show Mao did run for WP)? Ultimately, we have 89 MPs but only a small cabinet - surely among the 89 we have enough "good" people for that job? (Sometimes - I think someone without the trimmings of power, someone from an ordinary background - he actually speaks better for what the people want - why do we imagine that the powerful can represent the poor/middle-class well?)

No easy answer to this.

The problem with everybody kaopehing about the government, and looking to the government to be their saviours is that you will turn a lot of capable people away from politics. Then what's left will not be a lot of good people to choose from. Then the standard of government will go down.

Are you referring to what Yawning Bread calls "petitionary state" (KPing the gahmen)? Well - hopefully it transforms from petitioning to actually discussing and criticising issues and voting people in and out. And also doing things for ourselves at the grassroots level. I think more social workers will also lighten the MPs load too. In the past the PAP took on a lot of social work functions to control access to resources at a party level rather than at civil service level (and thereby earn the electorate's gratitude?), and also, by not budgeting for social support services, people turn to the only ones they can - their MPs. This makes an MP's job quite ridiculous today - they're doing so much social service work at MPS - instead of researching legislation, pushing out new bills, etc based on their electorate's needs (e.g. what SDP did with healthcare and housing). And the PAP is not affected - their policy weight-lifting is done by the civil service.

I think we can't avoid the fact that politicians will be the ones who are hungry for power (on top of whatever other qualities they have). There's no good way to choose - in fact, there is no committee choosing politicans, it's just the voters (except political parties - but like I argue for the US, that's a move towards being undemocratic - e.g. it's not Republicans at large who wanted Romney - but they ended up with him because he was supported by money - and Republicans had to vote for him in the presidential - and see how Roosevelt stepped down when the Democrats didn't accept this choice of vice-president Henry Wallace).

But that's the point of democracy - we have all these power-hungry candidates - but at least we can choose among them for those who can best serve us. It kindof goes back to the (full/proper) democracy vs benevolent dictatorship. The benevolent bit is hard to assure, as is the availability of good candidates in a democracy. But I'd rather count on the latter (don't forget - they will be guided by a civil service, and with a free press and academy and grassroots - good ideas can gain momentum and reach them from outside - they don't have to develop them internally).

That's not true. Did you live through the 90s? Singapore and Malaysia were leading electronics manufacturers in the 90s, until rising costs, the rise of China, and the Asian financial crisis. I remember thinking about 2 things 10 years ago. First, how is Singapore going to survive? Second, are they really going to carry out that stupid plan to raise the population to 5.5 million? OK, we know the answer to the second question now. The first question, though I have to give them credit. Did none of you realise that in the last 10 years, Singapore has to a large extent reinvented its economy? That 20 years ago everybody was pushed to go into engineering, and then now everybody's pushed into going into life sciences? We lost 1 sector and gained another. That's why I don't 100% condemn the PAP because I don't think they were lazy, I don't think they were standing still. They made plenty of mistakes, but they were mistakes of commission, not omission. If a lot of people don't know what the government is going to do next, at least they're trying a lot of newfangled stuff.

So you see it's very hard to plan things ahead in Singapore. When one sector fails, you can try to replace it with another sector. But it also means you will have to retrain all your workers. The question is, are you workers up to the task? In a larger country, when the industry moves to another city, the workers follow. In Singapore, when one sector dies, the workers will have to switch careers. And we all know how hard it is to switch careers, especially when Singaporeans are so narrow minded and set against employing older workers with no experience.

You made me realise I was too narrowly focused on Singapore's failure in producing home-grown high-tech manufacturing - when actually we're succeeding (or at least investing) in other sectors (finance, and maybe biotech). But I was actually commenting more on home-grown vs foreign-owned manufacturing rather than whether we were manufacturing. Other than Creative and now Hyflux - we don't have major domestic brands (ditto for Hong Kong manufacturing).

Re: early Singapore manufacturing - that was the high-tech stuff then, but the bar has been raised indeed. There're still technological frontiers - that's why Apple and Samsung and Taiwan's semiconductors are earning big profits - their technological edge is hard for others to overcome. Singapore has definitely fallen behind in the technological race (I think we invested in finance and biotech instead - so it seems an active gov't choice, like you said.)

Re: biotech - I'm not sure how successful we are here (your "mistakes of commission") - I think Singapore's research scene might not be so well-managed- based on what we hear from A-Star researchers, and researchers in other institutions. There is money - but people want to see results - and hence quotas for publications, and paying big money for star researchers (rather than trying our luck with many decent but not-so-famous ones - we care too much for track records - I think GIC does the same). (I recall again Taleb talking about Bell Labs in the US - who hires many researchers (without shame attached to lack of success) - recognising that research success is often serendipitous - and also stories about Google having one day off each week for all workers to work on their private projects - which they present later?)

Re: finance - well this is where we're making it. I guess making money from this is fine - other than that it makes us very sensitive to regional and global economic events. (And like Alex Au pointed out - it's kind of shady.) It seems to be making us more money than manufacturing a la S. Korea and Taiwan?

I don't know what ideal industrial landscape/structure Singapore should pursue - maybe others can chip in here. But I think when you talk about start-ups and innovation (which is something S'pore is pursuing), I don't see much of that in finance - it's more of in services and products. So, biasing our industrial structure towards finance (educating appropriate labour, letting the free market draw talent into finance rather than other careers, etc) and counting on that - it might not be a great thing (assuming innovation is desirable).

Re: are Singaporeans able to switch careers - did we talk about unemployment benefits and retraining benefits? As before - we agree that wayang retraining a la Workfare is probably a waste of money - but Scandinavia has a high success rate for retraining workers to cross industries (in fact, industrial shifts are more frequent in innovative societies, VoxEU made that assertion when challenging Acemoglu's paper - Scandinavia's workers, even more than US ones, change industries vigorously). Chang Ha Joon also supported these benefits - critiquing tertiary schooling (schools tend not to provide relevant skills, but instead serve a sorting and signalling function - and hence over time you get costly certification inflation - more and more years of schooling just to prove that you're at a particular percentile of the cohort) and supporting skills training instead (he suggested governments intervene to force this, because firms have little incentives to invest in mobile labour who can join competitors).

 

[eremarf]

managing public perception is the thing politicians do, make things look good, make you feel good, even when things are terrible! they manage the publics perception so they get voted into power again. :p:p:p

by any chance could you guys quote the appropriate sentences and/or points instead of quoting the whole chunks? learning a lot from you guys and keep posting

Re: managing public perception - well it's good to know that "perception" is not "reality". I think Singaporeans are all aware of this, and skeptical of politicians... But we don't know where to get "reality". We lack a free press, and our academics don't comment much about Singapore (if they comment, they might not get research funding, might not keep their jobs - and they also don't have much data to comment on - since the SG gov't doesn't release much data), and grassroots groups cannot really comment via protests - the best they can do is social media and Hong Lim Park.

Re: quoting just appropriate sentences - hmmm... I'll try? But I am not optimistic (because the ideas are big)? :o But you're very welcome to ask about things I am happy to talk about stuff. I'm very glad to know our discussion is reaching a wider audience.

 

[eremarf]

Singapore has never been able to exist independently of the outside world. To close the doors to the outer world would be suicide. First and foremost, it is a hub, or a trading post. Our people originated from China and India. And Malaysia. We don't have natural resources, but we are a finance and trade centre for 2 countries which have a lot of natural resources (Malaysia, Indonesia). The only thing that differentiates us from the average other city in Southeast Asia is our connectivity to the outside world. To cut that connectivity would be economic suicide.

For many years Singapore has had a strange existence. We used to depend on the rest of the world, but we were oblivious to their presence, because Singapore was so closed. Now what is happening, with foreigners coming in and slowly starting to take charge - that is more reflective of the real situation. The nationhood thing was something artificial. For most of its pre-independence history, Singapore has always been a city state.

We should have structured our economy to depend less on the outside world, but no - PAP was too fond of centralised control.

Well, the connectivity is good - which is why we are the regional financial hub. Which earns us money. But finance is dependent on the "outside world" like you say.

I was thinking of our other industries - I think it's striking that any company owned by Singaporeans seems to be an SME. The big companies are all either GLCs or MNCs (and Creative, and Hyflux). And the common belief is that GLCs and MNCs crowd out local companies from becoming big. Our GLCs are what make us quite different from Korea and Taiwan and Japan, right? In Korea and Taiwan, local companies get a lot of state backing - subsidies, laws, etc to start up - but in Singapore we did it through GLCs. GLCs arguably need to be linked to government when they perform somewhat public services, e.g. transport, telecomms, supporting the defence industry, etc. But when they venture into supermarkets, taxis, foodcourts, provision shops, etc - that argument's gone. They then compete against potential local companies - and they will always compete from a position of strength (much more capital, more political power, etc).

So my (and lots of other SGeans) question is - have GLCs stunted the growth of local companies into growing bigger and innovating and competing more regionally and globally? Are GLCs the reason why we're different from other Asia miracles? (But of course, like you said - we did kindof invest in finance and biotech instead of other sectors. But even the banks that do business here - there're many foreign banks - the scene is quite similar to manufacturing in the past - lots of non-local banks.)

I haven't figured out the national conversation. I think it's just there to stall for time. But time to do what? Surely they realise that stalling all your problems until 2016 would be a terrible idea for them. I think they're also trying to figure out what to do. But they're sorda not very happy about having to revise their base assumptions about things.

I actually believe they're willing to change. But I don't think they'll change enough to keep people happy. The PAP is not static, I'm sure you know that it's a very different animal from what it was in the 70s and the 80s. I believe that they are pragmatic, and what I mean by this is you should understand the nature of their "pragmatism". They're perfectly willing to change their ideology. What they're not willing to change is the power structure. I think they're thinking, we might have to do things differently, but we'll keep the power here, thank you.

I think it's not just that the PAP folks aren't happy about having to finally face up to reality and the fact they have been deceiving themselves for a while. They've also become truly complacent over the years of easy rule. They're used to not working as hard for people. They're used to not having to come up with good ideas to justify their existence in parliament. They're not used to sounding out how people feel.

So whether they can transform - I think we can't tell. Yes they're pragmatic in outlook, but are they still capable? Like Lucky Tan was talking about finding the middle ground - can the PAP find the middle ground (middle relative to the entire electorate of course), or will they side too strongly with the rich? I used to have this pet theory - that the first generation of PAP MPs were good to Singapore because they were not born privileged. They came from so-called "humble" backgrounds. That's not true for our second and third generation MPs. In terms of what I loosely call "class loyalties" - will they empathize with the "middle ground" electorate?

A lot of the PAP arrogance seems to be quite strongly instilled in their members - talking to Lim Hwee Hua at MPS left a strong impression. Hearing how Grace Fu talks is similar, or Ong Ye Kung (oh sorry this one not MP). Tan Chuan Jin is more thoughtful. Teo Chee Hean, Khaw Boon Wan, Ng Eng Hen even Tharman - they are very willing to spin things (it's patronising, I think, to tell us obvious bullshit and think we will believe it). It's not surprising coming from folks like Vikram Nair, or Vivian Balakrishnan, or "Zorro" Lim Swee Say, but when highly placed cabinet ministers talk like this - you wonder if they can transform themselves.

I have limited understanding of what happens during financial crises but a lot of loans start becoming non-performing loans. When things go wrong, the finger is either pointed at the person who took the loan who shouldn't have taken the loan in the first place. Or the banks who pimp their loans to the loaner during good times (because you always want your money to be earning more interest that way) because they are greedy. So one of them is at fault. The austerity measures are likely to be favoured by the banks who don't want to admit responsibility and write off the debt. And they don't really care of the debt is crushing. So there are two kinds of moral hazards: forgive the debt, and those people who took debts they shouldn't have taken get away with it. Or don't forgive the debt, and the banks who keep on pimping loans on people think they can continue in this fashion.

I don't know if England's banks are more accountable than the US. But in the US they have more suspicion of the government than in the UK, they have a black president who will be called a socialist anytime he tries to take the banks to task, they have tea partiers and powerful lobbies who speak on behalf of all the banks.

Okay the bank stuff is off-topic so I won't say too much.

But look - the whole point of banking is to only lend to credit-worthy people. If you lend to uncreditable people, and you can't get the money back, too bad. That's part of the risk - that's why we pay interest when we borrow money - to cover the cost of that risk. But banks were willing to do so because they could earn money from repackaging those debts and then selling it off to people. It might be criminal or not - but only in very few jurisdictions have charges been pressed - because politicians apparently believe banks behaved appropriately. And such behaviour was only enabled when banking was deregulated. The US led the way with Glass-Steagal, and other European countries followed.

I'm sure pharmaceutical firms also tried their "best" to avoid side-effects in drugs. But if they failed, and harmed their customers, I believe the law would step in to punish, or at least in future regulate the products (require human trials, published research, etc). Why could banks get away scot-free?

To me - the fault lies with the banks for pushing bad product (not the loan, but the repackaged debt) to earn profits by ripping off customers (either knowingly or not). And with politicians and civil servants for being bought by banks, to deregulate finance (e.g. allow savings and loans banks to do investment, allow complex opaque financial products to be sold to customers who could not understand them). If a pharmaceutical firm sold drugs with harmful side-effects, would you blame the (non-medically trained!) customers for buying the drug? Or would you blame pharma for selling dangerous product? And blame FDA for not regulating such dangerous drugs?

About solutions, I don't think you have to forgive the debt. It just won't be paid. Poor people can't and won't pay. Sometimes the banks would rather do write-downs than have people just declare bankruptcy on debts (resulting in write-offs) - but I'm not going to comment on the debt issue (haven't looked into that very much - most of the outrage on Naked Capitalism and elsewhere is about unregulated, law-breaking behaviour - in fact, shifting the focus to the irresponsible loaners is I think propaganda designed to distract and obfuscate). I just want to say - banks should be punished for selling dangerous products to people who bought re-re-repackaged bundles of mortgage debt. They should be prevented from being able to do so again. Banks should be punished for (knowingly) misrepresenting the quality of debt.


Lastly, England's banks are not more accountable (they're similarly unscrupulous - which arguably all corporations are - unless you believe there is genuine "social enterprise"?! - which is why we need to regulate these behaviours). It's just that English government has been more able to punish banks, because their press is more representative of what English people think. In the US, the press often represents what moneyed interests think, rather than what people think (and even ends up shifting the focus, setting the agenda).

In fact, the whole Tea Party thing about starving the beast and all that - it seems very unwarranted when you look at the academic data. You have some corporate shills publishing neoclassical economics at neo-conservative friendly places - Chicago University, CATO Institute, Heritage Foundation, etc (and they're pretty intellectually incestuous and isolationist - if you join them, you end up moving within those circles your entire career - and if you're against them, you never get hired in those places). I've listened to their podcasts (try EconTalk), read their laymen publications... (not the academic papers) - basically their research makes a lot of assumptions, then sets up a model (and models can be tweaked until you get the results you like - models usually are evaluated based on how well they reflect reality - but in economics you can do it the reverse way - tweak it until it shows the predictions you want, it seems - I mean, none of their models predicts crises! But crises occur all the time!), then does a lot of difficult math (another step of obfuscation), and they say tada, our model shows this.

Basically the neo-classicals can close out other intellectual competitors. The Nobel Prize in Economics isn't even a proper Nobel prize, and it's only being given out to people with sophisticated mathematics and models (so mostly to neoclassicals). But there're a lot of good ideas that don't do so much complex math and modelling. And you can't do controlled experiments in social science. For example I was just listening to John Cochrane (Chicago U) talking about the Keynesians - he claimed because they said historically stimulus via wartime situations was good - that they were basically asking the government to pay people to march in the jungle (or just for doing nothing - which is entirely not what Keynesians advocate - they want people employed to do useful work - like build infrastructure, a la FDR's New Deal work programmes) - so that the economy would expand. But he said there's been no study, no model, to prove that. But Keynesians don't do the models because Keynes didn't believe humans are always rational (and the complex math and models are built on these not-so-solid assumptions) - he talked about irrational animal spirits.

It's like focusing so strongly on Chomskyan linguistics (language as a universal human faculty) and neglecting to look at how language works in society (how language is shaped by social realities - power structures, discourse conventions, etc). (I do research in linguistics.)

But that's how it is, right? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" The academy is compromised when academics have to depend on private funding for their careers. I can see some ways to end this - 1) use public budgets to fund good science (so science is not beholden to private money), and 2) reduce concentrations of wealth because wealth is power, and power can be used and abused.

 

[scroobal]

Nice dialogue.

2 things :-

1) Education - I once met a gentleman who has been consulting in this region for over 2 decades tell me that the fault is not the teachers, the education administrators nor MOE. He told me that it is the country's culture that has evolved over the years. He told me no matter what you do to the curriculum - less rote learning, more life skills, more creative etc the outcome will be the same. He told me that Singaporeans tend to ace the exams with the aim of acquiring a great job which seems to be the end game. A great job is one that is highly regarded by fellow Singaporeans and Singaporeans only. No one else. So I asked him how he would fix it. He told me that as it is culture, it will take decades. He told me that the best thing to do was to send your children before the age of 12 to western schools. He told that ACS International, SJI International, RJC etc cannot fix it even if they are given total independence as the all the kids are immersed in the same culture.

2) Political Systems - whether it is Westminster, US Federal, EU, unicameral or bicameral, etc all play in the same general democratic - one man, one vote with freedom of choice. Within this broad definition, each variation has its respective pros and cons. Singapore is a different kettle of fish. Though it has the same setup - one man, one vote, the freedom of choice is severely restricted. Monopolising the talent pool, obstacles and barriers etc. It did work in the first 25 years but the following 25 has been one of disappointment for the younger generation in terms of jobs (competition), home affordability, finding a common identity etc. If you cannot identify with the country, it becomes a losing battle in building a cohesive and caring society. Our move away from a cohesive and caring society is perceptible. We might not have the right quality where opposition candidates are involved, whatever they do will help make politics more attractive to quality candidates with vision and leadership potential.

In essence, individuals need to take their thumbs out rather than wait for a Messiah to turn up.

 

[eremarf]

Nice dialogue.

That's high praise from a major contributor like yourself! :o

1) Education - I once met a gentleman who has been consulting in this region for over 2 decades tell me that the fault is not the teachers, the education administrators nor MOE. He told me that it is the country's culture that has evolved over the years. He told me no matter what you do to the curriculum - less rote learning, more life skills, more creative etc the outcome will be the same. He told me that Singaporeans tend to ace the exams with the aim of acquiring a great job which seems to be the end game. A great job is one that is highly regarded by fellow Singaporeans and Singaporeans only. No one else. So I asked him how he would fix it. He told me that as it is culture, it will take decades. He told me that the best thing to do was to send your children before the age of 12 to western schools. He told that ACS International, SJI International, RJC etc cannot fix it even if they are given total independence as the all the kids are immersed in the same culture.

Yeah I was just banging my head on a wall trying to change it, I think. It's true about what parents want, what children want.

It's perverse because like Chang Ha-Joon said - education becomes a sorting/signalling tool (suitability for "good" jobs), and education inflation occurs - which wastes resources. But this relates only to tertiary schooling - I think primary and secondary schooling is essential for all citizen-workers in our economy today. (But there should be debate about what a good primary and secondary education is - for e.g. secondary schooling should not be aimed towards getting into tertiary institutions if we agree that tertiary institutions are not so useful.)

But that doesn't mean we can't try to get tiny handles on things. Some things we could try:

1. Reduce the disparity in income between "good" and "not-so-good" jobs. Pay is a big component, although job description matters too (if a high class prostitutes earned as much as a doctor or lawyer, it's still not a very prestigious job), so you can't completely solve this - but I think once it's not so stigmatized to be in a blue-collar job, people wouldn't game the school system so hard - they can afford to quit school earlier, join the workforce, and learn work-relevant skills.

In Scandinavia because education is free (and supported by stipends), lots of people go to university even if they don't need to. It's wasteful from a productivity point of view - because they don't make use of their education at work - but education might be what enables them to have enlightened views about how to run their society - and to lead more meaningful lives.

2. Change assessment modes - so that when students try to score for exams, they also acquire useful skills. Look at how controversial Project Work is among A level students. They mind it, because it's not easy to mug for (and also because of subjective grading, and different amounts of teacher help across schools - but that can be audited - like I said - it's expensive). Look also at how the independent schools and IP schools are doing their own internal assessments - those are often progressive and really assess useful skills (but expensive). Secondary school is not necessarily wasteful education - it depends on how useful the curriculum is to students' future work/career (as opposed to useful for qualifying for further education alone).

It did work in the first 25 years but the following 25 has been one of disappointment for the younger generation in terms of jobs (competition), home affordability, finding a common identity etc. If you cannot identify with the country, it becomes a losing battle in building a cohesive and caring society. Our move away from a cohesive and caring society is perceptible.

Yes - I think the middle class (or whatever passed for it in the old days) is disappearing. The middle ground is becoming smaller, the electorate is more polarised. It's like two camps of sailors on the same ship, with less and less common ground between camps - and we don't know where to steer the ship, how to divide rations, workload, etc. Solving inequality would pull more of the poor and the rich back to a middle class life, values, and identity - and there is value in the social cohesion that creates, IMHO.

 

[metalmickey]

First I want to say hi to Scroobal and Zhihau, thanks for dropping by.

I think I said somewhere the US is exhausting its store of capital. English as world language - that's legacy capital - and it might get eroded (or not). Best universities - again that's legacy capital - continue to exhaust it without replacing it - and you won't have any left.

I think that there is very little consensus about the future of US innovation. Your argument that the US is not investing enough in grade school education to build the future innovators of tomorrow is based on the assumption that it is closed system, and quite clearly it is not. Another strength of the US system is how it attracts the best innovators from all over the world to set up businesses there. You might recall that Sergei Brin from Google is Russian (although he basically grew up in the States) and Jerry Yang of Yahoo is from Taiwan.

There are two different ideas: mobility and income inequality. Don’t mix them up. Just because there is income inequality, it doesn’t mean that there is no mobility. I’m not 100% convinced that there is no mobility in the US. But I have to say that what is good for innovation and what is good for society as a whole may not be that similar.

If you see this as an indication of what’s going to take place in the next generation in Singapore, though, it is quite chilling. It means that we are asking the best and the brightest from all over Asia to push out the Singaporeans. In the US, if you’re pushed out of a big city, you can always move to more rural areas. What happens when this happens to Singaporeans?

And ultimately - there're costs and benefits (like PAP ministers like to say - there is a trade-off). Do you want moral hazard or do you want not-so-capable politicians? Very hard to judge, right? Because how do you know how much moral hazard there is? Or how bad the alternative politicans are (after all, Chen Show Mao did run for WP)?

For all I complained about the WP being a little lightweight on policy, I also recognize that in the first year, they will most probably concentrate on running AHTC properly, since this is more crucial to their chances of survival in 2016 than what they say in parliament. But in the 3rd or 4th year I’ll be listening closely to what they have to say in parliament. It’s very heartening to see that there are people volunteering for politics for the opposition party. But what we’ve seen in 2011 is mainly that there has been an improvement in the quality of candidates over 2006 and earlier. That is a very low bar. It won’t be enough.

Chen Show Mao is obviously a very qualified person but if you believe that fancy degrees make you a great leader we wouldn’t be kaopehing so much about LHL. I want to reserve my judgement about him until after he completes a full term in parliament.

Re: early Singapore manufacturing - that was the high-tech stuff then, but the bar has been raised indeed. There're still technological frontiers - that's why Apple and Samsung and Taiwan's semiconductors are earning big profits - their technological edge is hard for others to overcome. Singapore has definitely fallen behind in the technological race (I think we invested in finance and biotech instead - so it seems an active gov't choice, like you said.)

I just want to say – when you look at Apple the big money is not in manufacturing, but in the brand name, the design, the IT and the intellectual property. If we had gone down the route of electronics manufacturing we would have ended up like Foxconn and it would have been slave/ sweatshops. So that probably was not the option. It was tragic what happened to our electronics manufacturing industry, but probably inevitable, given that we didn’t control our labour costs properly.

All this falling behind in the high tech business stakes is just symptomatic of – you got it – our failure to build a good environment for innovation. I was looking through a book about Israel’s fantastic start up culture, “Start Up nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. I’m usually quite biased against Israel because of what they did to the Palestinians, but then I find that they have a lot of good qualities that make them great entrepreneurs. One of them is that the people don’t have very high hierarchies. Anybody is allowed to talk back at a supervisor and argue, and the best ideas come through. In the book I wince whenever Singapore is mentioned because it’s usually in an unfavourable light.

In Israel, the army has very few generals because all the decisions are made by the Captains and Lieutenants (opposite of Singapore). There is incredibly little being spent on the military (opposite of Singapore). There is great emphasis on operational experience on the frontline at the military (opposite of SAF chao wayang army). At the same time, Singaporeans are still attached to the idea that your performance at primary school has something to do with winning Nobel prizes, like what I read in this thread. Very unfortunate.

http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread.php?137859-Singapore-kids-top-ME-sure-or-not

We’ve not done well in innovation at all. Innovation is based on rebelling, questioning authority, implementing change. All these are Singapore’s weaknesses. But then again Singapore is new at this. Maybe we will learn, maybe we won’t. What Singapore is trying to achieve in biotech is a lot in a short span of time.

Re: finance - well this is where we're making it. I guess making money from this is fine - other than that it makes us very sensitive to regional and global economic events. (And like Alex Au pointed out - it's kind of shady.) It seems to be making us more money than manufacturing a la S. Korea and Taiwan?

I don’t like Singapore basing so much of the economy on finance. We should reduce our economy’s dependence on finance, even though it is such a big part of who we are – regional HQ, trading post, etc. I hear about New York and Chicago setting up flourishing start-up scenes. If those financial centres can do it, we should also think about following suit.

Re: are Singaporeans able to switch careers - did we talk about unemployment benefits and retraining benefits? As before - we agree that wayang retraining a la Workfare is probably a waste of money - but Scandinavia has a high success rate for retraining workers to cross industries

What can we do to encourage people to change vocations more easily? When you change vocations, there is the chicken and egg problem: you can’t learn new skills until people are willing to employ you. People won’t employ you until you have those skills. Maybe the government can mandate that employers provide a certain amount of revoc training to people. Another problem is that Singaporean companies are unwilling to employ older workers, let alone retrain them.

The problem of higher education being too costly is also present in the US. If in Scandinavia, too many people have degrees because education is free, in the US, tertiary education is too expensive and people from the lower class find it very difficult to move up the ladder.

So my (and lots of other SGeans) question is - have GLCs stunted the growth of local companies into growing bigger and innovating and competing more regionally and globally? Are GLCs the reason why we're different from other Asia miracles?

I don’t think that our GLCs are that different from the South Korean chaebols or the Japanese zaibutsus. But the way we run them is the crucial thing, and it might be different. I think that it’s very unhealthy that we have stymied the growth of local industries all these years. It will take decades to correct this problem. Or maybe we will wake up one day to find that all those people who have managed to start up and run businesses in Singapore are all the foreign talents.

I used to have this pet theory - that the first generation of PAP MPs were good to Singapore because they were not born privileged. They came from so-called "humble" backgrounds. That's not true for our second and third generation MPs. In terms of what I loosely call "class loyalties" - will they empathize with the "middle ground" electorate?

I think I can speak for a lot of people in this forum when I say that when you can grab their balls and start squeezing them, they will learn a little bit more empathy – or they will quit the scene. I read something that George Yeo said. He’s a cabinet minister like them but I think he’s the least bad of the bunch. He’s enjoying life. He probably doesn’t want to go back to politics. To me this is as distressing as hearing about all the unsympathetic people who make up our cabinet. Who in their right minds would want to serve as cabinet ministers?

Anyway I don’t believe in your privileged person theory. LKY was a rich man’s son. Goh Keng Swee was a PhD at a time when going to a uni was for privileged people. I think the crucial difference is that they were exposed to real life, WWII and what not. And in the Israel book, the authors credit the high level of maturity of the citizens with the way they’re exposed to the frontline. If you think about it, this is a strike against cuddly capitalism.

In their generation, people from Singapore going overseas to study actually think about how to build a new nation from scratch. In our generation, people from Singapore going overseas to study come up with plenty of inane remarks about how and why Singapore is inferior to London.

But look - the whole point of banking is to only lend to credit-worthy people. If you lend to uncreditable people, and you can't get the money back, too bad. That's part of the risk - that's why we pay interest when we borrow money - to cover the cost of that risk. But banks were willing to do so because they could earn money from repackaging those debts and then selling it off to people.

The banks are supposed to lend to credit-worthy people. But during the boom time, the incentives were all skewed, and there was a lot of pressure on people on the front line to get people to sign up for loans, to get people to invest in toxic assets. The difference between this and unsafe food is that when you eat unsafe food, you get sick in a day or two. When you invest in shit, you get fucked much later. So it’s harder to regulate.

There are real reasons for bailing out banks during a financial crisis. You don’t destroy your banks in the middle of a crisis because the point is to get yourself out of trouble. You wait for the economy to recover first, and then after that then you fuck them upside down. It is heartening – I hear that it is possible that our banking system will be revamped in the near future. I’m glad that Obama got re-elected because I can’t imagine this sort of stuff happening under Romney. To celebrate the festive season, here is a preview of how and why bankers could all get fucked in 2013, although it is also wise to moderate your expectations.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-too-big-to-fail-could-end-in-2013-by-simon-johnson

For example I was just listening to John Cochrane (Chicago U) talking about the Keynesians - he claimed because they said historically stimulus via wartime situations was good - that they were basically asking the government to pay people to march in the jungle (or just for doing nothing - which is entirely not what Keynesians advocate - they want people employed to do useful work - like build infrastructure, a la FDR's New Deal work programmes) - so that the economy would expand.

I don’t agree with you that our banking system is a diversion because I feel that we have to understand it well in order to understand why our society is the way that it is. In this hypercompetitive economy, the money gets pumped into activities which deliver the most bang for buck. Unfortunately, not all the work that needs to be done is equally economically efficient. If you cannot make as much money sweeping the roads, does it mean the roads do not need to be swept? Does it mean that all doctors have to go into cosmetic surgery because it pays more than taking care of the sick and dying? That is the problem with the PAP – it has tethered itself to an ideology which is fundamentally inhumane.

This sort of neo-classical thinking unfortunately appeals to our KPI obsessed civil servants because they worship the clarity that it provides. To further add to your John Cochrane example: think carefully about what he is actually saying. He is saying that the fact that the economy is growing at a higher rate is more important than everybody having a job. The thing is that the Keynesian example of getting everybody to dig a useless ditch isn’t even accurate. There are a lot of things that need to be done right now, that don’t really pay off. Like health care, figuring out how to reverse global warming, research on alternative energy.

Of course, part of the problem is that Singaporeans themselves have a pretty screwed up attitude towards work. They look down on working with their hands, on manual labour. Even IT is looked down upon. In some developed countries, where being a plumber pays you more than being a professor, this attitude is changing. In Singapore, anything that involves you telling Singaporeans to work in unpopular vocations will be very hard to achieve, so like Scroobal said, the attitudes of Singaporeans themselves is part of the problem.

It's like focusing so strongly on Chomskyan linguistics (language as a universal human faculty) and neglecting to look at how language works in society (how language is shaped by social realities - power structures, discourse conventions, etc). (I do research in linguistics.)

My impression is that Chomsky himself was also concerned about how language is shaped by social realities. His political writings are as anti-establishment as anything you can find on this forum.

Change assessment modes - so that when students try to score for exams, they also acquire useful skills. Look at how controversial Project Work is among A level students. They mind it, because it's not easy to mug for (and also because of subjective grading, and different amounts of teacher help across schools - but that can be audited - like I said - it's expensive).

For the government schools, it could be really easy – just throw some of the kids into the real world for 1 of the 4 terms, and they’ll learn more than they would have done in the classroom. Unfortunately our education system is so fucked up that there is probably a stigma against learning things that are useful in real life. You don’t have to grade their projects. Just throw them into the water. It’s not supposed to be this complicated.

 

[metalmickey]

Political Systems - whether it is Westminster, US Federal, EU, unicameral or bicameral, etc all play in the same general democratic - one man, one vote with freedom of choice. Within this broad definition, each variation has its respective pros and cons. Singapore is a different kettle of fish. Though it has the same setup - one man, one vote, the freedom of choice is severely restricted.

I think the westminister system is not really that free. You think it’s wonderful to choose between 2 or 3 people from their parties. But their parties are the ones who chose them from amongst thousands of eligible candidates, so they're the ones doing the choosing for you. Sometimes you're just choosing between two fools.

It seems that the level field - while not level is much more so than in the 90s. People feel that they can vote however they want and not worry about whatever consequences. Let's see how the Singaporean people respond in these circumstances.

If you cannot identify with the country, it becomes a losing battle in building a cohesive and caring society. Our move away from a cohesive and caring society is perceptible. We might not have the right quality where opposition candidates are involved, whatever they do will help make politics more attractive to quality candidates with vision and leadership potential.

In essence, individuals need to take their thumbs out rather than wait for a Messiah to turn up.

There's a lot of talk about Singapore turning from a nation into a city state. Which means we're moving away from a system where there was the old social compact where the paternalistic government took care of you as long as you knew who was boss. And we're moving to a new system which is more open, everybody's unprotected, more profitable for the best and the brightest, but everybody fends for themselves. The problem is when the government wants to abdicate its responsibility, but not abdicate their power. Like right now. But even in a system where the government abdicates their responsibility, and they abdicate their power through us kicking them out - I have very mixed feelings about that.

I don't know what the alternative for Singapore would be like. Maybe you could look at Tan Jee Say, who used to work for asset management, or KJ, who used to work for investment banking, or Chen Show Mao who used to work in a law firm advising M+As - gee seems to be a lot of investment banking people around...

 

[neddy]

Well it is not exactly a new strategy but an expansion of an old strategy that was first used after Barisan walked. For convenience I am going to call it the "Ang Hin Kee" strategy who is the PAP MP for the Prime Minister's GRC at Ang Mo Kio and new.

Interesting times.

ps. Look at PAP MP Low Yen Ling's occupation in her CV. Imagine collects MP pay yet can put down that description as an occupation. If anyone gave that kind of description in their CV and applied for a job, it will certainly go in the bin. No manners.

Thanks for the news.

So, another repackaged old strategy put out for desperate times.

Luckily, Singaporeans is rich enough to support the jiak-liao-bees.

 

[I_Hate_Pappies]

These people can easily recover their income loss by taking up a few more directorship. More time, less work and more income. Win Win situation for them.

 

[Mdm Tang]

.


Give some time for Aung Juan Soon Chee to make a comeback statement .

His number of supporters are slowing appearring.

new ones also joining .


expect Aung Juan Soon Chee to make some statements soon.

 

[sirus]

hahaha....don't just echo without using brain lah.....
why is the civil service not neutral???
is there a directive that said that civil servants must vote for papee????

Mr. Palmer will tell you: I know the truth, because I've just resigned from PAP.

 

[eremarf]

I think that there is very little consensus about the future of US innovation. Your argument that the US is not investing enough in grade school education to build the future innovators of tomorrow is based on the assumption that it is closed system, and quite clearly it is not. Another strength of the US system is how it attracts the best innovators from all over the world to set up businesses there. You might recall that Sergei Brin from Google is Russian (although he basically grew up in the States) and Jerry Yang of Yahoo is from Taiwan.

Hmm - I'm not really critiquing US' ability to innovate in future. I'm speculating more about how much more they can destroy the middle class and still have a strong economy (domestic consumption, skilled workers, etc), and avoid social unrest (the tougher problem). It won't be the first time a society has fallen behind others because the elites would rather cement their position within a stagnant society than move society forward (and risk their elite status).

If you see this as an indication of what’s going to take place in the next generation in Singapore, though, it is quite chilling. It means that we are asking the best and the brightest from all over Asia to push out the Singaporeans. In the US, if you’re pushed out of a big city, you can always move to more rural areas. What happens when this happens to Singaporeans?

Their life gets worse and worse, and - either a police state gets formed to control them, risking that they might one day rise up in open violent revolt - or they effect democratic change at the polls, (if they're not paralysed by state/big-money propaganda and distraction).

The US faces the same problem - there're only so many people you can push out of your elite enclaves. They're facing very rapid demographic changes - if the US hadn't been able to disenfranchise non-white non-rich voters so much - they would have been forced to change via democratic elections long ago.

I'm just looking towards history for inspiration. It's hard for us to think our lives and times will be written by some future Toynbee - but think of what Toynbee has said about past societies - there're some common threads that run through their rise and fall. What makes us think we're not subject to those (in the long run, in the big scheme)?

Chen Show Mao is obviously a very qualified person but if you believe that fancy degrees make you a great leader we wouldn’t be kaopehing so much about LHL. I want to reserve my judgement about him until after he completes a full term in parliament.

Well, by all means remain skeptical (of whether the oppo or even the PAP can attract good candidates or avoid corruption without obscene pay) under the current status quo. But I think the fact that there are many non-corrupt politicians not earning Singapore politician levels of pay in other parts of the world (granted - they use other mechanisms to prevent corruption - i.e. democratic institutions), already shows that you can attract talent even without obscene amounts of money.

What I'm trying to say is - maybe beyond a certain level it's not pay that determine whether you can get good enough talent into politics, while avoiding their corruption. The criteria would then be in other things - but we don't know what those criteria are - because we've always been talking about pay. I suggest those things are in democratic institutions - in subjecting politicians' to assessment by people in the polls, by the establishment of free and independent media, academia, and grassroots (or if they can't be unbiased - at least establish a plurality of equi-powered such entities). These are what we should work towards if we want to get good candidates to stand for political office.

(I do not reverse my position that with less pay, you WILL get a smaller pool of "talented" people to draw from for political office. But I question - how big does the pool have to be? And are political "talents" the same as other talents - are we competing in the same pool of talent for them? And there will always be talented people who serve for reasons other than earning a lot of money - for these - a sufficient pay is enough. I think the really difficult thing to solve in picking people for political office is actually not ability, but sincerity to the wishes of the people.)

I just want to say – when you look at Apple the big money is not in manufacturing, but in the brand name, the design, the IT and the intellectual property. If we had gone down the route of electronics manufacturing we would have ended up like Foxconn and it would have been slave/ sweatshops. So that probably was not the option. It was tragic what happened to our electronics manufacturing industry, but probably inevitable, given that we didn’t control our labour costs properly.

But we were always like Foxconn (maybe more advanced, more high-tech, more humane). So what's tragic is that we never had home-grown manufacturers.

All this falling behind in the high tech business stakes is just symptomatic of – you got it – our failure to build a good environment for innovation. I was looking through a book about Israel’s...

I quite agree. Good ideas don't get traction with the powerful here (they're not open-minded). The powerful impose their vision of what is good downwards. You can find math/modelling evidence for that in Martin Nowak, I mentioned before, right?

What's worse is that our GLCs can crowd out the good ideas. Good ideas can't compete if they're going up against GLCs with so much more capital and political clout. The whole GLC thing reminds me of how Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney outsourced so much military spending to private firms post 9/11 - you "privatise" government, ostensibly for efficiency, but actually it just becomes a way to reward yourself and cronies.

Re: Israel, we can admire their innovativeness while condemning their politics of oppression.

We’ve not done well in innovation at all. Innovation is based on rebelling, questioning authority, implementing change. All these are Singapore’s weaknesses. But then again Singapore is new at this. Maybe we will learn, maybe we won’t.

Don't be so generous. We're new at this? How so? If you think we subjected ourselves to authority to survive difficult times, Israelis should be in worse shape - they've had even more difficult times. Maybe you want to attribute it to Confucian culture (Ngiam Tong Dow precisely compared Confucian vs Jewish culture) - well remember how Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Korean Airlines, their horrible crash record due to hierarchical social structures where 2nd pilots were too diffident in correcting 1st pilots - they have Samsung and LG and Ssangyong etc now. Taiwan too has homegrown enterprises. Don't make excuses for Singapore. We crushed our own innovativeness. Maybe consider this - both S. Korea and Taiwan have become open democracies, but Singapore is still not-so-open. I'm just pointing out a correlation, not saying it's causation, but it's food for thought, yes?

I don’t like Singapore basing so much of the economy on finance. We should reduce our economy’s dependence on finance, even though it is such a big part of who we are – regional HQ, trading post, etc. I hear about New York and Chicago setting up flourishing start-up scenes. If those financial centres can do it, we should also think about following suit.

Okay I'm a bit of a doomsday person where global warming and consequent economic collapse is concerned. Singapore really is too tightly tied to the global economy to survive that. And finance is even more vulnerable than high-tech industries. At least high-tech industries, the technical knowledge, the machine capital, they will still be relevant in a post-climate-change world. Financial expertise will be useless once the huge flows of money evaporate when people realise hard assets are what count in a collapsing world.

But other than that (a maybe unlikely occurrence - so we can gamble on it happening in a mild way), finance seems as good as manufacturing for earning money. Unless someone can prove otherwise?

What can we do to encourage people to change vocations more easily? When you change vocations, there is the chicken and egg problem: you can’t learn new skills until people are willing to employ you. People won’t employ you until you have those skills. Maybe the government can mandate that employers provide a certain amount of revoc training to people. Another problem is that Singaporean companies are unwilling to employ older workers, let alone retrain them.

Yay, we have consensus on government intervention in free labour markets. Re: not hiring older workers, we could conceivably set up and enforce discriminatory employment legislation. Or do other kinds of gov't intervention. I mean I'm not a technical expert, but if we can identify the problems, we can set the technocrats on them so they can suggest the best answers. I still think unemployment benefits are crucial though - or the opportunity cost of changing jobs becomes much higher, and people would be more averse to the idea.

The problem of higher education being too costly is also present in the US. If in Scandinavia, too many people have degrees because education is free, in the US, tertiary education is too expensive and people from the lower class find it very difficult to move up the ladder.

Well, so I'm not very supportive (I'm just a little supportive) of heavily subsidising tertiary education. This is especially true in Singapore where people aren't really trying to obtain the experience of tertiary education - most see it as a means to an end - they just want to signal their fitness for work. I think it's better to not subsidise tertiary education so much, but subsidize those things that will make people better workers - skills and vocational training, and unemployment benefits, etc. More equal wages is probably an important part of discouraging the excessive diversion of resources to sorting/signalling work ability too - but that's another topic. (I mean - one of the benefits of more equal wages is you free up resources from being spent on signalling fitness for work.) Or if funds must stay within education - to subsidize earlier education stages, e.g. childhood and primary school.

I don’t think that our GLCs are that different from the South Korean chaebols or the Japanese zaibutsus. But the way we run them is the crucial thing, and it might be different. I think that it’s very unhealthy that we have stymied the growth of local industries all these years. It will take decades to correct this problem. Or maybe we will wake up one day to find that all those people who have managed to start up and run businesses in Singapore are all the foreign talents.

Well, isn't that difference significant? So let's call them different, shall we?

And, in S Korea and Japan and Taiwan, the government picks winners and they (some of them) win. But here, we pick winners and they don't win - well they win domestically (no competition man, and they even squeeze out the competition) but they don't win overseas.

Anyway I don’t believe in your privileged person theory... etc

Interesting things to think about. Thanks for the info.
Re: crucible of hardship in early Singapore and Israel - very thought-provoking too. Cool.



Will respond to the rest later - gotta get out for a bit. Nice discussion!

 

[Picardo]

One can spend a whole lifetime talking about stuff, as there's endless stuff to occupy all available time, even many lifetimes. But it serves no useful purpose other than as a means to occupied all the time. Bickering academically over endless matters is pointless.

Reality, for anyone, is only all about the money. For a few, things like taking astronomical salaries while the going is still good is the only reality to be reckoned with. It had to be astronomical perhaps to factor in future uncertainties. The never-imagined arrival of the Internet has thankfully increased that uncertainty, if there was such uncertainty in the first place. But more likely, there was no such feeling of uncertainty, other than 'freak' events. Thus Internet media can be said to be the saving factor, to prevent, or at least for the time being hinder, things from getting worse than they could ever be.

Without Internet media, such advance would have been unthinkable and near impossible.

Re: managing public perception - well it's good to know that "perception" is not "reality". I think Singaporeans are all aware of this, and skeptical of politicians... But we don't know where to get "reality". We lack a free press, and our academics don't comment much about Singapore (if they comment, they might not get research funding, might not keep their jobs - and they also don't have much data to comment on - since the SG gov't doesn't release much data), and grassroots groups cannot really comment via protests - the best they can do is social media and Hong Lim Park.

Re: quoting just appropriate sentences - hmmm... I'll try? But I am not optimistic (because the ideas are big)? :o But you're very welcome to ask about things I am happy to talk about stuff. I'm very glad to know our discussion is reaching a wider audience.

 

[GOD IS MY DOG]

Good analysis.

The pap is desperate and will try many new strategies. But as long as LHL and his cronies dont listen to people and know the people's cries..the new strategies can only buy him some time.

still so politically naive ah..............Allah-mak...........

S'poreans are cattle and sheep.............the Lee Family are the big boss.............PAP ministers their farmers........


last resort..........they'll resort to election fraud.............they control the media and declare themselves winners...........what can gutless S'poreans do ?

 

[metalmickey]

But we were always like Foxconn (maybe more advanced, more high-tech, more humane). So what's tragic is that we never had home-grown manufacturers.

I'm not sure about this. Foxconn is not "home grown". If I'm not wrong it's Taiwanese. And they're manufacturing for Apple. So Foxconn is in no sense "home grown". And I'm also not sure that being "home grown" means your manufacturing base is in Singapore, because I don't know if Creative did their manufacturing in Singapore. Cost is still the crucial thing.

Don't be so generous. We're new at this? How so? If you think we subjected ourselves to authority to survive difficult times, Israelis should be in worse shape - they've had even more difficult times. Maybe you want to attribute it to Confucian culture (Ngiam Tong Dow precisely compared Confucian vs Jewish culture)

OK, I was referring to biotech when I said "we're new at this". Other areas, I would say, yes. Singapore is not good at innovating. And even in the past when Singapore was really good at innovating (because let's face it: the anti-littering campaign, the idea to have an export based economy, the idea to be an aviation and maritime hub were all successful innovations that drove Singapore in the past) those innovations were driven from the top. Singapore's bottom up innovation has never been very good.

I just want to say - I don't think that the PAP is adverse to change per se. They seem to have their fingers in a lot of pies right now, opening new education institutes, SIT, SUTD, etc etc. IT's basically that our culture is not changing. The current structures are not changing. This lack of innovation is a problem of the system, and the system is the people, not only the government. So the netizens can complain about the government all they want, they are part of the problem - the citizens are not changing.

Okay I'm a bit of a doomsday person where global warming and consequent economic collapse is concerned. Singapore really is too tightly tied to the global economy to survive that. And finance is even more vulnerable than high-tech industries. At least high-tech industries, the technical knowledge, the machine capital, they will still be relevant in a post-climate-change world. Financial expertise will be useless once the huge flows of money evaporate when people realise hard assets are what count in a collapsing world.

But other than that (a maybe unlikely occurrence - so we can gamble on it happening in a mild way), finance seems as good as manufacturing for earning money. Unless someone can prove otherwise?

Finance will always be a crucial component of our economy. The key point is not whether manufacturing is "good" or finance is "bad" but about balance. Finance is a crucial component of a manufacturing system anyway.

And being tied to the global economy does not mean we have to go down when the global economy goes down. We didn't go down in the Asian financial crisis, and that was because we had plenty of reserves. So you see reserves are not purely a bad thing. Unfortunately we started building up greater reserves at the expense of the the people of Singapore 10 years later.

Yay, we have consensus on government intervention in free labour markets. Re: not hiring older workers, we could conceivably set up and enforce discriminatory employment legislation.

Yah. I feel that the government has been pretty heartless in this respect. Yes, it's good to have a dynamic economy, and yes it's good that you want to change the industry when you want to. But instead of facilitating your own citizens to change, you bring in cheaper alternatives by the boatload to drive your citizens out of the door.

Well, so I'm not very supportive (I'm just a little supportive) of heavily subsidising tertiary education. This is especially true in Singapore where people aren't really trying to obtain the experience of tertiary education - most see it as a means to an end - they just want to signal their fitness for work.

It's a shame that Singaporeans have so little regard for genuine education. I think we don't subsidise our education as much as the Europeans. And I wonder why we are totally subsidising so many foreigners - almost as though the PAP were waging war on its own people! I don't see Singaporeans going for postgraduate studies. And I see that in IT industries in other countries, they actually take in non-graduates if these people can prove that they have real knowledge, whereas in Singapore people are so kiasee that a capable person without a certificate would be shown the door immediately. Then again, I have to say that our local unis, especially the elite ones, are not so badly run.

That's the thing about Singaporeans - and I don't mind other people around here calling them Sinkies because of this. As much as they hate people like LHL and Teo Chee Hean and whoever getting scholarships and running this country, they totally wouldn't mind it if it happened to their own kids.

 

[scroobal]

I have come across some of our best and brightest leave the education system and move to other fields. They all seem to have a similar message. I know of an outstanding lady who was in the pioneer batch of teachers to lead the gifted programme. She was an exceptional individual and had tremendous respect from those who met her.

I was sad to see her leave our shores to move to NZ. Though she never gave her reasons I am sure she was looking for validation from her pupils and what they did in life and not results in the form of grades.

And what a tremndous lady - swears like a sailor, had great leadership potential etc.

That's high praise from a major contributor like yourself! :o



Yeah I was just banging my head on a wall trying to change it, I think. It's true about what parents want, what children want.

It's perverse because like Chang Ha-Joon said - education becomes a sorting/signalling tool (suitability for "good" jobs), and education inflation occurs - which wastes resources. But this relates only to tertiary schooling - I think primary and secondary schooling is essential for all citizen-workers in our economy today. (But there should be debate about what a good primary and secondary education is - for e.g. secondary schooling should not be aimed towards getting into tertiary institutions if we agree that tertiary institutions are not so useful.)

But that doesn't mean we can't try to get tiny handles on things. Some things we could try:

1. Reduce the disparity in income between "good" and "not-so-good" jobs. Pay is a big component, although job description matters too (if a high class prostitutes earned as much as a doctor or lawyer, it's still not a very prestigious job), so you can't completely solve this - but I think once it's not so stigmatized to be in a blue-collar job, people wouldn't game the school system so hard - they can afford to quit school earlier, join the workforce, and learn work-relevant skills.

In Scandinavia because education is free (and supported by stipends), lots of people go to university even if they don't need to. It's wasteful from a productivity point of view - because they don't make use of their education at work - but education might be what enables them to have enlightened views about how to run their society - and to lead more meaningful lives.

2. Change assessment modes - so that when students try to score for exams, they also acquire useful skills. Look at how controversial Project Work is among A level students. They mind it, because it's not easy to mug for (and also because of subjective grading, and different amounts of teacher help across schools - but that can be audited - like I said - it's expensive). Look also at how the independent schools and IP schools are doing their own internal assessments - those are often progressive and really assess useful skills (but expensive). Secondary school is not necessarily wasteful education - it depends on how useful the curriculum is to students' future work/career (as opposed to useful for qualifying for further education alone).



Yes - I think the middle class (or whatever passed for it in the old days) is disappearing. The middle ground is becoming smaller, the electorate is more polarised. It's like two camps of sailors on the same ship, with less and less common ground between camps - and we don't know where to steer the ship, how to divide rations, workload, etc. Solving inequality would pull more of the poor and the rich back to a middle class life, values, and identity - and there is value in the social cohesion that creates, IMHO.