Singapore has the dubious honour of having the third lowest fertility rate (TFR) in the world after Hong Kong and South Korea and a population that is ageing faster than blue cheese in the open. For the past 25 or so years, Singaporeans and its Government have been gripped in national soul-searching, finger-pointing and a blame-game on every purported culprit and proposed solution to the birth dearth. One thing has remained constant -- we still ain't producing babies.
On the part of Government, I give them points for being pro-active and responsive to social changes as many policies have been tweaked and introduced to improve the societal and workplace support for people who have kids over the last few decades. I have it much better than my mother did in the 80s, where she only got 2 months' paid maternity and no child-care or domestic-helper subsidy, yet the tragic thing is, nothing has improved where it should have improved -- our TFR.
Today, I hear a new set of gripes and alleged causes of the low TFR, mostly from well-educated women. They whinge mostly about
- the high financial cost of having one or more children (drain on their resources);
- the high personal cost to their freedom, mobility and potentially earned resources (there is a curious phenomena of middle-class women giving up their well-paid jobs to become stay-home-mums, which I will discuss under the "Helicopter Parent Problem later in this essay);
- the lack of state support (even though we have one of the best sets of maternity policies in place compared to the ones in other East Asian countries and even some EU countries, people now compare ours to those of Scandinavia, proving once again that nothing is good enough for this nation of whingers);
- the lack of workplace support, i,e, long working hours (again, relative to only certain countries in the EU, which is not representative of Europe and the U.S as a whole).
None of the above is a direct cause to get Government worried about, because these gripes belie actually more endemic and systemic root problems. The French system targets number three and to some degree, number four, and people think that is a panacea for your birth dearth. Not true, French society and their economic and taxation systems are very different from ours and these have something to do with French success with their TFR. Let me attempt to put all of that in some sort of sociological and economic perspective because each needs to be weighed in the context of Singaporean as well as global realities. My point is: the tendency of a population as a whole to have babies (one or more or not at all) tells us a LOT about its economic and social values. Therefore, if you want to get someone to make 2.1 babies, you don't throw money at them nor do you start giving out free this and free that.
1) It's not money, stupid, it's mobility
When people lament the financial cost of having babies, they are calculating what they perceive as necessary in comparison with a default norm. This is totally mental, but systemic, going by the billion-dollar industry that thrives on children's health, education and "intellectual" needs. Half of all Singaporeans live with a monthly household income of under S$4000, the majority of this group does not pay any income tax because they make less than S$22,000 a year, living under what most developed nations would call the poverty line. Yet they have more children than the middle class that earns between $4000 and $10,000 that make up the 50th to 80th percentile of household incomes in Singapore.
Point: poorer people do not have fewer children because it would cost them more to raise each kid. They do the exact opposite. Relatively wealthier people have fewer children (even though comparatively they have more resources) because they perceive the drain on their resources where the former group does not. Why?
1.1) The Keeping-Up-With-The-Joneses Problem
Robert Frank, the economist, summed it up perfectly when he told us that given a choice, people would prefer to earn $80,000 while all their neighbours and friends earned $70,000 rather than earn $100,000 while people around them earned $110,000. Honest. I'll tell you why this is important to a population officer in our yet-to-justify-its-existence National Population Secretariat: upward mobility.
Upward mobility is the desire (or the ability) to enter the class above your own, and upward generational mobility is the ability to move into the class above your parents'. To this end, Singaporeans have literally soared upwards during our industrial boom in the 1980s. People don't want to do as well or have as much as their neighbours, they want to have MORE. Not a lot more, just slightly. Now, if your friends started trading in their Toyotas for Audis, you would look at your Toyota and start feeling a little dissatisfied. If all of them enrolled their kids in Montessori, Mindchamps or one of the thousands of private childcare and playgroup centres offering bogus programmes designed to "nurture a genius", you would have to look very far and dig very deep to be happy sending Junior to the PAP Kindergarten. Consumption can be conspicuous (car, property) or inconspicuous (education & insurance plans, holidays and tuition classes) but both forms of consumption stem from a relative desire to be equal or better off than your peers.
I'm talking about the Middle Class that has really every financial ability to pay for 2 children's food, basic education but choose instead to perceive otherwise because they are comparing themselves to an artificially constructed Middle Class Lie that their children require this extra music class and that 9 day holiday to Hokkaido and Disneyland. Throw in a hyper-consumerist culture (open any newspaper and you will find on every other page a spanking advertisement for a newly-launched designer condominium that costs an average of $1.2 million and the latest Mercedes, BMW or Audi) that pervades EVERY stratum of society, yes, this is not only a Middle Class Problem, but an entire society problem, and you understand why people count dollars where their grandparents never used to. The "needs" of today are really the luxuries of yesterday.
A word about the working class: they are not immune to keeping up with the Joneses either. Our post-industrial, consumerist culture survives on people not being happy with what they have currently. If you can't afford a car, your aspiration is to own a little Hyundai or Kia. To hell with the over-extended public transport with its inefficiencies and high costs. If you currently drive a Honda or Toyota, you aspire to drive a VW or a nice Lexus SUV. If you have been living in a 5 room HDB flat and your friends have been selling theirs and flinging their small profits into a private condominium that comes with a half-million dollar mortgage, you would be putting your flat on the market as well. If you wanted all these things, what would you have to give up in order to pay for a second child?
It's not money stupid. You don't give these people a Baby Bonus (of $4000) for doing what their natural instincts are urging them to do anyway. You take away the pressures that stymie and repress these natural urges to have a baby.You do something about a mass media that celebrates millionaires and glorifies consumerist lifestyles. Aha....but you don't want to compromise consumption or GDP growth. So you throw a few grand at each family and pretend to be perplexed by why they still aren't biting. Gimme a break.
1.2) The Helicopter Parent Problem
In America, there is a curious yet real trend of middle class parents (especially mothers) of being pathologically involved in every aspect of their children's existence -- school, hobbies, friends, diet. Sociologists have named them Helicopter Parents. Helicopter parenting is not novel to Singaporeans, it afflicts the middle class working mother more than anyone because she is educated and aspires for her children to be upwardly mobile (see 1.1). Therefore, she views parenting as not a mere role (like working or supporting your parents) but an entire career. Every minuscule development of the child becomes her obsession and she is devoted to every single aspect of the child's life, sometimes stiflingly so. The child's perceived successes or failures are frighteningly attributed to her own abilities to control and "nurture" them.
What this means for our Population Officer friend is an increasing proportion of parents tallying up a hefty personal cost to their time and energies on top of an already bloated account deficit owed to conspicuous consumption. So when women weigh the costs and benefits of having a child, they now factor in the cost of giving up their jobs to be a stay-at-home helicopter mum. Of course not everyone subscribes to the helicopter way, I must be exaggerating, you scoff. Granted, I have no data to elucidate how many women give up their jobs or think they have to in order to be a "good mother", but going by the pervasiveness of substitutes for good parenting -- I'm referring to tuition centers, enrichment courses, full-time maids, sales of computers, iPads and other "enriching" toys for kids -- you cannot doubt that the modern parent makes parenting out to be more costly than it ever was in the 20th century.
1.3) The Every-Man-For-Himself Problem
The third argument I make for social mobility being the cause of a low TFR (and not financial cost) is ironically enough our antagonistic relationship with welfarism. Just about every Singaporean from inception is taught that there is no free meal, no handout without strings and absolutely nobody out there who owes us a living no matter come hell, damnation, war or disease. Full stop. There is no unemployment benefit, no minimum wage, no universal health coverage or affordable comprehensive health insurance (state-health insurance is paid for by your own income and is not comprehensive), no pensions or retirement benefit (you pay for your own retirement with your own income into a state-run fund called the CPF)at 4% interest). Since the Great Brief Recession of 2007-08, Government has grudgingly designed a welfare system with more brakes in it than a Universal Studios rollercoaster. People depend mostly on voluntary welfare organisations and civil charities for assistance, particularly for health-related needs like dialysis and hospice care. State medical facilities are subsidised but not free and neither is education. If you are impressed by our almost universal home-ownership rate, I'll tell you that public housing is subsidised but costs more than private housing in many of the world's most developed cities. How do we pay for all this? How do we live on a median monthly household income of S$4000 before tax and still consume conspicuously, you ask?
By having a pretty healthy savings rate. In a recent survey by HSBC, 31% polled said they are saving for early retirement (early retirement is another curious Singaporean aspiration that puts more pressure on resource accruance and hence cost of raising a child); 67% say their savings plans are a top source of retirement funds; and the top 3 financial products people own are medical insurance, life insurance and cash in decreasing order. Singaporeans are a pretty anxious lot.
We cannot live like the Europeans, taking annual 6 week holidays and working part time, or spend 120% of our incomes like the Americans because NOBODY IS GOING TO PAY FOR OUR RETIREMENT. Am I indicting our social safety net or rather lack thereof? Not really. Europe and America are going bankrupt partly because what they are currently producing can no longer sustain what they have promised to provide people when they age or fall sick. The system we have here is more robust and sustainable, but the consequence for the TFR is an entrenched social value of non-dependency on the state (laughable since Singaporeans have been called the saddest bunch of spoiled brats mollycoddled by their nanny-state) in terms of what people expect to get from the Government.
Again, let us view this value as a gradation relative to the lower to upper social classes. Insecurity plagues everyone, but I would bet that the higher you go, up to a certain point where financial insecurity tapers off once you hit a certain income level, the more insecure you become of maintaining a certain lifestyle you have attained (again, see 1.1). If there is something that must go hand-in-hand with upward mobility, it's the fear of status degradation -- falling below the class you are currently in. I would hate to have to move into a smaller place in a less wealthy neighbourhood, drive a Korean car where I used to drive a European one or worse, take only one vacationn a year. In a population of insecure individuals, ever worried about losing their status and acquired lifestyles once they hit retirement, every birth to their family has to be weighed against the cost of their savings and retirement fund.
Aha, but you do not want to foster a "Crutch Mentality" by giving handouts to the unemployed, god forbid we have lazy people who don't want to work squandering away taxpayers' money like the bums in the US and Europe. We don't want to increase taxes either, otherwise all the Americans and Europeans would not want to bring their businesses here and nobody would want to come to Singapore to work - we are, after all, the next tax-haven after Switzerland. An insecure population that doesn't breed is preferred to a lazy one with a national current account deficit.
2) It's not money, stupid, it's housework
My second thesis against the assumption that financial cost hinders people giving birth is the gender problem. You got it, unequal pay, unequal expectations and all that. Wait, I am no feminist even though I have been lambasting society and the establishment forever on this issue of inequality. Women are expected to do the housework and raising of children despite being an equal contributer to household income. Men do not get paternity leave, which does nothing to change the idea that men's main responsibility is to be the breadwinner. In a toss-up between who should give up their job to be the helicopter stay-at-home parent, it is invariably the woman (there are exceptions but because they are exceptions, they are not worth talking about).
Given this, does anyone realistically expect a highly educated woman whose income enables her and her husband to live the hyperconsumerist, upwardly-mobile (see 1.1 and 1.3) lifestyle to have babies that will exert a perceived cost to overall well-being (see 1.1, 1.2, 1.3)? People don't fight over money, they fight over whom is going to do the housework so that nobody has to stop making money in order to do it, and whom is going to look after Junior so that nobody has to stop making money in order to do it.
2.1) The Division of Labour Problem (gender, maids, nuclear fams)
The Government is not stupid on this one. That's why we have one of the highest rates of dependency on domestic foreign labour in the world. Poor Indonesian, Filipina and Burmese women clean our houses, bathe our elderly and raise our children while husband and wife work 8 to 12 hour days making an income that isn't even on par with the average American household. Hell, Americans make more money than we do without having to pay for third world domestic help. That is because a) families perceive they can live on one income and b) women there do everything and I mean everything themselves. And c) putting your elderly parent in a nursing home is not a crime punishable by ostracism and shame.
If half of all Singaporeans require dual incomes to meet their survival needs (remember our median household income) then the other half of dual income families believe they need two incomes to meet their consumption needs (see 1.1). If everybody up to the 70th percentile were content to live in a $150,000 public-funded apartment, we would not have a booming property market with steady 10% annual growth. On the other hand, we would also have nobody complaining they cannot live on a single income of S$3500 to S$5000. So half of the problem is economic in nature - people want their nice houses and cars and holidays and designer kitchens - and the other half is societal. Who is going to do the work at home?
Middle class Singaporean women are not happy having foreign domestic helpers raising their children, yet they can't bring themselves to live in a 4-room, 10 year old flat either. Singaporean women would rather do the child caring themselves than leave it to an unprofessional "professional" child-minder, yet they can't bring themselves to give up one of their two cars and spend less on one income. Singaporean women would love to have that second or third child, but they can't bring themselves to snub their next promotion to a senior management position by taking a year off to raise the kids. Why should they, their husbands are not more qualified or more capable than they are!
Again, Population Officer, you don't throw in an additional month of maternity leave and pretend that men are not part of the equation when it comes to raising a family. 6 months of paid maternity leave, more"tax rebates" or childcare subsidies will not change people's minds about having one or two more kids. The only thing you accomplish is to reinforce the idea that women still have to do the domestic work, you continue to keep mothers in an intolerable work system that demands long hours and you do nothing to change women's minds about accepting this system.
If women believe that they can work fewer hours - flexible and part time work - this solves problem 1.2. If men started taking paid paternity leave (say, 3 months while their wives took the other 3), women would not feel like they are targets of gender discrimination or the glass ceiling, which in turn helps them make choices at work to support having another child. If families believed they could be happy on one income - this means Government has to do something about problem 1.1 and 1.3 through policy - they would consider having more children.
3) It's not money, stupid, it's quality time
Finally, no amount of money can pay for the time lost with your child while you are out there in some office crunching numbers or shuffling papers. People don't want to subcontract their parenting duties to third-world labour, as I said in point 2, they do it because they THINK they HAVE TO, as I showed in point 1. It's a dismal, laughable reality, and it's because we like our economic growth and buying new, shiny things so that we can keep up with our friends and colleagues.
Singaporeans are not the most productive people around. Yet we obsess over it. We have long work hours that don't amount to much real value add. Work can be done in half the time, if you look at the way people behave in offices and around the water cooler and pantry. So if you paid someone the same wages, and you let her say, leave 2 hours early or come 2 hours later as long as her work is done and she does not cause inconvenience to her teammates or project, why don't you do it? If a person left work at 6pm on the dot while all his colleagues left at 8pm because they wanted to show their boss (who leaves at 7.45pm) they worked long hours, pretty soon he is going to start staying at work till 8pm. It's wasteful and stupid.
But Singaporeans do it. Out of social pressure, insecurity, personal ambitions, you name it. While the employer is to some extent responsible for much of the wastefulness and unproductive use of time and resources, the individual Singaporean is too caught up with his own personal needs (see 1.1 and 1.3) to think collectively as a group of workers. You don't have to strike or protest for better working hours and pay, all you need to do is pick an organisation and employer who is reasonable enough about productivity and working hours. If everyone boycotted companies with poor work-life balance, you wouldn't have many companies who can succeed with their existing poor conditions. But people will always aspire to more earnings, higher status and therefore, employers have no incentive to design more productive work systems.
So there you go. It's not really the real net cost of raising a child that has depressed our national birth rate the last 20 years. It isn't even the cost of living or the cost of working (long hours, no quality time), It is the way people behave in relation to other people, what they see as necessary to living a good life, having a secure retirement and being a Good Parent - and all this is flexible and changeble because these needs are as artificially created as the colouring on your ice-cream.
How should I know? Do I look like the Prime Minister or his bunch of overpaid millionaire ministers who claim they are the best people to lead this country?
4 comments:
Look, this may sound a bit offensive, but I'm not really sure what this mad race to have babies, more babies, ever more babies is about, when it is a fact that we don't even know how to educate, feed, and generally provide a healthy life to the ones we already have.
We don't have enough food.
We don't have enough energy.
We don't have enough drinking water.
We don't have enough teachers to educate children.
Hell, we can hardly even control the whole thing anymore!
More of these kids born in the parts of the world with fewer flat screen TVs and hollywood movies are already waking up to the truth of their condition.
We thought we could cut corners, just not care, avoid spending the money on their education, they are far away, in another country, you know, just let them read this or that holy book, deal with their "government", sell them kalashnikovs and let them prosper.
And so they pray, and they prosper, and there are more and more of them and they are HUNGRIER and come in LARGER NUMBERS than your kids.
And now they want a flat TV too, and an ipod, and a share of that clean water and that burger you thought you could buy just for your kid, and they want to sit next to him at school.
They are done using guns on each other, they start boarding our cargo or holiday cruise ships, they switch to enriched uranium and turn to one brand of jihad or the other.
So, what do we do?
Well, we change the design of the heat pump in our refrigerators so we can stick a "green compliant" label on them. Wonderful!
Oh, we also install security scanners at the airport, to keep all these bad people out. Safe!
And we try really hard to have MORE KIDS so that they consume ever MORE resources and create MORE shit and everybody just has to ever work harder and find ways to create MORE food, MORE mind numbing entertainment, MORE pure water, MORE techniques to keep the bad hungry 50% of humanity out of the peaceful playground where OUR kids play with bambi dolls and jingle bells.
Do we really think this is going to work?
Does it matter at all, if we get 2.x or 2.y kids per family, or why, in -- where again? -- Sin-ga-pore?
Does our lipstick color match with our dress?
In the real world, outside of the walled gardens and narrow minds of our political systems, the birth rate DOES matter.
Check this out.
Then, I suggest that instead of worrying about the birth rate in Singapore, you could apply your mind to something like "how are we going to safely recycle the nuclear fuel that will be used to generate the electricity to power the car that my kid will drive?"
or "What are we going to do with all these people when they get old and can't work?"
Until someone can articulate an answer to these, as a personal choice, I stick to this.
National governments fret over the TFR issue for a good reason: bankruptcy. If there is only 1 young person for every 2 elderly (non productive) people, who is going to pay for the elderly?
That said, you are free to ignore this since you are not concerned about policy-making, but by the time you get to 65, you might get a nasty surprise from CPF - sorry, you can't withdraw your funds till you're 75 maybe.
The alternative solution is immigration but working class S'poreans resist this, you can't blame them, even the middle classes can be xenophobic if their "turf" is intruded upon, as in the Serangoon Gardens case.
Overpopulation is certainly a problem, and the stress it puts on the environment real. But at the moment there is no feasible or desirable way to get the billion or so poor Africans, Indians and Chinese redistributed to the developed world without widespread rioting.
V, you are getting your intellectual brain working!
Great! Love reading a well written and considered post like this! Keep it up!:D
It's hard to fend off the argument that cost of living is not a key contributor to low TFR. The highest contributor is really housing. In the past housing prices went for as low as 20k. Today, most of them (my guess is over 2/3s of them) are 300k and above, and still rising. So, while the question on retirement might have crossed the minds of the older generations, the younger generations will take a even more critical view in having babies because (300-20)k is a sum of money that makes a world of difference to retirement.
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