Away From The Toxic Playground

Of course I'm talking about Singapore, lah!

After giving much thought to the content of my very first post after a 2 year hiatus from writing anything else besides internal emails and shopping lists, I've decided to talk about the answer to a question that I've been asked by several people: What has changed?

I have changed.

FROM TOXIC PLAYGROUND TO TOXIC REALITY

To be sure, no one remains definitively the same from moment to moment, or year to year for you skeptics out there. Imagine an emotionally high-strung person (such as myself), we swing from mood to mood in a single morning, and emotions, which drive decision-making, create the multiple realities that we experience in a single day. I might be calmly drinking my coffee and having breakfast with Ju thinking what a blissful time I am having despite being a weekday single Mum (more on this below); 15 minutes later I am sitting in my car stuck in a gridlock between my apartment and Ju's school (it is a 4 minute drive) cursing the Brussels traffic system, the gold standard of Belgian  government inefficiency. 

Chateau de la Hulpe, Autumn 2014

When people in Kuala Lumpur sympathise with me for having moved here from Brussels, I inform them wryly -- to looks of astonishment and disbelief -- that life in Malaysia is not much worse than that in Belgium. The same uncontrollable traffic snarls, the same ISIS types lurking in the vicinity, in fact the weather here is preferable and with the lower cost of living I get more bang for my buck. 

Daniel thinks that when your expectations are not matched by reality, your subjective judgment of how good a place is to live in fares more poorly. This is especially true for Brussels, a place most people mistakenly imagine as a First World city. Being included in the same continent as Germany, I am sorry to say, does not help foreign visitors at all when it comes to first impressions. The phrases "rude shock", and "utter disappointment" sum up one's experience more aptly, particularly if one has to live there. In fact I have never seen my former boss show more emotion than his sighs of resignation when he is talking about the Belgian state. In fact my boss had about a total of 6 facial expressions and 4 of them were of resignation with how things were run over there. Oh, one is eye-rolling, we did a lot of that in Brussels. No wonder Singapore is warmly labelled "Asia for Beginners" by Western visitors. The opposite logic holds true for Singapore and Southeast Asia. 

But this isn't a smackdown of Brussels, I've done enough of that on Facebook and with friends over the last almost 2 years living there. Away from the toxic playground of Singapore (also poorly-nicknamed "Disneyland with the death penalty"), I was able to think about ideas I had long taken for granted living in one place for over 30 years. Living in Brussels then Kuala Lumpur, I was forced to examine my ethnocentric views* and most important of all, take stock of my own flaws. 

I changed in small and monumental ways. I had to make changes to my beliefs, and then to my behaviour, which were really adaptive responses to the external stimuli that I was experiencing and the challenges that threw me off kilter. It was not only about the places we were in. It was about the choices we made and the attitudes we chose to use in making our choices. Singapore feels toxic because of the many taken-for-granted axioms that its citizens go around with about the country, which can be summed up in the following adjectives: convenient, safe, orderly, efficient, predictable, comfortable. Away from these safety nets and devoid of familiar friends and family, one has to evolve a new set of mechanisms with which to manage the tasks of daily life. You never really get to grow in your thoughts and beliefs because they are hardly ever challenged in the uber-comfort zone that's Singapore.

SLOWING DOWN

I realised that the biggest gain I had made away from the sanctuary of a well-planned state was to Slow Down. This was as much an adaptive response (because it is necessary when everything shuts down on a Sunday, your entire staff are out the door at 5 sharp every day, and the check-out counters at every Carrefour are designed for the patience of people aged 50 and over) as it was a personal choice.

I slowed down when it came to Getting Things Done. First discovery -- I could be as efficient as I wanted, finish as much as I could, but I couldn't get anyone else to work on my time schedule or fit themselves into my deadlines. Getting things done depends entirely on the 10 or so people you rely on to finish the damn task. Second discovery -- it's not about how quickly you get it done, it's how many mistakes you avoided. We love being the fastest and the first in Singapore don't we? But when things seriously cock up, thumbs get stuck up asses and fingers pointed more quickly than it took to build the Marina Bay Sands. I had to really push out the Big Picture Ending in many cases in order to  zoom into the tiny details we all hate to "waste time" over. I had to oversee and check on the people who were helping me (in other words "supervise") just to prevent little preventable errors. It could be a matter of minutes scanning through a quotation and finding a small detail in calculation (that blew up into a long and costly battle 2 months later); or reading a 5 page contract for a line that would come back to bite you. It would be easy blaming the staff for not doing their due diligence, an excuse we like to trot out, but as we also say, it was my neck on the chopping block. 

Koblenz, Spring 2014

I slowed down to live life. No, there were not that many roses to smell (nor time to smell them) on the dirty, dog-poo littered streets of Brussels, but Europeans are generally happier in large-scale surveys compared to us islanders, and there's a good reason for it. Besides forming the new habit of sorting my trash (I actually found it therapeutic to sort my garbage into the 3 trashcans in my kitchen) and rushing for shopping on Saturday before the supermarkets closed, we learnt to use those sacred weekends to do something other than retail shopping and eating at new restaurants. It was enjoyable to simply bask under a rare spring sun on the grass of the Bois de la Cambre (they let their dogs shit everywhere except the park) while Ju cycled along the Sunday car-free lanes that wind through the expansive park in the middle of the city. We could spend a slow morning at one of the outdoor markets, meandering through the stalls buying our supply of French saucissons (dried sausages), olives and my favourite fresh chicken innards, or an afternoon at Brussels' popular Tram Museum riding a vintage tram through the woods of Terveuren. 

Brugges, Autumn 2014

Oh yes, Europe can be an inefficient mess with most  of the bureaucracy (wait till you hear how I dealt with my export taxes on my car), but it doesn't cost much to be happy, if your idea of happiness is the simple joy of watching your kid build a sandcastle, eat an ice cream or take walks through old cobblestone streets and sip wine in the evenings as the sun set at bedtime in summer. Since we had no babysitter, we took Ju with us everywhere. Ju at 3 and a half years could sit quietly at a restaurant through dinner without much drama. 

I slowed down most of all in the way I viewed the world and its inhabitants. I had been cussing and swearing in frustration while driving my entire adult life. After moving to Belgium and Malaysia, I wondered why on earth I had found it necessary to complain about Singapore roads and traffic. There IS NO TRAFFIC in Singapore. What you would call a jam is a minor congestion in KL or Brussels. While the proportion of idiots driving in KL is certainly larger than that in Singapore (by simple fact that there is no pricing control on automobiles or prohibitive road-use taxes in Malaysia), the level of road courtesy here is miles apart from that found in Singapore. In fact I would go so far as to say you should not expect any sort of courtesy from Singapore drivers. It's as if the rat race which they view as symbolic of their lives permeates the manner in which they react to those who jostle with them on the roads. Malaysians are terribly patient about things they cannot change: rush hour congestion, people cutting into their queue and taxi-drivers who mostly drive as if they are drunk or high on drugs. I had to learn the same. There is no other way to live without going insane in KL. 

MAKING CHOICES

The biggest change I had to make was to decide what kind of mother and employee I wanted to be. Daniel had taken a job that moved him to Hamburg so I was home alone with Ju on weekdays while Daniel would visit us on weekends from Germany. Even with a part-time nanny who looked after Ju after school till I got home, it was never lost on me how I was juggling two roles by myself and how heavy this responsibility was. While every one of my Singaporean colleagues (who were childless) worked past 7 or 8pm, I left at 6pm, 6.30pm latest every day to go home to my son. In Singapore, I hardly ever worked late even with Daniel around all the time, but in Brussels I was Ju's only constant parent most days and I simply could not arrange my son around my workload, which was in fact endless. I often drove three hours with Ju on weekends over the border to Germany so he could spend time with the grandparents or Daniel when he was in the western areas of Stuttgart or Freiburg. Planning our family meetings became as normal as planning my calendar of work events. It was not normal, and the toll only showed itself when Daniel was offered a posting to Malaysia. 

And so here I am now, fast forwarding to the present. I no longer work for my previous company, a choice I didn't make without pretty heavy soul searching. The time away in Brussels gave me an insight into changing the way I used to think and behave, about time, about parenting, about what quality of life means. And the time now in Kuala Lumpur has given me a much-needed pause to reflect upon the direction of my future: how my thoughts have changed, how I choose and decide on a daily basis, be it my behaviour, my emotions or my health. It is ironic that you feel your responsibility most acutely only when you have ultimate freedom with which to use your time each day. 

Hamburg, Summer 2014

You will have  probably noticed that I have dealt quite effectively with my decision to quit my job. My current vocation? On Sabbatical. One of the most toxic parts of life as a Singaporean is the norm that one needs to label how one spends her hours between 9 and 5. I certainly do not Stay At Home even though I am only called "Mum" now rather than "Boss". After all that I have gone through, I can safely say that the people who couldn't understand my decision and who asked me the rather condescending "are you just going to be a full time mum?" might never see a perspective beyond their prescribed roles within their organization or chosen profession. 

Finally, I could describe my life now as something akin to recovery in a mental health spa retreat. While Ju is in school, I am doing the things that fulfil only the needs of my own physical and mental health: swimming, reading, playing the piano, thinking. Yes, it sounds like a luxury only the moderately well-off might afford, but it's not true.  Daniel and most Type A personalities, even many of the Type Bs, who likely only see the inside of a swimming pool while on holiday in Bali would find my life now quite aversive ("but, but...what do you DO with your time?!"). 

We all have to do the same things with our limited time -- learn something new and be a better person (oops, if you disagreed with that, then just skip to the end of the paragraph). Making a living, carving out your career, bringing up your children or taking care of your parents,  finding self-fulfilment, these are choices that are laced with preferences, mostly culture bound to where you grew up and formed most of your identity. At their most fundamental, they mean nothing more than or as much as the next person's choice. How toxic you wish each aspect of life to be depends on the importance you place on a choice. I guess Singapore is about as toxic as the next city, the next country. We each create the reality that we are a part of and the meaning that's in it. It wasn't easy digging myself out of my old attitudes and changing my view of the world. 

Life is about as meaningful as you want it to be, whether you're in Singapore, Europe, Malaysia, being gainfully employed or bumming like a low-maintenance tai-tai. 

*  *  *  *  *

*Ethnocentrism refers to the belief in the superiority of one's own culture or cultural practices and beliefs. It also describes the negative appraisal of foreign cultures against the yardstick of one's own.

Bus Drivers Are Workers Too

I am a worker, I work for an employer who pays me a monthly wage to do a job that value-adds in some way. I don't produce a physical product for sale, but I perform a service which the public may need from time to time.

Bus drivers perform such a service, and a bus service is a definite value-added public good because everything depends on transportation of people. Your entire economy would grind to a halt if millions of people were unable to go to work on a given day.

So I don't understand why so many people are throwing up their hands in self-righteous condemnation when a hundred or so bus-drivers decided not to call-in for work one day because they felt that they had been unfairly remunerated compared to their Malaysian or Singaporean counterparts who did the SAME job as they did. Would the reaction have been different if the strikers had been Singaporean or Malaysian?

We wouldn't be able to say. But I suspect the uproar would have been more tempered. But then again, it is very unlike Singaporeans to go to such "drastic" measures which, in some highly-developed countries, counts as the norm where industrial action is concerned.

It came as an even bigger surprise to me when I heard on last evening's news that the acting Manpower Minister had said that a legal manner in which to have staged a protest would have been to give the bus company, SMRT, 14 days' notice.

You mean to say there is a legally-sanctioned recourse for workers who want to go on strike?! I hope the children in school are listening to this.

I agree fully with the position that there are alternatives to bring a worker's grievance to his employer before a strike is called. Do we know if the Chinese bus drivers had already done this and exhausted this possibility?

We do not, because the press and the government spokespeople have so far obsessed on how ILLEGAL the action was. And how zero the state's tolerance is for such action.

Do we know from the mainstream media if there is any veracity to the bus drivers' claims of unequitable remuneration? We do not, because SMRT, the employer at the center of the maelstrom, has kept silent on the crux of the matter -- its wage package. And if you look at the table I've borrowed from the Online Citizen, your first conclusion would not be that the bus drivers are greedy, subversive and criminal.

As a principle of ethics, it is wrong to treat any group differently be they a different nationality, gender, ethnicity or pregnant. People have a right to have their concerns heard and rectified to their satisfaction. Barring that, they are free to leave. But what if they are NOT free to leave? What if they want to do their jobs but they just want a fairer deal? Is it not their right to pursue that? Yes, within the limits of the law, but the common worker has not a legally-trained professional. He does what he can within his means and understanding. I would let the employer and the authorities decide if the striking bus drivers had any legitimate claims and if they had breached any laws in taking the action they had on Monday. But I would not rush in to judge or demand for their termination, as so many rabid netizens have done.

Who will drive the buses? Isn't it patently clear from the numbers in the table that few Singaporeans would do this job for the amount they get? It is taxing, exhausting work to ply Singapore's busy roads with its lunatic and inconsiderate drivers.

There are 3 things happening here: one, the government is trying to contain the political fall-out from the strike action by thundering on about its illegitimacy and criminality. It has to send a clear and present message to any other group (local or otherwise) that they should not even think about doing this.

Two, SMRT is trying to resolve the dispute with a large group of disgruntled employees while keeping the lid on its pay policies tightly clamped lest they are forced into the awkward spotlight to explain what looks to everyone as discrimination.

Third, the elephant in the room is the fact that SMRT had to employ this many foreign nationals to drive their buses. What is responsible for the dearth? Dismal wages that put off Singaporeans from the job? Higher profit margins from depressing wages of certain bus-drivers?

I don't have the answers, but the picture would surely look much clearer than the murky sludge it now resembles if we had those answers. But to the ignorant, xenophobic person, everything naturally looks crystal clear. 

I'll end with an anecdote. I was in Germany during the summer and 3 days before we were to fly home from Frankfurt, the news reported of an impending strike by Lufthansa cabin crew. They had been in week-long negotiations by then with their carrier about salary increments. I was furious, I remembered, at the thought of a bunch of air-stewardesses who could barely provide proper service holding me hostage with their belief in their entitlements. Anyway, the news would broadcast developments in the negotiations each day, and the interesting thing was: we were all told that if negotiations broke down, that the strike would take place on Friday from 1am to 12 noon. (This was announced on Wednesday). In addition, only the short-haul flights within Europe would be affected first.

So as expected, talks reached an impasse, the workers striked, and Lufthansa did their damage control. By Friday evening, when we arrived at Frankfurt, the airport looked normal. Talks had resumed, we heard, and the crew had gone back to work. Our flight proceeded as normal. This episode showed me that even strikes can be carried out to a certain degree of normality, that it is within the right of the worker to demand something, as long as he acted within legal and fair limits. The dispute was between Lufthansa and its workers, and to some degree, the union and workers were cognisant that it would do nobody any good to inconvenience the very customers that contributed to their salaries.

There has been no real union or recourse for workers with grievances in Singapore since this was wiped out in the 80s. We are a workforce that runs on compliance, no matter how resentful or involuntary that is. Is it any wonder that we are the unhappiest, unkindest and most unemotional nation in the world?

My Experience With German

Language By Accident

With the exception of those who are true linguists (people whose life obsession is to learn as many languages as they are interested in) none of us choose the language(s) we speak. In a monolinguistic society like Germany, France or the the UK (I exclude the new immigrants) and China (I mean the dialects in addition to Putonghua), people speak the language they grow up with and they learn a foreign one or two, as in Western Europe, but they are mostly dominant in only their mother tongue since the opportunity to use the second or third languages is rare given the monocultural envionment. In smaller nations such as the Nordic countries or Holland, people are more bilingual given that linguistic cultural imports (like movies and music) are consumed in their original form, i.e. not translated into the native language. That's why on a holiday, you're more likely to encounter a Swede who speaks fluent English than a German or French one.

What about Singapore? Or the handful of tiny nation-states scattered across the Pacific that also use English in addition to their native languages? We're a quirk, a flash in the plan if you will. English is not considered our native language despite it being the lingua franca, the official working language and the first language taught in schools here with the mother tongues being called the "second language" (in the 90s, "second language" was dropped in favour of the term "mother tongue" to denote Chinese, Malay and Tamil for political reasons). I suspect it has a lot more to do with history, race and ethnicity rather than which language Singaporeans are strongest in. But I digress. This is not an essay about why English is our native language.

I would restate again that people do not choose the languages they speak and learn. It's a happenstance of birthplace, the education system and which world economy is currently dominating the airwaves. In the 20th century, it was America and Britain and for a decade or two, Japan. Today, it's China. If your child is learning French in school, you would not have a long wait before someone asks you why he isn't learning Chinese. Then again, there are many folks who are schooling and nurturing their kids in their own native tongue for the sole reason of passing on their heritage and this is completely reasonable too. In fact, if I were to take the extreme economic-advantage position, there would be no reason to put Julien through the torture of German verbs.

I jest of course, no offence meant to Germans, I would be the first to tell you how insane it is to memorize thousands of Chinese words. The point remains that languages are living things, they're not some physics or math theorems you should master. Languages are tools of communication and a window on culture. There are no better or worse languages, but there are languages that can give you an advantage depending on where you happen to be and what you have chosen to do.

Why Not German?

I am asked constantly why I don't speak German, or why I have never learnt it. The short answer would be: no time. The long answer is more interesting I hope. I am bilingual, so I've always been able to juggle two languages and make the code-switching in everyday life, since my parents speak different languages with me. I spoke a smattering of Cantonese as well, my mother's native dialect and the only tongue my maternal grandparents spoke. I loved the idea of French (note: I loved the idea of speaking it and being in France, not necessarily the French way of life, which I knew nothing about when I first learnt it) and so I studied it in university for two years. At age 19, any language feels great to learn, and French was fun. And as with any foreign language, it just gets harder and harder if there aren't environmental conditions to support its acquisition. So by my third year, without native speaking French friends or actually having to live in France for at least a year, it was pretty much au revoir to francais for me. I retained the basic structure of French grammar (which doesn't go beyond the present, past, future and imperfect tense) and some vocabulary to this day, but for lack of use, it's as good as Greek. So with 4 languages under my belt (each at different levels of proficiency), I did not approach German with as much enthusiasm as I would have expected of myself when I met my German husband at age 29.

I dabbled in a few classes of Spanish after graduating, and even a bit of the local Hokkien dialect. But I couldn't see the point in acquiring a language I didn't need. Language acquisition takes time, effort, practice and committment. On top of these, you need to use the language or you may as well learn Advanced Calculus. I've heard people complaining about foreigners who write English well or have excellent English language grades on paper but in person, they can hardly string a sentence together. So you see, while I was in university with all the time in the world to study and learn, it was no problem picking up a new language. In my late 20s, the motivation to put myself through the rigours of homework, practice and more practice (which I wouldn't get with Daniel anyway) didn't exist and the prospect of this seemed like a waste of my precious Saturday afternoons.

I'm not picking fault at the process of language acquisition, I am stating the facts of it and what is entailed in language acquisition. Julien is picking up 3 languages at the most amazing pace, but he is 17 months old and he has no other job to do but to listen to us talk to him all day. He isn't even required to answer us! How great would it be if you went to German class every day from 8am to 8pm and all you had to do was play with stuff and not have to talk to your teacher? I'd take this class in a heart beat.

Furthermore, I didn't live in Germany and I didn't have to speak to Daniel's parents but for a few weeks in the year when they visited Singapore or we visited them. Of course I made the effort: I bought books, a CD, a dictionary and I prepared before each trip. This was more for social reasons than anything else. And I was more than a little pleased when people in Germany complimented my German with each passing year. It was encouraging and no one gave me a hard time for bad grammar and tenses or my broken Germanglish. And trust me when I say it matters to many learners how others perceive the way they speak the language, I have heard Germans tell me they are simply too shy or embarassed to speak to me in English even though there is no way I would judge them or laugh at them.

The Way Julien Learns

In 2011 I gave birth to Julien and the world of social exchanges became transformed. There came a new person in all our lives and for the most part, life became tenfold richer and more full - of excitement and excrement. Suddenly, there were more things to talk about with the Germans, more reasons to interact and visit cross-continent. When I first met Daniel's parents in 2008, I started to email his Mum, because this was the only way to communicate with her (with an online translator, bless Microsoft Bing Translator, anything is possible). We kept up the weekly conversation and today, I still paste her emails into a translator. Technology is convenient, but it doesn't help you acquire a language. 

Now I am learning German (organically) along with my son, but nowhere at the rate that Julien is learning it. A child's mind is like a supercomputer. A billion neurons are firing every 3 seconds in his first 5 years of life. That's his job: to learn. Our adult brains will never acquire language the way a child's brain does until he is age 7. In a nutshell, Julien is learning German completely differently from the way I am: he is using both sides of his brain. Scientists discovered that in early childhood, the language center of the brain (located in left hemisphere) isn't formed yet, so a child processes language with his entire brain - the parts responsible for learning language and producing it is more diffused across both hemispheres. MRI imaging found that as we get older, the brain begins to specialise so that only one part in the left hemisphere takes over the work of understanding and producing language.

This explains why 33-year-old me finds it a terrible chore to remember genders and cases in German while Julien will most likely take to it "naturally".

Learning German "Organically" - What Works and What Doesn't

When I say "organically", I mean without the intervention of a teacher or a structured classroom curriculum. The problem with picking up a language through informal interaction is you would never learn the rules of its grammatical structure and syntax. You would be confined also to the parameters of the conversations you have. This way has been great for me, don't get me wrong, more words and phrases stick than if I had had to memorise it in a whole semester of language class. But the biggest obstacle is usage. Passive/receptive language acquisition, like what Julien is doing now, precludes the active component of speech. It is only when I have had to structure a sentence that I realise how handicapped I am. 

4 weeks ago, I started German lessons at the Singapore Goethe Institut. I am not in the beginners' class, since my test score let me skip 3 levels. My acquisition has leaped exponentially for the following reasons:

1) I have to do homework (which means daily or almost daily revision, which is necessary)

2) I have to speak German in class

3) I have a teacher who explains things and gives me the rules

Rules of grammar are for me like the roadmap to someplace I need to get. I just need it. I must say GI has a good program structure and the methods are effective. We get out of our tiny classroom at least 2-3 times each lesson to the break area and practise with one another the lesson, be it asking and answering questions on the Dativ prepositions or the Warum/Weil agreements. Using the language makes ALL the difference, and in this I have a small advantage because of my family circumstances. Daniel and I still speak no German with each other, but he helps with my homework and when I have a question on Why This Particular German Rule is So Annoying. So far, Daniel has agreed with me more than not that it is annoying. 

My experience with German has been largely positive, despite my bellyaching. The pronunciation is easy enough, I get plenty of practice if I just go online for lessons, and I have access to German speakers. The pace is much slower than French, which aids comprehension and conversation by 500%. I'm going at it really slowly, as I have no personal goal to master it in a year. After all, ignorance still comes in handy when you are not in any mood to join in the conversation in German!

For me, languages are the most interesting thing in the world. They are puzzles and when you get them, they become such handy tools. And starting on my fifth, I can say that multilingualism isn't just some lofty hobby, it can and should be normal. Our brains are capable of so much more, and looking at the state of our "bilingual education", I would guess that something just isn't being done right at the level of acquisition. If schools would help their students learn Chinese or Tamil the way I am learning German now, as a foreign lamguage, I am certain it would benefit a lot more children. If they hang on to the belief that Chinese is a "mother tongue" for Chinese kids, then the thousands of Chinese tuition schools will continue to reap millions of dollars each year. 

Survival Of The Weakest

Singapore will not find itself climbing out of its fertility rut for a while. I'll tell you one of the reasons for this: our species has become too weak.

By "species", I am referring to the Kiasu Singaporean. We Singaporeans need no introduction or explication of the infamous term, but for those in doubt, click on the link. 

Before I proceed, let me qualify that I am not saying that there are not many reasons for the global phenomena of falling birthrates. I am only pointing out that there is one glaring symptom among Singaporeans of a certain creed...that acts like an antibiotic that has become ineffective to fighting a virus. 

In an NHK broadcast on September 28 which reported on Prime Minister Lee's speech in his National Day Rally on the lack of babies being born on our high-functioning island, the reporter interviewed one 33 year old Charmaine Ho, her occupation:  "reporter for a fashion magazine". The reporter described CHarmaine as someone who "wants her career but also to give her children the best possible education". Balancing those goals won't be easy, it went on because Ms Ho is adamant that she wants to have kids but she doesn't like how "competitive Simaporean society has become".

Ms Ho said to the camera, "Having kids...is very expensive, we don't mean it in a monetary way, we mean...the kind of sacrifices you have to make [...] Maybe you have 1000 kids trying to get into the same university where there's only like...100. You're fighting with the whole nation."

Watch the clip here.

Let me pause for a moment to take in the news. Wow, this is the first time I've heard someone equating competition with a few million people with a reason NOT to have children. It's a wonder Singapore's population hasn't gone under decades ago like the sinking city of Venice.  

Yes, it's not news that we are and have been a nation of complainers (which advanced, insecure, non-G8 member country isn't?). We're also notoriously protective of our offspring and we suffer from a pathological obligation to ENSURE that their childhoods culminate in illustrious professional careers in medicine, law, or at the very least, a position in the upper echelons of the civil and administrative service. Better yet if they can get their hands on a tax-payer-funded Ivy League college education, since those degrees are worth a lot more than others. 

I get it, parents want the best for their kids. I have one, so I feel your angst, Ms Ho. But somehow, the kind of parents that echo Ms Ho's sentiment is the sort that goes beyond the boundaries of typical parental concern. Singaporean parents want a guarantee that their kids will do well, and by "well", I mean head and shoulders above the rest, even if it means they have to get there kicking, shoving and pushing others aside for their kids. And this is precisely what Ms Ho does not want to do, or at least is loathe to do. But she will do it, if she eventually succumbs to the biological and evolutionary urge to procreate. 

What I think is this: the spirit of competition is not dead. But it has evolved into an ugly, narrowminded, class war between those who have and those who have more. It's the new middle class against everyone else: the less well-off, who seek to compete with their children for the same things, and the more well-off, whose privileges it seeks to replicate and gain.

Those who have some, aspire to have more, and they will do everything it takes to ensure that their children come out ahead of the rest, no matter the cost to the children. Those who have more, will use all their resources to keep it that way for their children. Failure is never an option for those who feel that what they have achieved could be snatched away at a moment's notice. Their children's success or lack of it reflect their own worst fears and insecurities. We are a generation that has come to fear competition, maybe because those of us who have reaped the fruits of our own struggles, cannot bear to lose the privileges of the new middle class. Our children are a reflection of ourselves, even though this is a seriously warped view. Their failure becomes our failure, and their success becomes our imaginary trophies and the chimera that we are safe and secure in all that we have achieved.

As a result, the strongest don't come out of this system to re-populate the nation (and workforce), the weak that have the social capital of middle-class parents and networks do. But this isn't new, is it? It happened to Venice, and it will happen to Singapore if the class warfare in our education continues unabated. Immigration might actually be a good thing, if it brings in people of another ilk, with a taste for competition as it really is in the jungle. But is our system robust and open enough to accomodate all kinds of talent? From the economy to the government, from schools to the home, there is still only a very narrowly-defined idea of a productive, able and valued member of society. So I will wait and see if we go the way of Venice, or perhaps we will be something else altogether.  

Speak Good English Campaign Flub #41

NTUC (the supermarket) is hiring full time and part-time staff. They would like to hire people to man cash registers, assist in retail-related tasks and cut skills. If you have experience with Skills and are moderately confident about cutting them, please contact NTUC Fairprice!

Speak Good English Campaign - Year 47

Copyright: Mr Brown (and his copyrighted source)

Coming to you proudly from the country whose working language is English, whose lingua franca is Singlish (a quarrelsome, polygamous marriage of Chinese, Hokkien, Malay and English) and the nation responsible for Hainanese Chicken Rice, electronic road toll and the only democratically-elected authoritarian parliamentary regime in all of post World War 2 history with selective native-linguistic amnesia.

Speech By Bilahari Kausikan

This is a speech that Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr Bilahari Kausikan, made at his high school alma mater, Raffles Institution. The transcript is available on the school website and I am reproducing it here without edits. The reason is because I know Mr Kausikan in his capacity as Permanent Secretary, and have had the privilege of being on occasion, privy to his ideas and caustic comments. Mr Kausikan is one of the -- if not, the most astute, brilliant and erudite man I know. It's the civil service's privilege to have him steering its foreign policy, although I believe his profound sense of irony and sometimes brazen contempt for stupidity (and there is lots to go around) is mistaken for arrogance. Those who think so would know they are wrong after reading this speech, and he says a few things that all of us, no matter which branch of philosophy or ideology or fervency we may each espouse, should heed. For those of you who have less than a fleeting interest in existentialism, Mr Kausikan gets to his point in the middle of the speech, at which point you begin to understand why he chose to begin with a ramble about the meaning of life to a bunch of pubescent boys. Enjoy.

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SPEECH BY PS (FOREIGN AFFAIRS) BILAHARI KAUSIKAN AT RAFFLES INSTITUTION’S 189TH FOUNDER’S DAY ON 21 JULY 2012 (SATURDAY) AT 9 AM AT ALBERT HONG HALL, RAFFLES INSTITUTION

                  When your Principal, in a reckless act of folly, asked me to be Guest-of-Honour at this 189th Founder's Day, my first instinct was to do us both a favour and refuse. But I hesitated and in an instant was lost. The temptation to savour the irony was too great. For what I am about to say, I absolve her of all responsibility.

                  My comrades and I spent our six years in Raffles Institution waging insurgency against all established authority. At a very tender age one of our teachers told us we were all born to be hanged. And if that extreme did not come to pass -- perhaps I should say, has not yet come to pass -- several of us were at least caned. Our then Principal failed to achieve his dearest ambition of getting us all expelled only due to our dumb luck. So here I stand before you, living testimony to the role of chance and serendipity in life; a role more often than not, insufficiently acknowledged if not ignored, particularly by Singaporeans of a certain ilk. And that is my theme.

                 Eighty-five years ago an American writer by the name of Thornton Wilder published a short novel entitled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book has never been out of print, but deserves to be better known. The novel begins at noon on a certain day in 1714 when a bridge in Peru -- "the finest bridge in all Peru", writes Wilder -- inexplicably collapses and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing, plummet to their deaths. The tragedy is witnessed by a devout Franciscan monk, in Peru for missionary work among the natives, who immediately asks himself “Why did this happen to those five?” The monk is convinced that it was not a random event but some manifestation of God's Will for some greater end and vows to investigate to so as to prove to the natives the necessity of divine purpose. But his investigation runs afoul of the Inquisition and he is burnt at the stake.

                Wilder poses, but never directly answers, the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?” The point, of course, is that it could have been anyone of us on that metaphorical bridge. I do not think that there is any particular meaning, pattern or direction, divine or secular, in the drift of human events. History, as Winston Churchill is reported to have remarked, is just one damned thing after another. The innocent die young and the wicked flourish; and not necessarily in equal measure either because to the wicked the innocent are often prey.

                 The world is far too complex a place to be comprehended in any holistic way by the human mind. It is made up of too many moving parts interacting in too many unpredictable ways for human reason to grasp. I mean, of course, the social world: the world of human interactions, human relationships and human institutions; of love and hatred, politics and economics, war and peace, infused with emotions like anger, pity, joy and sorrow, and not the material world of rocks and stones and trees and the earth's diurnal course.

                 In the material world, the apple will always fall whether or not Newton was there to observe it. In the material world, all phenomena must ultimately conform to the laws of physics. In the material world, when we return to earth and ashes, we too will confirm to the laws of physics. But in the meantime we inhabit a social world of sentient beings who observe, think and respond so that our every effort to act or comprehend alters what we try to comprehend and every thought and action begets a never ending, ever shifting kaleidoscope of unpredictable possibilities that makes all social science an oxymoron.

                 Reason may distinguish man from beast, but the sum of the interactions of different reasons; of many logics, is only coincidentally and occasionally logical. That is why actions always have unintended consequences even if they are not always immediately apparent, and our best laid plans and most fervent hopes are constantly ambushed by chance and events.

                 Most things eventually fail. The shade of Ozymandias hovers unseen but omnipresent over every human enterprise, biding its time.The ancient Greeks advised us to call no man happy until he was dead. This is good advice. We can be reasonably certain of something only after it has occurred. The only true knowledge is historical, and even then there is always room for argument over interpretation. None of us ever sees or understands the same thing, no matter how conscientiously we try to observe or communicate.


                As I stand here speaking to you, at least three different things are occurring simultaneously: first, what I think; second, what I say to convey what I think which, whether because of the limitations of language or by design, will not always be the same as what I think: deception and self-deception are intrinsic parts of human nature; and third what you hear and understand of what I had intended to convey which is again not necessarily the same thing.

               One could call this, after the title of a short story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Rashomon phenomenon. It makes for a world without fixed meaning, which accentuates its fundamental incomprehensibility. A world in which the past can only be partially known, the present is largely unknown and the future certainly unknowable.

               None of us asked to be born. Yet having had life thrust upon us, we must, unless bent on suicide, nevertheless live. Although we can only, if dimly and darkly, know backwards, we have to live forwards. No one can live in a constant Hamlet-like state of existential doubt. We must profess a certainty that we do not necessarily feel. To keep the metaphysical horror of unfathomable meaninglessness at bay, we all, singly or collectively, consciously or unconsciously, adopt mental frameworks to simplify a complex reality in order to deal with it.

              Since the Enlightenment of the 17th Century, belief in Reason has replaced belief in God as the primary organizing mental framework of society. We are all the creatures of this western defined modernity and the most successful of the non-western countries, Singapore among them, are precisely those who have embraced it the most closely.

              Reason's children include law and justice, philosophy, literature and the arts, economics and other social sciences and even the very belief in reason, progress, technology and science. But the fundamental mode of thought that underpins these trappings of reason is still theological in that whether our belief is in Reason or in God, it is still mere belief and not epistemologically provable beyond all doubt. There is no end to philosophy any more than there can be an end to history.

              Stated in another way, none of Reason's children have an autonomous reality separate from our apprehensions of them. They are socially constructed artefacts; frameworks of ideas that we have chosen to believe in, in order to comprehend the world and comprehend in order live in a particular way. Their utility is thus purely instrumental. They are at best all only partially and contingently right which means, of course, that they are all also always at least partially wrong. That includes, by the way, the ideas I am presently expounding.

               I advance these arguments not to instil cynicism or despair but to suggest the possibility of liberation and hope. A rock is forever only a rock. But human beings are defined by their potentialities, and since there is no predetermined meaning to the unfolding of events, the potentialities are equally boundless. Were it not so, Singapore should not exist as a sovereign and independent country.
 
              The only meaning in life that can exist is that which we create for ourselves. And unless we want our lives to be merely a slow, selfish dying, we ought to try to create some meaning larger than ourselves. This is, to my mind, an absolute duty imposed by the human condition, even if we know that uncertainty and error are constants and that we are always writing on sand before the advancing tide. Our duties to our families, our friends and our country endure when even hope is dead.

              I am sure that by now many of you are harbouring a thought that you are too well brought up to speak out loud: this idiot exaggerates. Of course, I exaggerate. But only a little, and only for clarity's sake and not to distort or mislead. So let me restate my essential point in a different way.

              Do not confuse the depth of sincerity with which you or others hold an idea, or the number of people who sincerely hold an idea, with its validity. Sincerity is an over-rated virtue, if indeed it is a virtue. All of you may be suddenly seized with the sincere conviction that that pigs should fly. But pigs will nevertheless never sprout wings no matter how devoutly you hope for them to escape the surly bonds of earth.

              And if you, ignoring the possibility of error, sincerely believe that pigs ought to fly; or that God's Will has been revealed to you; or that you are one of the elect to whom the direction of History's cunning passages has been vouchsafed, then it is but a tiny step to being convinced that anyone who does not share your conviction is not just ignorant but evil. Then for the greater glory of PIGS or HISTORY or GOD, all spelt in capital letters, it is only a tinier further step to seeing it as your bounden DUTY, again spelt with capitals, to expunge the evil.

               And it all inevitably ends as Wilder's poor monk did, in flames at the stake. Rather than sincerity, if we want to do some trifling and ephemeral good or at least to minimize harm, we should approach life with an ironic and humane scepticism. Irony to ensure that we retain a sense of proportion and as ballast against the inevitability of unintended consequences: today's error being the correction of yesterday's error. Humanity so that we may empathize with logics other than our own, if only to better manoeuvre to impose our will because in a world of competing logics, if we hope to do any good, we cannot hope to do so by logic alone. And scepticism because the possibility of deception, our own self-deceptions if not those of others, casts constant shadows over every human action.

               I have chosen to dwell on this at what you may consider inordinate length, because Raffles Institution likes to consider itself unique. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry to inform you that RI is no longer unique.

               You are now only one of a number of similar elite educational institutions from which will come a disproportionate number of scholarship recipients and a disproportionate number of leaders in the civil service, the professions, business, the Arts and the academy. And all these institutions are united by a certain sense of entitlement, possibly so profound as to be quite unconscious.

               I do not blame you for this. All of you are highly intelligent. You will be very well educated. And the odds are that you will be more than averagely successful in your careers. But understand that you will therefore also be more vulnerable to the curse of the highly intelligent, highly educated and highly successful: this curse is the illusion of certainty; the conviction of the omnipotence of your ideas.

               This is the delusion that your ideas or words are validated by mere virtue by being thought or uttered by you! YOU and not some lesser being. And the more intelligent and the more successful and the more highly educated, the deeper the delusion. "The learned", Adam Smith is reported to have said, “ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.”

              Shortly after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, a powerful and erudite man, confessed in testimony to a Senate. Hearing that his intellectual assumptions of a lifetime had been shaken and he was still trying to understand what happened. I do not know if he has since come to any conclusions. But it was clear that prior to the near global disaster, he had never even faintly contemplated the possibility that his beliefs may have been in error. We are all still paying the price for his certainties.

              Yours will be a generation that that will live through times of more than usual uncertainty. A global transition of power and ideas is underway. Transition to what, no one can yet say. We have no maps and will have to improvise our way forward the best we can. It will be a transition measured in decades and not just a few years, and it is your misfortune that it is occurring as the technology of the internet is making us solipsistic.

             The internet conflates and confuses our opinion with information and tempts us to immerse ourselves only in a circle of those who share and reinforce our own interests and views. It shortens attention spans and privileges the new and novel over any notion of lasting value. Social media like Facebook have perverted the common meaning of ‘friend’ and ‘like’ beyond all recognition. Only a solipsist or, what is much the same thing, a narcissist, would think that what he or she had for lunch would be of wider interest; and only those with vacuous minds would be interested. And this at a time when the safe navigation of uncharted waters requires a prudent modesty, openness and some minimal capacity for sustained thought. And yet the internet and its associated technologies is indispensible to modern life. We need it to prosper. But what its ultimate effects will be on society, on governance, on international relations, on the very way we think, no one yet knows.

               I certainly have no answers. As you, the anointed ones, ready yourselves to assume authority and responsibility under these challenging circumstances. I can do no more than to remind you of what Sir Olivier Cromwell wrote to the Synod of the Church of Scotland in 1650. He was trying to persuade the Scots not to embrace the Royalist cause of King Charles the Second and so avert civil war. Gentlemen, he wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ” -- and I should explain that in the 17th Century the bowels were considered to be the seat of pity or the gentler emotions -- Gentlemen, Cromwell wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken”.

              So, Ladies and Gentlemen of the 21st Century, I too beseech you from whatever portion of anatomy you consider most dear, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

              Before I conclude, you may wish to know how it all ended. Cromwell's advice was not heeded. Shortly thereafter, the third English Civil War broke out. This set in motion a historical trajectory of political, social and economic changes that led to modern Britain, the industrial revolution, the East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Empire, the founding of Singapore and ultimately, you and I.

              And all because good advice fell on deaf years. What better way to appreciate the irony and contingency of events than to ponder what may have happened if Cromwell's advice was in fact taken and civil war avoided. And as you do so, consider also the possibility that you may be mistaken when you think you are mistaken.

             And with that final paradox I will end.

             Thank you for listening to me.
                                     

My Own One Child Policy

Yesterday, in an informal setting, my boss remarked that it wouldn't be long before I had another kid. I hastily rejoindered that I was stopping at one. Like anyone who has heard me say that, my boss scoffed that her colleague had said the same thing and after a few years (from the first baby), she was now trying for the second. My boss is single but lest anyone assumes she is anti-natal in her management style, she has very definite opinions about gender equality and the right of female employees to maternal benefits. I was extremely heartened to hear her do a mathematical comparison between the amount of (paid) time off a male employee takes for annual obligatory military reservice for the 15 or more years during the peak of his career, which far exceeds any amount of maternity leave a woman might potentially take to bear a child. (If anyone is wondering, it's 4 months, going by our total fertility rate of 1.2 children per female). 

I've posted elsewhere about how the clowns who call themselves policymakers can improve our abysmal fertility rates (ameliorate social inequality for example) and encourage earlier marriage (which increases the odds of 2 or more children being born). The same clowns who beseech you to marry earlier (and settle for the one who's second to ideal since you won't ever find the ideal partner) and have kids would tell you in the same breath that marriage and parenting is a personal choice (as if this absolves the state from its policy failures in this department). I've already zoomed in on our rising social inequality and the status anxiety of middle class people as a root cause of this problem.

I'm going to state categorically today that meritocracy breeds inequality, cements it and reproduces even more inequality.

And why should we care? Because the more unequal society becomes, the less likely people will have 2.1 children and the less likely you get economic growth of the sort that isn't perverted by cheap foreign labour. Of course this is not the whole answer, it's just part of the equation, but I'm not an economist and I'm here only to show that an unfettered meritocracy is not only harmful to the good of society (mental and physical health outcomes, social stability, low unemployment), it simply raises the overall cost of having children.

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Meritocracies Favour the Rich

Jason DeParle's article in the New York Times described how latest trends in American households showed that the greatest increase in economic inequality was seen in families with children (see diagram). Why should we care? Simple: the more worse-off or well-off you feel, the less or more likely you are to have babies.

As the article notes, one thing affluent do with their money is buy enrichment activities for their children, such as tutors, sports and private schools. The gap between what upper- and lower-income families spend in this way has grown rapidly, from about $2,700 a year in the early 1970s to $7,600 a year in the mid-2000s.

Do we see the same trend of income disparities between the top and bottom wage earners in Singapore? I couldn't find the same breakdown in terms of families and singles, but I found 2011 figures for individuals in households that attest to the widening gap between rich and poor:

Source: Department of  Statistics, Singapore (2011)*

Even if you look only at the red line (income after accounting for transfers and taxes), the top earners here made about 8 times what the bottom did. The two spikes took place during the 2007 global financial crisis, when income inequality in Singapore spiked to the highest ever in a decade.What does that mean? In any serious market aberration like a financial crisis, the poor are the worst hit. So wealthier people not only have more resources than a poorer counterpart to spend on each child, they are less vulnerable and susceptible to financial gloom and doom.

Given this basic cost-benefit analysis, you and I would logically have only one child to increase our kid's odds in a zero-sum competition with other kids. In fact, this is the reality in China: in Shanxi province where the one-child policy was suspended, data showed no increase in TFR. The Chinese, when given the choice to have more than one child, chose not to.

Let me recover from the shock (duh). China's income inequality is notorious, especially in coastal cities like Shanghai. Going back to the meritocracy system (one in which people are rewarded according to their abilities rather than status or caste) which is essentially a system of social inequality, unequal outcomes is defended as logical in order that (a) the most talented people do the most important jobs and (b) these talented people are appropriately rewarded so it balances the cost of doing these jobs (like time, effort or the training required to do the job, e.g. studying medicine). 

This is classic functional theory (a la Davis and Moore ) and the criticisms of this theory is just as obvious. Who determines what is a more functionally important job, and who determines what is an appropriate reward? If meritocracy were as perfectly operationalized as it is idealistic in its claim to fairness of opportunity, then CEOs of major banks and tobacco companies should make about as much money as a high school mathematics teacher or a doctor. In fact, a doctor in Germany or Norway doesn't make that much more than a teacher or a waste collector. Obviously, the doctor pays more taxes than the waste collector, but the status of the waste collector and high school teacher isn't as starkly lower in Europe as compared to Asia. Basically, meritocracy cannot guarantee that the subjective and differential social status of a job (which is also culturally determined) does not affect the economic value of the job and thereby, how much said worker is paid. The Europeans figured this out and that's why they worked out a system of redistribution (what our politicians pejoratively dismiss as the welfare-state) to make sure that the postman is able to have as many children as the doctor, and that his children would be accorded the same opportunities in education and health as those of the doctor.

It makes perfect sense then, that in highly developed and highly meritocratic (read: unequal) societies like Singapore and the United States, people who want access to more vital resources like education, healthcare would choose to have fewer children. Fewer children means more income to procure the very resources needed for each child to success in a meritocracy. Immigration is the only reason the Americans are not experiencing what the rest of the OECD is experiencing in low birthrates. You can have a meritocracy, I am by no means denouncing this as the least objectionable system of rewarding people, but just like democracy is the least objectionable form of governance, you need something else to fix the bad effects inherent in any system. And this system, call it welfare or call it a donkey-kong, depends on what that society deems is most important for all. In this respect, I admit that democracies are the best tool to ensure such an outcome.

Don't quote me, see the evidence out there that inequality is associated with lower levels of fertility (Perrotti, 1993).  Scholars have emphasized the role of equality in allowing individuals to overcome fixed costs of investment in human capital: if a society is more equal, given the same level of income, a higher fraction of its poor would be willing to undertake investments with considerable fixed costs. There are good reasons to believe that education investment is precisely characterized by fixed costs and increasing returns.

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The Myth that Meritocracy and Inequality are essential for Economic Growth

Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire (1998) showed that there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in asset distribution and long-term growth. In fact inequality reduces income growth for the poor, but not for the rich, which gives you a clue why your highly-paid politicians keep telling you that our GINI coefficient is okay and still lower than in "other countries". It's funny how they tout Finland and Denmark as role models in terms of education and innovation but leave out the fact that they are also highly equal societies. When someone brings that up, you will hear the automatic reply that the Finns pay more taxes. Hello, if I could get universal healthcare, 2 years of paid maternity/paternity leave (without fear of the chop) and free quality childcare (and not some half-baked, overpriced pre-school programme) in exchange for giving up 30% of my income (which is higher than the average Singaporean's anyway), I AM WILLING PAY MORE TAXES, HAPPILY.

Plus, more and/or better redistribution doesn't necessarily equate to more taxes for ALL segments of society. You just need to tax the richer (who, at the moment are paying ridiculously low rates). Warren Buffett called for the government to increase taxes on his and his peers' incomes, for crying out loud. And if you do a check, you will see that the amount of taxes collected through our famous ERP (road-use toll) last year outstripped personal income taxes by manyfold. Where's all that money going to?

Inequality can be harmful to long run economic growth by making it harder to implement economic reforms. Inequality can reduce the base of support for fundamental structural transformations necessary to embark on a path of high growth because inequality tends to result in polarized societies and polarized societies may be in a weaker position to undertake fundamental economic reforms (I'm thinking of Greece now). Rodrik (1998) has provided empirical evidence that unequal societies are less likely to carry out the adjustments necessary to respond to negative macroeconomic shocks. Indeed, Rodrik finds that what is particularly destructive is a combination of high inequality and poor institutions of conflict management (such as social safety nets, democratic institutions, rule of law, and efficient government institutions). In Singapore, we can say that these had always existed, and were a major reason why our country managed to pull out of each major financial crisis when other countries buckled. 

You may say that Singapore does fine, as we have a bunch of technocrats helming the ship, but however benign and sagely your authoritarian regime may be, it's contingent on the same regime being able to replenish its ranks. The Chinese do not believe that the wealth of a family could outlast three generations for this reason. We cannot rely on a bunch of technocrats who are the bottom-feeders of the meritocratic trench.

Today we are seeing the effects of policies that supported an unfettered economic growth and inadequate resources channelled to remedying the ill effects of that "growth". The ultra rich here do not pay enough taxes to ameliorate the stagnant incomes of the lower classes and the toxic outcomes of inflation. At a time when more and more people need universal healthcare, comprehensive insurance and a level playing field for school-age children, you see trends that instead reveal rising income poverty (the poor are taxed more than the rich when it comes to falling sick and basic goods and services), and rich-poor divide. The Scandinavian countries and Japan consistently have the smallest differences between higher and lower incomes, and the best record of psycho-social health (Wilkinson and Pickette 2009).

Back to my proposition: babies have everything to do with meritocracy and how unequal a society is. I'm not feeling very well-off as an individual. I do well on a statistical graph of average incomes in Singapore but it tells you nothing about how confident I feel in my ability to provide a reasonable amount of resources to my child. This story is not found in the median incomes chart or the GDP growth chart. It's in the other chart that your politicians would rather not address. 

What would I do then? As an individual without much power to mobilise for lofty social change, I do what the other 2 million or so of my countrymen would obviously do: Stop At One. 

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*Dept of Statistics Singapore: Key Household Income Characteristics and Household Income Trends, 2011

Deininger and Squire, 1998, New ways of looking at old issues: inequality and growth, Journal of Developmental Economics, 57(2): 259-87.

Perotti, Roberto, 1993, Political Equilibrium, Income Distribution, and Growth, Review of
Economic Studies 60(4): 755-76.

Rodrik, Dani, 1998, Where Did All the Growth Go? External Shocks, Growth Collapses and
Social Conflict. NBER Working Paper 6350.

Juju Finds His Junk (and why he won't need MOE's new & improved sex-ed)

A couple of weeks ago, Ju started groping around his groin each time we plonked him down for a diaper change. You can just imagine my initial horror as I watched his right thumb and forefinger nab his little penis and start messing around with it. By the way, Ju is only 13 months and a half. A discreet check confirmed that he wasn't doing a premature version of childhood masturbation but I did cast suspicious glances at him every time he tugged at the front of his diaper.

So after I was sure that my baby wasn't wanking off during diaper changes, I wondered about the possible reasons for it and only one came to mind: curiosity. The guy has barely seen his junk since he was born. I mean, he only started sitting up at 5 or 6 months and his belly is so rotund that he hardly sees anything below it even during bath time. So it's no surprise that once he mastered some hand-eye coordination, his hand would stray below his belt, so to speak, to explore and discover the crown jewels.

My husband and friends know me well enough to expect that I would take the most liberal approach to sex education with Ju, but in fact, ever since I became a parent, my attitude towards my son's sexual education  has veered dangerously to the right. Daniel, of course, advocates girlfriends as early as possible (in keeping with Daddy's historical exploits) and losing his virginity at no later than 15. I would protest vociferously and order that Ju will NOT bring any girls home until he moves out of my house, to which Daniel would roll his eyes and our sparring would go on.

This post is starting to sound like a precursor to a flaming of the MOE's latest sex education fracas but it won't be, I promise. There are so many people out there doing it already that I feel kind of sorry for MOE, who didn't really care to get into this in the first place if not for the AWARE saga two years ago. (You can read coverage about it here and a concise, tongue-in-cheek one by The Economist here.)

I find it healthy and helpful for parents to discuss how they want to raise their sons and daughters to approach sex, sexuality and relationships. It's never too early and the conversation between you and your spouse should begin even before your child finds his genitals. I have accepted the fact that my kid will start to have this conversation (be it in his head or with his friends) before he hits puberty and anyone who thinks that an 11 year old is still a child is obviously as deluded as any one of Kong Hee's rabid supporters who attacked the media last week outside the courthouse like the crew of extras from the Planet Of The Apes.

The so-called "conservative view" (hitherto espoused by a very silent segment of Singapore because I've so far not heard anyone come out and declare their conservative view, but plenty of people happily repeating said view) makes an erroneous moral assumption that educating kids about health preventive methods (like contraception) is by implication an approval of promiscuity. I cannot emphasize more how wrong this view is and how ludicrously uninformed the assumption. There is NO evidence that people who are informed about contraceptive methods engage in more sexual intercourse at an earlier age (see the Dutch experience). But there is PLENTY of evidence that in countries where people are not formally educated about sex and preventive methods, there is the highest rates of abortion (also due to unavailability of legal abortion). I searched for data on our abortion rates among the developed nations and Singapore has higher rates compared with Holland, Spain, Greece, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy and Japan. This doesn't prove that people from these countries are less promiscuous, but it sure does prove that fewer of their women compared to ours end up with unwanted pregnancies. In Singapore, it is not so much the teens who are seeking abortions but adult women: ignorant teenagers grow up to become ignorant adults. If you still don't see the logic, then try soaking up the number of teenagers -- boys and girls -- getting infected with sexually-transmitted infections year on year (see here and here).

As Adam Lee puts it bluntly but succinctly in his book Daylight Atheism:
"The deepest irony is that the religious right’s rigid opposition to contraception and sex education hasn’t produced a more stable or healthier society, but has resulted in the opposite. Among Western nations, the United States has the highest divorce rate, the highest teen pregnancy rate, and the highest rate of STD infection; and within the United States, the highest rates of these social ills are found among the highly conservative, highly religious states usually referred to as the Bible Belt. Meanwhile, a 1999 study by conservative Christian pollster George Barna found that atheists as a group have lower divorce rates than virtually all Christian denominations, including Baptists, Pentecostals, born-agains, and evangelicals."

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Teenagers are not only curious, they happen to enjoy pissing adults off by doing exactly what adults don't want them to do. You're doing every child a disservice by keeping information from him or her that would save their lives and keep them free of disease.

At 13 months, this is what Ju hears when we tell him NOT to do something cos it's bad for him:

Me: Ju! Get off the table, it's dangerous.
Ju hears: Ju! ba-ba-ba-ba-ba (Mummy is paying attention!)
Me: I said leg OFF!
Ju hears: Ai-ai-ah-ah-ah! (Mummy likes what I'm doing! Let's do it again)
Me: One more time and I'm smacking you (hand raised)
Ju hears: Ba-bah-bah! (ooh, I like being spanked)
Me: That's it (I smack his leg). Naughty boy (I carry him away from the table).
Ju: (Giggles. I'm so bored with this. Ooh, there's my car.) 

And this repeats itself two more times in the space of 30 minutes. You say he's going to exercise more logic and self-restraint at age 13? Let's see what sort of conversation we will have when he is13:

Me: Don't have sex with your girlfriend because sex is special and you should do only when you love her.
Ju hears:  I don't trust you not to fuck her. Plus I don't think you love her.

Me: If you really love her, you can wait till you're married, Ju.
Ju hears: Don't be horny, keep it in your pants till you're 35.

Me: Use common sense! No sex means no HIV, STD, STI and pregnancy. Don't you want a bright future at NUS Medical School?
Ju hears: Just ignore the nice, nice feeling when you go near the girl and your hard, hard dickie like going to explode because otherwise you will get some fuck disease and cannot go to college.

Thanks for the advice, MOE, but no thanks. Anyone who reads any publication other than the Bible and the Straits Times will know that hormones mixed with an increased spike in emotion (during foreplay for example) will prevail over the "rational" logic that abstaining from sex would save you a lot of potential problems. Hey, as a mother, I will be the first one to tell you I would rather pull out my eyeballs through my nostrils than approve of my son humping a 14 year old girl. But I'm going to tell you that there are a few very possible outcomes if I don't teach him what to do if he gets the urge to poke (and yes, masturbation is part of my sex-ed programme):

1) He will not use a condom and he may get a disease or knock up a girl
2) He will not tell me that he is having sex and leave his DNA in some public location or worse, in my car
3) He will rape some girl and say she asked for it
4) He will procure the services available between Geylang Lorong 6 to 24

Of course, I would totally give Ju the guilt trip about screwing around (with girls or guys, I'm no bigot), which parent won't? But I don't delude myself into thinking that my 12 year old would regard Mummy's Word as God's Decree, over and above video games, television, the internet, his buddies and pornography. That's just stupid and the only thing Ju should remember is that Mummy is no fool. 

Why Julien Will Not Go To A Singapore School Part 2

My previous post was highly critical of the pressure-cooking competition in schools here, largely through exams and by this same method, the "streaming" of children into different class types and schools. I cited Kohn's work to show that there is plenty of scientific evidence that subjecting kids to competition defeats the purpose of learning because when kids focus on the end goal of getting a grade or getting to the school of their choice, they lose interest in actually retaining information and their brains pretty much become photo-copy machines and nothing more. The impact on kids' self-esteem is a corollary but no less significant, as fostering a winner-take-all and failure-is-not-an option ideology does not get you creative, broad-minded youth whose enthusiasm for learning suvives in spite of failing at certain things. The government should not waste a single cent more on teaching people to be creative while it is running the most cost-effective machinery to kill it.

I agree largely with readers who championed finding balance between a competitive system and nurturing a kid's healthy self-esteem (and not just shielding him from adversity). While I absolutely agree with those who have commented that parents are not powerless against the system, that the home environment and the attitude with which you take towards parenting can counterbalance the bulwark of the education machinery, I would argue with certainty that the 30 hours a week -- give or take 10, depending on how much "tuition" and "enrichment classes" your kid is enrolled in -- that working parents spend with their kids cannot and will not overcome the toxic effects of the Singapore school. Let me come to this with a little anecdote from my childhood.

Teachers Don't Teach (Much) Anymore

I started promising myself a long time ago, before thoughts of what I really wanted to do as a wage-earning adult came to mind, that I would never become a teacher like my mother had been. Even back in 1990, my mother would wear a perpetually constipated look on her face every afternoon when she returned from work. She would spend the next many years complaining to my father (every day) about how tired she was of the administrative work she had to do which took her away from the actual lesson preparation and grading which is really what was most crucial to teaching anyway. I didn't remember my mother ever smiling on week days. At some point, my father started to go to bed at 9pm when my mother began grading her students' work to avoid hearing the grouses. My mother would then bite at me sarcastically, "Girl, don't ever become a teacher!"

That was the late 1980s. Twenty years on, a lot has changed. But not in the way you think it should have. Ask any one of my friends and colleagues who have quit the teaching machinery (I wouldn't even go so far as to call it a profession because I'm not familiar with teacher training here that resembles international standards) and he or she will assure you that they have had no regrets leaving behind long hours, unrealistic demands from their superiors, unnecessarily copious amounts of non-teaching related work and not enough time to focus on what they felt was most important -- teaching. "Remedial" classes used to be reserved for kids who needed extra coaching because they had problems understanding or keeping up with the class. Now, anecdotal evidence points to remedial class as a permanent fixture in many schools because the teachers simply can't teach the lesson within the stipulated time allocated for class. In some instances, parents report that they have no choice but to resort to private tutors to do the core job of the teacher -- teaching the lesson itself. I hold no teacher to blame, instead, I would like someone to tell me why the students today as a whole require extra classes after school and during school holidays to learn a syllabus which took me and my peers the standard school term to complete in the 1980s.

It cannot be that IQ levels have fallen across the board along with our fertility rate. I was told by more than one person in their late 20s that they would likely fail a Primary Two mathematics test today. I suspect that those who set the agenda for each school may have the answer. For instance, I have many questions about the appointment of principals. I think everyone can remember quaking at the sight of their almost-always rather old and authoritative-looking principal. The fear of being sent to his or her office was enough to make us think twice about whatever misdemeanour we were about to commit. Now, why would I want to send Julien to a school where the principal would more likely resemble his teacher's daughter than her boss?

It seems to me that the other overarching trumpet theme of our national conscience, meritocracy, as become the pretext by which to defend an increasingly unequal playing field in our schools (if you don't know how to read and write at age 6, you go to the special needs class at Primary One), and an increasingly lop-sided leadership where the same kind of people from the same social backgrounds (elite schools, elite scholarships to elite American or British universities) are making policy and administrative decisions that affect our children. I would like to know what the standard indicators of merit are when one considers candidates for a position as significant as that of a school principal. Does years of ACTUAL teaching experience count more than the number of international ranking magazines that one's alma mata has been featured in?


Leaders can either be very obsessed with the goals they set for the people they lead and whether these goals are reached, no matter the reasons for setting and reaching them in the first place, or they set the direction and tone for the people they lead and trust those same people to take the ship there. I don't know about you, but I despise people who micro-manage, since it belies their distrust in the very people they should trust (after all, the majority of people can't all be morons). I also doubt leaders who lack any vision other than shoring up brownie points so they can get a pat on the head from their superiors. I blanch every time I hear the phrase "Key Performance Indicator" or its acronym KPI. A teacher's only KPI should be how many students she helps and not how many hours of extra classes he schedules. Every child needs help on different levels and in different ways, which is why it is so important to safeguard the autonomy of teachers and to give them the time they need to do their jobs.


The real leadership KPIs
Harvard's professor of psychology, Howard Gardner, 10 years ago in an interview, echoed Plato who had said that the purpose of education is to "make people want to do what they have to do".


Over the years, as I graduated from university and went on to graduate school and then to the several jobs I did, there were always one or two people at each place from whom I learnt greatly. There were professors, instructors and doctors, but there were also people like my colleagues and Singaporeans I had met through the course of my research and work. They each had a story to tell, and I'll tell you that the ones we can learn most from are the ones who have spent a long time doing what they do best, and being good at it after years of honing their craft. You don't become really good at anything because you're born with "talent" or some "gift", and trust me, nobody is born with the "talent" to be a great leader. When I listen to great musicians like Lang Lang and Valentina Lisitsa talk about their path to greatness, they talked a lot about working their butts off, even when they had been labelled "musical prodigies" as children. Being "gifted" wasn't any guarantee that they would have successful careers as concert pianists and thousands of hours of practising later, it still doesn't work out for many gifted pianists.

I don't think kids now appreciate how greatness takes time, effort and cultivation of oneself. How can they, when so many are told that at age 9, they're "gifted", as if being "gifted" is like being set for life, as long as you don't fall off the tightrope that's the education path which has been set out for you. I have no doubt that we have brilliant and go-getting individuals among the youth here who are handpicked as precocious children for super-loving-care by MOE. Not all of them are ingrates who take scholarships on tax-payers' money just for the spring board to the US and then turn their backs on the bond they owe to government service for the lure of Wall Street. I don't know enough about the wheels and cogs of the system enough to critique it, but as an outsider, I see that we are losing the very people that our schools need: the educators who want to make a positive difference in however small a way, and the leaders who want to change the system for the better, and not for the pure sake of looking proactive and justifying their accelerated career advancement.

I would like Julien to at least grow up with an understanding that what he has to do is essentially to earn his place on this earth. That he should aim for a lot more than sucking up oxygen and excreting crap on his way to his grave and no, earning bucketloads of money is not on Mummy's list of Making A Positive Difference to the World. I want him to respect every individual for what they have done with their lives and what they can teach him, regardless of their age and stature in the hierachy, and I want him to have the ability to think about things that his teacher didn't write down on the whiteboard. When I take him to the park, he should notice that there's always a hunched, white-haired old lady picking from the garbage cans and he should ask me why she's doing that when his and his friends' grandparents are doing other stuff with their time. When he's at the supermarket, he should ask me why we sometimes take our own grocery bags and sometimes we don't, and why some customers look like they're bagging food with enough plastic to take to the bottom of the ocean. Don't take my word for it when I tell parents not to lose the forest for the trees and over-focus on grades, qualifications and brand-name colleges. Listen to what this HR consultant has to say about Singaporeans and their attitude towards their CVs.

************
One more story before I wrap this up.

Half a year ago, my husband was headhunted for a position in Stuttgart, Germany. The talks went on for almost 6 months and throughout the process, we discussed the reasons for staying and leaving, and the factors that were prerequisites for leaving Singapore (remuneration for example). You see, I know that there are many anti-Singapore system bashers out there who would readily tell anyone in our position to pack up and leave. I also know personally of many Singaporeans who have returned from many years abroad, and in the same vein, many more who are currently overseas and who wonder when to return. Our dilemma was a rather pure one because we had not sought out this opportunity, it had come to us. So we were really at a crossroad wondering whether to take the new path that's appeared.

Our decision-making process was a mixture of the rational and the emotional. Like any good forward-planning Singaporean, I thought about how this choice might impact our small family 5 years on, and of course, I couldn't do much more than a probability outcome based on limited information such as the global financial situation, the industry prospects and social support in both cities. The Germans are actually quite similar to us, and most of our friends and relatives in Germany remarked that it would be a difficult transition from a place with plenty of family and social support to a city that is 3 hours' drive from my husband's hometown. However, Stuttgart has a vibrant culture, is comparatively more cosmopolitan as a German city because of the many international companies based there and high quality and affordable childcare is abundant, unlike in Singapore where standards are dismal and at best, uneven. My husband would have more time with the family as he would work shorter hours so he would actually get to see his son during daylight hours on weekdays. His parents would finally see their grandson more than twice a year. The choice was clear, wasn't it?

It wasn't. The toughest decisions to make are the ones where there are no extenuating circumstances (at least one overriding factor, such as better monetary reward) pushing you in that direction. And people rarely find themselves in that situation when it comes to the big things in life, like which country to live in and which man to marry (I've been in that one and trust me, it's no walk in the park). And I am not an anti-Singapore basher with a chip on my shoulder. This is my home and I am very clear why it is so: my family is here, my friends and work are here, and the source of my support and identity is here. I consider myself adaptable and flexible, and people have told me the same, so in our discussions, I told my husband to take my ability to adapt to Stuttgart out of the equation. In the end, the pros-and-cons checklist was getting us nowhere so we asked ourselves what our gut was telling us. Both our gut feelings were to stay. We have a good life going even though it's not perfect and we hate a lot of things about here like the working hours and the bad traffic and transportation (this is big, studies have found that the commute to and from work is one of the biggest sources of stress). But for the sake of the boy, Singapore offered both of us better career prospects in the medium term. And for 30-somethings like us, career still matters a lot.

You see, the merits of a country does have a lot to do with the economic and financial.  People have to feel safe, secure and confident before they want to set down roots and raise their families. Singapore has done exceptionally well in providing this, and I can give the government due credit. But the next big bugbear, the next deal-breaker for families like us would be the education system.  For many in the lower income bracket, the system of rising education and economic inequality has become intolerable, and it is becoming exceedingly harder to bear for the middle class. Expats, as anyone is well aware, love Singapore, and schooling is no issue because they can afford international school.

We could live in any country with a comparable standard of living, but we both share the same values and convictions that underpin our decision not to raise Julien in the education system here. Opportunities have come, and more will come along, as I am sure is the case for many other families like ours. Last month's decision was a hard one to take, but in 5 years' time, when Julien is ready for school, the decision to leave would be much, much easier.