Developing the market

In my day job, I provide strategy, commercial as well as policy advice particularly related to the energy transition. We aim to support players to make evidence-based decisions and to ground their decisions on proper assessment of risks and the dynamics underlying the operating environment.

One of the big mistakes I have been encountering when it comes to the energy transition is that market players (including government) have this mistaken idea that certain solutions are not viable or possible after trying to get a sense of pricing when a market has not been developed. In essence, price discovery can only take place after establishing a market. We can try to work out the cost of bringing certain products into the market, but that is different from trying to call a tender a have a price discovery process.

Take for example biomethane in Southeast Asia. There are pockets of it already produced, and you would be able to get price quotes for delivery of the products to where you need. Maybe you could also sign a long term contract on a small volume but pricing is going to be high because the players would put in more margins in order to deal with their risks. The lack of liquidity and a fleshed out market leads to distortions in price quotes. Moreover, biomethane being a gas means that transport cost can be a huge portion of the delivered cost if you are situated far from the original source.

Logically, you could put the biomethane into the national gas networks and then distribute it using mass balance methodologies. However, there are issues and questions around gas grid access – the immaturity of regulations around open gas grid access in Southeast Asia makes things a bit more complex and that gets amplified when you consider cross-border trades, and even liquefaction.

Don’t get me wrong, complex markets do exists. The global LNG market is a marvel, and our agrifood supply chains are truly an amazing showing of what the free market does. But these markets took time to develop and have had to go through a process of evolution where the supply is driven by initial demand and the willingness to build infrastructure to support all that.

The same principle applies to cross-border renewable electricity; there is typically a gradual process of working out the infrastructure costs, understanding the approaches towards delivery of the electricity, developing feasibility studies and so on. Having diversified sources is all well-and-good but that works when you are accessing markets that have developed supply available to make these happen.

No matter how sophisticated your price discovery process is; it will not deliver in an environment where the market is under-developed.

Grieving a loss

It was 20 years ago.

A group of students taking the project work (PW) subject at A Levels thought to embark on a ‘controversial’ topic: reviving dialect speaking amongst our generation.

Never mind the topic that year was actually ‘Maintaining momentum’ (the other topic was maintaining tradition, but we didn’t want to paint dialects as a tradition) – we thought there was a bit more momentum in reversing the policy at that point in time.

Guess we were wrong.

Anyways, if you look into our presentation deck, it was just a glimpse of the research work we did and ideas we had. There were interviews with teachers, clan associations, social welfare organisations, primary surveys with students, peers. Even if only some of those ideas were implemented, perhaps we won’t grieve the loss as much (as Prof Tan Ying Ying written in her commentary on CNA).

But it’s too late. And it’s not much to do with policy anymore.

PW Oral Presentation materialsDownload


English language was perhaps too successful, with our education system and the employment market providing all of the carrots and sticks necessary to beat us into shape. Think about the people who actually did not lose their dialect abilities. They were the ones who weren’t quite in the system to be beaten into shape.

In our project, we even considered why it was important to keep this part of us. We thought about communication, cultural transmission, social divides, and public service.

20 years ago, we came up with all of these. But perhaps we didn’t believe in it enough. Some of us who entered public service did not enter the arts, heritage, culture or social sector. Most of us were successful in the system.

Surely it was not up to us for sensibilities to prevail.

Driving the market

The challenge with over-financialisation is that price signals get confused in the market. We are trying to make prices mean too many different things. And there gradually is some kind of misallocation. This is probably something not studied deeply enough in economics because it’s always been glossed over in the assumptions about free markets.

We often think only about the demand and supply sides of free markets, but never quite about the income side. The assumption is that incomes then unlock the demand back in the free market. Yet the income side of the equation also changes the underlying demand. A society that has higher concentration of wealth will have a different demand profile than one that has lower concentration of wealth.

Not to mention that different regulations and rules will divert income and wealth in different ways. Countries with stricter labour regulations can have higher unemployment, but wages can also tend to be higher, and that gives rise to a broader middle class while also resulting in labour-based services commanding higher prices, and changing the value of goods vis-a-vis services.

The philosophy to leave things to the market isn’t neutral per se. We cannot make a conscious decision to say this or that should be left to the market and then disclaim the negative consequences of it. Once we institute a market, or any other policies, we ought to recognise the presence of winners and losers, and then the overall system needs to deal with the shortfall of the system.

In the HDB for example, the government seeks to ‘subsidise’ housing for the BTO flats but allow secondary ‘resale’ transactions to be ‘priced’ by the market. Yet this pricing is subject to forces such as private housing prices, which is in turn related to land sales and also buying power from foreign capital. This means that as much as we try to create the two-track market to ensure locals have access to affordable housing, it is subject to forces on the other side. Ultimately, the tension is political – with so much wealth of the people locked in real estate, can the government or the political parties allow for massive collapse in real estate value to ‘reset’ costs for a younger generation?

And if not, how can we ensure that intergenerational wealth transfers do not massively handicap those who do not receive them? Do we then intervene in the market? I would think that the market continues and should be part of the whole suite of allocation mechanisms available for policy-makers but treating it like the default approach for allocation of everything would be wrong.

Quiet in Tokyo

At first, I thought it was because I didn’t speak a word of Japanese.

There was something silent about being in a country that spoke a foreign language you do not understand.

But then I realised it wasn’t just my own experience. Others thought that Tokyo was quiet for the density of the city as well.

It is amazing. Indeed.

It was impolite to take calls in cafes.

And I realised that when Japanese people spoke to each other in the city they did not speak out aloud; they leaned in and speak. They were intentional and speaking to one another, not talking out loud randomly.

It was interesting and I sure think we all can learn a little from that.

Coming back from Japan, I found Singapore pretty noisy. The traffic, the ventilators, the impatient people using their voice to rush others – with their orders, with their pace, with their movements.

I wished we didn’t have to use our voices that much.

Hunger versus desperation

I think it’s great that Edwin & Shulin’s interview/podcast with Steve Chia and Tiff Ang on CNA provoked a whole bunch of discussion. The point that Steve brought up at the beginning of the podcast was that he talked about the need to balance between the aspirations of the nation and the work preferences of the younger generation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really the conversation they had because the grander picture of Singapore’s economy and market evolution isn’t mentioned.

Jeraldine Phneah actually posted a video discussing some of her take on how these things blew up and it was a really balanced perspective. I like how she gently took a jab at Shulin’s approach to delivering the message when Shulin herself talked about the importance of communication.

Personally, I’m more concerned about the characterisation of what ‘hunger’ is about. A lot of the discussions made it seem like this ‘hunger’ is self-evident but it isn’t. Different people had different interpretation of what hunger is and what it looks like.

For Shulin, it might be more about an attitude, not projecting so much me-first; being willing to stretch and take on learning opportunities as opposed to viewing things outside job scope as a chore or seeing some work as ‘beneath’ a job title. Yet for many others, hunger might look more like desperation; of making sacrifices that are unreasonable, and sucking up to bosses, going all out to please clients or entertain their unreasonable requests, etc. Shulin even posed ‘hunger’ as binary – whether you have it or not. That just probably didn’t seem right.

Tan Min-Liang, the founder of Razer, made a very good point on Linkedin about the younger ones behaving simply as a response to the corporates and employers. Give them the right sense of purpose and the work that they feel they deserve, and they will make the appropriate sacrifices.

Technology has made it possible for people to just keep working non-stop; and at the same time, companies may not have properly adapted technologies to their own business and workflow, and managed their employees poorly in that process. It would only make sense that without the management improvements (with management being stuck in the 80-90s mindset and management style), the company is suffering from actually really poor productivity, of which the younger employees are bearing the brunt of.

So the question now goes back to the employers. Are they hungry enough? Are they hungry enough for the right people and talents to provide the appropriate training, software systems, management and leadership? Shulin mentioned about employers’ lack of flexibility and the corporates limitations in meeting the needs of the current workforce culture. I thought Tiffany helped to voice out some of that employers’ and managers’ grievances about the inability to have the real conversations about work / job redesign. These are exactly the issues that we are not confronting enough in this podcast. I am actually really glad that the younger workforce is forcing employers to rethink their approach.

It will be politically challenging for the government to keep the situation in the way it is and allow the market to simmer and boil a bit so that the culture would shift. To do that, they will need to let businesses struggle with the manpower challenges. But maybe, they need to do just that.

Prompt too far

While engineering our prompts well can maximise the possibility of a good result from GenAI tools that we are using, it is also important to understand the technology, the features that AI are really good at, and the things that they are really poor at so that you’re leveraging the right strengths and not wasting your tokens or prompting attempts on things that are fundamentally not going to come out of the AI tool.

One thing to appreciate, especially for GenAI, is that LLMs are designed to provide you with high probability responses that will be considered ‘right’ or ‘appropriate’ by human raters. So even though they are trained on a large amount of data and information, it is difficult to necessarily weight the information appropriately to your needs when giving you a response. As a result, they would tend to give you motherhood statements that have a high probability of being on-point even if they are tangentially related to what you are really looking for. You may be able to guide it in your prompt to go a bit more specific towards what you want, but essentially, you’ll have to do the work of narrowing down things. This is because the LLM is designed not to clarify your questions and sharpen their output for you – that’s something that you are supposed to do. Yet at the same time, they would already be consuming your tokens even during that process while you’re ‘finetuning’ them towards your output.

The other challenge for LLM is the problem of hallucination and even creating false data or connections. Quite often even when they are citing or linking to certain sources, the LLMs are making guesses on the content and association with what you’re searching for and also what they are ‘talking about’ themselves. So an assertion may be associated with a link they furnish you, rather than being based on that link. This is radically different from academic citations when your ‘sources’ are really saying or validating what you are saying. Most GenAI tools simply provide materials that may be associated rather than actually make certain points. Worse still, they could make up links that are broken and claim them as source.

Of course, there’s a whole issue around existing softwares being replaced by AI or vibe-coding. Often, this involves almost reinventing the wheel. Yes, maybe the prototyping cost has come down: what AI has done is that it has taken down some of the initial barriers in getting some kind of digital product out. But all that without providing a proper long-term infrastructure planning or system thinking because it is not exactly optimising towards a longer-term vision. This means a lot more resources dealing with bugs and bolting on new features or other aspects of the software in a way that is not optimised at the system level. Moreover, the AI companies are themselves competing with their own customers and users in developing the more bespoke tools for those willing-to-pay clients. So what makes you think you are going to vibe-code your way to a proper product people will pay you for?

Delighting in rules and laws

I was just chatting with a Christian friend who purportedly likes rules because they make things clear to follow and, hence, help determine the right course of action or decision. Yet this friend feels tortured when she is somehow made to break rules, or when rules are suspended in her favour after she has broken them.

I asked if she love those rules in a manner that is not about practicality or functionality but actually appreciate the heart of the rules and meaning of them. Not always, she recognises.

Yet the Psalmist could say in Psalm 112 as well as 119 (they may or may not be written by the same author) that he delights in God’s laws and statues or that one who delights in it is blessed. How do you love rules? How do you delight in these things anyways? Surely it is because you’ve grasp and understood the spirit beyond them and what they were set out to do. And in order to do that you, must embrace the character and spirit of the one who have put these rules in place.

It is in fearing God, loving God where we find ourselves delighting in the statues of God because He had put them in place as a manner of relating to us and guiding us, revealing His intentions and His designs. And that’s why the Bible often portrays obedience as a consequence of love. That is what it means to fear God – to be in awe of Him, His works, His intents. We can love God, and learn to love His laws but still struggle with them, and struggle with obedience. Until we are about to allow our will to be subject to Him, and to have our will be aligned to loving and serving Him, there will always be a tension.

Which is why I determined that each day, we are choosing to be Christians all over again. Conscious that our every deed and, in fact, every decision will bring us back to consider our faith in the Lord.

Making judgments

One of the things that the modern democracies are struggling now is with making clear judgment or assessments about things including truth. Having been used to mostly civil public discourse for decades, there are groups which are sick of endless debates and trying to take shortcuts. And often, the shortcuts means both the left and right of society are coroborating to destroy the foundations of democratic debates and wrestling but instead resorting to de facto power.

If that is seen as a solution to winning the superpower race for the US, it is seriously misguided. De facto power isn’t so much what reigns in China. Rather, it is ultimately a government’s care for countrymen and ability to uplift the bottom strata of society that wins legitimacy and organising authority. Think of governance and leadership in any country as an organising authority – this group helps coordinate things that do not naturally emerge in the market, and make decisions on trade-offs.

Democracy tries to push the debate on trade-offs to a wider, more diverse group and that forms politics. But what are the issues to push out and what are those to be decided by the bureacrats is something to be determined by culture and society. Ideally, devolution of power to the local helps ensure the higher levels of government focus on the most critical issues.

But that’s the rationalistic approach. Reality is more complex because politics always finds its way to play the rules rather than by the rules. So local authority uses devolved power to block larger developments, and higher levels of government sometimes have to do horse trading of issues. Regardless of the ills of the system, we need to determine if this is the way to make the best judgment for the overall society. Sure, things may benefit one segment of the population but not others; but at the very least, people can agree on a course of action suited for the society over the longer time horizon.

I think part of the lack of judgment have to do with the way philosophy is taught and viewed in our society these days. Different ideas are taught without recognising what frameworks are suitable for what kind of context and decisions. And at the same time, this coincides with the relativisation of moral values. The less we consider and cultivate broader civic virtues in society, the more it reflects in our politics less of it.

Applying judgments in the society requires that some basic principles and values be accepted broadly as the foundation of the society. If everything is subjective and relative, then politics becomes simply a beauty contest with extremely irratic outcomes.

It’s now or never

It’s Good Friday and while in the car with my wife, the song by Elvis Presley, ‘It’s now or never’ came up and I asked her, isn’t this the tune of a hymn?

She said no, it’s an old song.

I said, it’s definitely a hymn. And I searched, realised it was ‘Down from His glory’ that shared the same melody as the Elvis Presley song, which was based on a very old Neapolitan (some kind of dialect of Italy though recognise almost as a distinct language) song, ‘O Sole Mio’ (written in 1898). The title translates to ‘My Sunshine’ and the original song was a bit of a love song that used ‘sun’ or ‘sunshine’ point to his subject of adoration.

Meanwhile, Down from His glory was written by William Booth-Clibborn in 1921. He is not to be confused with his own maternal grandfather, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. What I thought was interesting was how William Booth-Clibborn basically paid tribute to the source of the melody for which he composed his hymn with the lines in the chorus:

O how I love Him! How I adore Him!
My breath, my sunshine, my all in all.

What a wonderful way a love song had been directed towards the praise and adoration of the Lord! In contrast, ‘It’s now or never’, despite Elvis’ musical talents and brilliance in delivering this somewhat seductive song, becomes so superficial and pale in comparison to the depth of William Booth-Clibborn’s hymn.

Maundy Thursday 2026

A year ago, I reflected on Maundy Thursday and also shared about what this word ‘maundy’ was referring to. Maundy refers to the command – and this command was to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). The focus of this term was not so much on the last supper, nor the betrayal of Jesus, but on the washing of the disciples’ feet.

There is always a lot to unpack within the gospel for the record, leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in these two days. But we continue to focus on this feet-washing matter. What does it mean, why does it matter and what of this experience did the disciples take away?

On one hand, Jesus washing of the disciples’ feet is a matter of service. He was demonstrating to the disciples the level of humility that they are all called to. John the Baptist said that he was not worthy to loose/untie the sandal strap of Jesus (John 1:27) and yet here was Jesus, washing the feet of His disciples. And in John 13:14-17, Jesus clearly expects that the example he set will make a strong impression in the disciples to follow his example of love and service. The mandate to love one another then follows from there.

On the other hand, we got to peer even more deeply into the spiritual meaning of feet-washing from the perspective of those whose feet are being washed. This is perhaps thanks to Peter, who tried to ask Jesus to wash his head and hands after Jesus said that Peter had no part with Him if He didn’t wash Peter’s feet. Peter probably tries to say that all of him is with Jesus and therefore asks to be washed fully. But Jesus explains further that ‘He who is bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean’ (John 13:10). So the feet washing is not just symbolic of the loving and serving of the one who washes. There was a separate point being brought up.

And this is the point that daily cleansing of the filth from the world (sanctification) is needed, even when we have been cleansed through salvation. There will always be influences from the world that draws us to sin and we would have our personal struggles that we are dealing with – the daily cleansing, with the Lord’s word, with prayer, mutual encouragement and service (which can come through a gentle rebuke, or holding one another accountable) will allow us to sanctify one another to the Lord.

All of these mattered to Jesus at the point before His betrayal and crucifixion (noting the way John wrote verses 2-3). This was almost the last time the disciples gathered together, and Jesus was certainly teaching them the final lessons He could share and leave with them directly before His death. There’s one common misunderstanding that I’d like to tidy up before finishing this post. The question is whether Judas’ feet were washed. Given that Jesus alluded to the fact that Judas was ‘unclean’ in John 13:10-11. The difficulty of John 13’s record is that verses 1-17 about feet washing comes first but then verses 18-30 where Jesus identifies his betrayer comes later. So there’s this impression that Jesus washed the feet of all his disciples and then subsequently Judas left.

But if you read verse 2 carefully, you realise that the elements of the flowing prose from verses 1-30 isn’t chronologically ordered. The foot washing took place immediately after supper. Whereas verses 18-38 was almost like a flashback to the times the supper when Jesus and his disciples were still eating, and then Judas went out from them and Jesus continued teaching, giving the command to love, and then predicting Peter’s denial.

I have not looked into why John wrote the way he did but I had thought that John must have been so deeply impacted by having his feet washed by Jesus and he wanted to write about that and show how Jesus lived out this ‘mandate’ while he was alive, and also how this related to the cleansing the disciples needed vis-a-vis the one they already had (salvation received in their hearts). By sharing this experience first and then unpacking the rest in the next couple of chapters, John was prefacing Jesus’ teachings with first the revelation of who His person was like from His action.

To be a Christian, the person of Jesus needs to hit us, the manner He taught with His life and not just His words. It is the consciousness of His life that enables us to cling on to His words.