I spent a couple of hours chatting with a friend about history, politics and society in Singapore. It was an interesting exchange on observations about the government, Singaporeans as a people and our topics ranged from the Maju forest developments to the NDR 2026 announcements.
One of the things that came up repeatedly in the conversation was a thesis I had about the evolution of our leaders’ paradigm about Singapore’s development. It was perhaps a thesis I had in mind but embedded deeply and have not surfaced until this conversation. I articulated this notion that we learnt to mimic the form of policymaking and decision-making that our founding leaders’ had without its substance.
What do I mean?
A short digression first. I have to qualify that I am not an expert in history, but I read widely and have admired Dr Goh Keng Swee since I was 15. I read every speech and piece of writing by him I could find. And of course, the declassification of the Albatross files was to my great delight. I care deeply about Singapore’s governance and leadership. And I always felt that it was important to keep going back to different stories, incidents, and anecdotes to pick the brains of these founding leaders. Knowing about them is different from knowing them. And it would be good to get to know them properly, and understand how they thought about things. Because our success is not just happenstance nor having their relentlessness, nor about just their character. How they thought about things matters.
Let’s start with the systems thinking and approach to nation-building.
When Dr Goh Keng Swee thought about the economy and obsess over job creation, he was thinking about the jobs that common people could take on. He was observing the people and the kind of skills or work they could do. People were not necessarily educated yet. Industrialisation was necessary and made sense; and industries could absorb the labour force. And we needed to build things up anyway – so we had factories of every kind: making nails, steel, mosquito coils, and then textiles. Yes, these were all in the industrialisation roadmap, but the starting point was observation of our people, before finding ideas elsewhere.
For me, there are a few areas of our economy and society which will demonstrate weaknesses that can affect us in the next decade and will need to be properly dealt with:
- Low fertility coupled with ageing population
- Decoupling between jobs and GDP growth
- Bifurcation of the external and internal sector growth
- Geopolitical uncertainties and rising trade barriers
Not all of these can be dealt with directly but we can position ourselves properly amidst the challenges and align our solutions to deal with the struggles by being absolutely clear about the trade-offs.
There are of course internal political considerations to take care of – but we can be honest about it and speak up about them. I recall how LKY had responded to a question by Han Fook Kwang (former ST editor) a while back when he asked about the foreign talents outdoing Singaporeans – I recalled how he replied candidly to say ‘what choice to do we have if our people are not reproducing ourselves and growing in competitiveness – we’d rather the foreign talents be tugging the economic rope on our side than from elsewhere against us! Be open to real ideas and think of ways how we could approach it with the big picture in mind.
I have three proposals in mind to deal with the four big problems I highlighted. None of the three proposals will be able comprehensive enough but they serve as starting points to think about those four problems at a broader and more strategic level. I’m going to write about these proposals in separate posts and put in the links to the posts as they get published.
- Champion caregiving jobs for locals (deals with point 1,2,3)
- Get even more strategic about embedding Singapore into critical global supply/value chains (deals with point 2,4)
- Increase support towards financial risk-taking activities for locals