Companies are going out there and committing to carbon-neutrality, net-zero and all that catchphases. I wonder if they really know what it entails or it’s a case of talking first and sorting things out later especially when the guy on top may not be holding on to his job by the “deadline”.
When Bill Gates tried to exit fossil fuel from his portfolio, he began to realise how hard it was. I think we only start recognising the difficulty or the ease of certain things when we start doing them. If we keep putting them off then we will never discover the true extent of the difficulty.
Take action now. Refine later. Instead of promising now and doing later.
Satellite towns are going to need some upgrading: the neighbourhood malls require more amenities and services. There has to be more shops around the malls to provide alternatives and greater variety. Because working from home is probably here to stay. Besides the way we consume housing, the demands we place on our neighbourhood malls are going to change. We will probably shop more there and lunch options will need to be more varied, not just catering to students after school.
Shops in the major town areas including eating outlets are going to consider moving out into more residential areas, fragmenting flagship stores into local distribution points. There can actually be more combinations of online-to-offline business models with this change in landscape. Because a small shop in the neighbourhood is never going to rival the variety one can offer up in a flagship store, you want to allow customers to access the greater range of products through digital means either at the store or nearby so they can eventually consume at the store or bring it home from there.
Food options will have to go beyond the usual chain outlets and provide takeaways or delivery options with ease. Malls can start considering ways in which the last-mile food logistics can be better organised than having an army of grab delivery or foodpanda delivery men/ladies sitting outside malls. Perhaps some kind of central holding area where food will be pushed to for that mall?
Food courts can start simplifying their dinning areas (if they are not keen on having crowds gather and sit for long), maybe even combining kitchens to create cloud-kitchen type of setup.
The smaller scale amenities that may be a little “odd” or less consumer-ish such as the laundromat, dry-cleaner, money-changer, hardware shops can be organised around the malls. These outlets may need to serve people who are there for a clear purpose and don’t enjoy as much agglomeration economies.
Networks are powerful, they amplify signals and messages, create effects that anchor and entrench products and players. When we have a power plant and a network supplying power to a lot of households, we gain from economies of scale, the higher power available unlocks higher consumption of electrical appliances, increases our productive hours and amplify the wonders of having electricity.
It also means that if that power plant fails, you’ve a blackout. Not just you but across the network. Expanding the network, putting more plants on it enhances resilience to an extent – so much so we have taken our network’s reliability for granted.
But guess what, power networks are going to be less stable. Intermittent sources of electricity from wind and solar power, as well as decentralised generation of power reduces the predictability of power flows and makes it harder for the system to operate smoothly in matching demand and supply. Huge mismatches will cause outages and when that happens, can your decentralised generation actually help you? Do you have “island” capabilities on your microgrid?
A microgrid that has capabilities to disconnect from the main grid and supply itself is powerful – even if the supply is just to sustain the system for some time. That enhances resilience. In life as well, it makes sense to acquire another skill on the side, make friends from beyond work and save up significantly, to achieve this resilience. Too often we are silently being lulled into being dependent on the mammoth bureacracy and system built around us we think we don’t need the island capabilities anymore.
With working from home becoming a norm following Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, there’s going to be major shifts in infrastructure one might start to expect and consider as one thinks about entering a career in infrastructure. I’m going to share some thoughts on this particularly from the perspective of housing first and in the coming posts, maybe some other aspects.
Housing has traditionally been about proximity to work and also key amenities and that was what created waves of urbanisation right from the start of industrialisation. However, over time, as the industrial core and city centres became a little degraded, the patterns of housing moved out to the city fringes and even to the suburbs, giving rise to suburban malls but also transport lines, roads that connects the city to the suburbs.
In the case of Singapore, we’ve been successful in creating satellite towns to support housing needs as our urban core area becomes too unaffordable for ordinary people to live in, and the continuous refreshing of old spaces means it has become increasingly high-rise and land-use intensified. This intensification is made possible only through advancements in public transport and the ability to pull people from more satellite towns into this urban core where people work and also do some of their consumption.
With the pandemic and work from home, demand for housing that are sitting on transport nodes linking to city centres may fall a little; the desire for more space, and comfort might become more important. Cramming people into small shoebox apartments and encouraging them to be out of their houses (a la Hong Kong) might be increasingly difficult. I am looking forward to shifts in valuation of property though that change might take much longer to reflect in the property market.
I’m writing this purely from a theoretical viewpoint, and perhaps it can feed into practice and application but I’ve no intention to address that in this post. From a supply-side perspective, there’s no single optimal point of production combinations. The production possibility frontier involves a continuous combination of possibilities that would be “optimal” from a technical efficiency and resource availability perspective.
In Economics, the optimal point of production is obtained by specifying some sort of aggregated utility function – in other words, asking the demand-side of the picture. Figuring out the demand and specifying it is just as important as thinking about how to produce because it helps determine what is to be produced.
Yet day in and out we seem to act as though the market is always calling the shots, pinning down our behaviours. A society that is caught up with trying to produce more and more, and scaling up without understanding the demand-side of the equation will only find itself in misery. We cannot always assume our demand function or aggregated utility to behave in the same way, to comply with the kind of assumptions made in the Economics discipline.
Does a society exist for its members or do the members exist for the society? Think of “significance” as the extent or ways in which members feel that appreciation and sense of being part of the group that they make up. The demand for significance have increased.
Wait, no the way significance is manifested have changed. Maybe it was an arms race after all, but maybe, it does not have to be. Members don’t have to be pit against one another for significance, they all can have significance.
So many of our systems have been built by drawing upon the resources and members of a society in order to help govern and maintain the society. These systems reward significance to those who are helping to lead and control (or maybe those people reward significance to themselves); but either way, the people who are ‘managed’ are often mere digits. They are called to work their way up to gain significance, to learn the skills to be a top dog, to lead and manage.
What about a world where all the members of society are rewarded with more significance by the leaders and so the members can themselves attribute more significance to the leaders? Where we as constituents don’t just say people are leaders because they make the cut in competence but above all, they care for the people.
Singapore is a small island state. We have no natural resources besides our strategic geographical location, as well as our manpower. And therefore, most of the value that we can try to create comes from being able to drive productivity growth from our manpower. And productivity growth cannot be seen as isolated within industries or sectors, but rather, integrated as a cluster of activities.
The mistake of looking at construction sector, or cleaning sector and say that productivity growth is lagging behind that of financial sector is the fact that investment trends in these sectors are different and quality of labour may not be evenly distributed. More significantly, as a result of those conditions, the bargaining power of labour vis-a-vis capital is also much more imbalanced. This sort of productivity slowdown cannot be easily dealt with through skills training.
Think about the incentives from the capital-side of the equation. With little competition from international capital to compete in the domestic sector (due perhaps to limited size and scale of the market), the businesses will tend to use labour as a means to put off capital investment as that helps improve returns on existing capital stock at the expense of labour productivity. Once you factor the uncertainties around return on capital, that will start to appear as a sensible move.
If this is the case of underinvestment in capital, then how would skills training improve the situation? What is being encountered is a labour force that might be worn out from poor quality capital being deployed (poorly maintained machinery, version 1.0 of an equipment for which version 10 is already available, etc).
Then moving on to my point about productivity cluster. Should the cleaners of a bank earn more than the cleaners at the construction site? With outsourcing, competition being encouraged at every segment of the value chain, this probably would not happen anymore. But is this really a good outcome? Because there will always be industries that are growing faster and extracting more profits from their activities, the supporting activities should also be entitled to a share of that windfall. This helps to speed up the expansion of growing sectors in an economy. This sort of cluster helps facilitate more real trickle-down effects.
I was having a conversation with a middle aged man. He was in his late forties and having been a salaryman all his life, he was happy and satisfied with his work. He thought about some of those who went farther and higher in the organisation and said ‘they were really good’. I interpreted that to mean ‘they had what it takes’. I responded to say, ‘it’s also a lifestyle choice’.
The society has its way of determing what constitutes merit. And it’s often a mad rush in those dimensions in order to prove you’re up to par. Whether it is certificates, points, grades, licenses, we are all sucked into some of these common denominators of comparison. We want to find out the rules of the game everyone is playing and then play to win it. And be ‘really good’ – and if others win, we consider them ‘really good’, implying also that they are ‘better than us’ (though only in that single, narrow dimension).
The greatest gift as a parent that you can give to a child is to show them – that despite the education syste, despite what the society and people around you keep trying to tell you about studying hard, getting good grades, gaining CCA points, being able to rattle off lists of achievements, that there is a spectrum of different intelligence. And you may be intelligent in some form, others may be intelligent in other forms. There is no single overall type of intelligence. In a PR firm, intelligent may be about EQ, language skills; whereas in academia, intelligent may be about intellectual rigour. The context matter and of course in the context of school, there is certain definition of merit but that is not the definitive kind of merit in life.
The next great gift to your child is to encourage them to get out of basing solely on the paper chase, and find a domain of intelligence that allows them to flex their potential more than any others. Cultivate and develop that, and keep at it even as they try to meet the basic standards on other areas. Then they will come to appreciate others’ as ‘really good in such-and-such’, ‘better than me in so-and-so’.
Man are social animals and so it is natural that with the pandemic out there, social media is going to have a greater hold of us than before. The unique feature about social media is that fringe group can find more strength in numbers because distance is no longer a barrier. And with some kind of perceived veil over our identities (as an online digital avatar rather than our real physical self), our voice may be a bit more expressive.
That can be used positively or negatively; we can decide to amplify positive or negative voices each time we share, and every time when we post. We may try to punch above our weight in terms of voice by exaggeration or taking a more extreme stance than we actually do just as a tactical way of counterbalancing the voices. But it is our choice whether to do so.
Now that we have that awareness of how we come across, we are better positioned to think about how we are being influence. Thinking through more clearly about our stance on different things helps us give pause to what we are reading and consuming and consider whether we are relying too much on similar viewpoints and others who are in agreement with us. Social media algorithms have their patterns of keeping us hooked to them because they show us things that agrees with us. But what about those opposing views that are available out there which social media is not showing you? Does the algorithm make them less valid?
We have to start regulating our influences and also our influence, especially online. And make your contribution a positive one.
What is a transition? It is shifting from one state to another and it entails change. So configurations and structures will have to change in order for that shift of state to occur – or those reconfigurations and structural-shifts are simply the transition itself. Over the past decades, there are some transitions that we kind of take for granted are necessary and we just allow them to happen even though they wreck a lot of havoc but most people may think nothing much of them. Then there are the transitions we haven’t fully agreed with in part because we think there are ways to stay in the same state, or that we are simply so vested in the current state that the new state feels ‘inhabitable’ to us.
Now I invite all of us to rethink those instances where we are resisting change because of that. Because of the thought that the new state is ‘inhabitable’ or is it?
Now the Energy Transition is going to be a major such shift in the world over the next decade or so. And the pace will accelerate – well, it must – in order to achieve the carbon-reduction targets that we have committed to at the Paris Climate Agreement. The world will have to radically change the way we produce food, consume products, move people and goods around. That will entail pain because activities which are geographically-bound previously may open up to more competition, communities and local economies created by the old ways of doing things may be destroyed.
We are going to find ourselves aligning with the resistance on some fronts at least; because we might think the new world on the other side of the energy transition is inhospitable for our habits, our lifestyles, at least for quite some time. But we have to think, whether our prevailing system, habits and practises themselves can eventually make earth, our one and only home planet, more inhabitable instead of the alternative on the ill-fated trajectory we are on.
