In a recent dinner meet with some new friends who have just arrived from overseas and settling in Singapore for a stint, I discovered that we actually have a National Integration Council and they have this little guidebook about Settling in Singapore. The foreigners who received their EPs or other immigration documents allowing them to settle in Singapore would receive a hardcopy of this guide.
Besides the attractive graphics and the nice type-setting, I thought it was really nice how they put together some of the norms and conveyed recommendations on how people can adapt to the culture in Singapore. I liked how carefully worded various different practices were in Singapore (including ‘chope-ing’ seats in the hawker centres) in ways that would be neutral. In some sense, the ‘codification’ of all these cultural norms here in such a document from the government already reflected a positive sense of pride.
I’m certainly proud that we have such an organised system to help non-Singaporeans integrate better. For me, I always realise that ultimately, there’s no single Singaporean identity and it would always be full of paradoxes, tension between the Asian values with some of the westernised thinking, struggle between putting self or society first and so on. Over the years, our government have most certainly stepped away from that nannying role and try to take on a more nurturing role towards the culture and the economy. As citizens and Singaporeans, we too will have to step up and mature into a new future that we are going to create and not just passively receive.
We are stingy with our ideas for many reasons; I can think of a few:
We are afraid a poorly thought-out idea will get criticised
We are afraid the idea will put us in bad light
We don’t actually want to take the trouble of executing so we want to spare ourselves the embarrassment
We think compliance is more important than creativity
We leave ‘creative thinking’ to others while we practice “critical thinking”
But the chance to share an idea is not a chore; it is not necessarily a right, and often it is a privilege. The ability to execute aside, at the end of each day when we all walk out into the world, out of our offices, video conferences, as fellow man, we want the best ideas to win, we want the world to be a better place because there were great ideas that mankind acted upon. It was a good idea to burn fuel to get energy and turn that energy into useful work. It was also a good idea to generate those motive power from things like flowing water or shinning sun that will not be exhausted, nor throw up more pollutants into the air.
For Singapore to be greener, better, we need to give our ideas – even the simplest ones you may not think too highly of. And honestly, I think for so long, our government have been very open to ideas-sharing as long as you come in as a concerned citizen who wants to make things better. So, please, I’d encourage you to look through the Singapore Green Plan, and then post your ideas and thoughts there.
In my final blog post questioning the pillars of the Green Plan, I’m covering the final pillar “Resilient Future”. If our vision of a resilient future is just about defending our coastlines against rising sea levels (no doubt important), local food production and having more greenery, I question what resilience really mean. Our future, intertwined with the focus on sustainability and resilience needs to encompass the physical, mental, policy and system aspects of resilience. By reducing resilience simply into something physical, we are giving ourselves too easy a problem to ‘solve’.
Resilience is not an easy concept – there’s a lot of dynamism embedded in it. You can be resilient but not seen as a winner; because it is more about suffering blows than claiming credit. And at the same time, we can build resilience at one level (eg. having strong base of reserves to use when they are required) but when crisis strikes, behave in a way that reduces our resilience (eg. creating moral hazards about using further draws to delay structural changes that is needed in the economy).
And even as we think about the resilience of a nation – what about our people, who are increasingly having difficulties with mental health, who feel increasingly disconnected between the prescribed path to success during their upbringing and their personal experiences in life? Has our education, upbringing and the manner by which we consider policy-making been building up or tearing down our mental, emotional resilience as a nation?
I appreciate that the Singapore Green Plan is not so much a plan than just an effort to piece together ideas as well as existing initiatives so as to cement our agenda against climate change and for more sustainable development. We need all the best ideas we can have regardless of where they may come from. Because when the ideas get out there, whether it works or not depends not on who came up with it – but more on the quality of it and on our ability to execute them. Having healthy conversations, trying to work things out through unanswerable questions are more important than trying to answer them. As a society, it is the willingness to do this, to work together that is going to bring about that resilient future ahead.
On this part 2 of my post about the green plan, I want to interrogate the next 2 pillars about Sustainable Living, and the Green Economy.
Sustainable living; our lifestyles are a product of systemic incentives and disincentives. We already see that in the case of marriage in Singapore and HDB flats availability. And often, availability is actually more powerful than price signals in changing behaviours. Take IKEA for example, you can’t choose to buy a plastic bag, you simply have to make do with carrying with your hands if you didn’t bring your own bag. Of course you can buy the proper reusable bag but that unavailability of the cheap plastic bag option matters.
So when it comes to waste, the lack of waste bins around can help; and maybe more importantly, the availability of proper recycling bins that are locked up, keeps the stuff in them dry and used only by those who have sorted and wash their recyclables should be available. You can even have a daily passcode reset so only those who bother to login to their accounts, check the code can use the bin. This kind of accountability, sense that your upholding of sustainability living makes an impact, will be infectious. Sustainable living only works when everyone plays their part but ideas spread in a different way, the leaders of action is a minority, most people “adapt” to social conventions when they take hold. How we start things off will have to appeal to exclusivity, to those who are leaders of action. We don’t need to convert non-believers but we do need to make things easier and impactful for believers.
Trying to “mass manufacture” sustainable living in the way we drive GDP KPIs is simply not going to work. We need smart and innovative marketing – to spread the good and infectious ideas that convinces us we actually can move mountains – then things gets interesting.
The Green Economy; what exactly is that? The Green Plan blurb for this section starts off with “Tackling climate change cannot be at the expense of livelihoods and jobs”. The negative thinking and presupposition is disappointing here. There is so much assumption around loss of livelihoods and jobs because of tackling climate change which is opposite of truth. Dealing with climate change needs work; and if we think more fundamentally about the work of creating transparency about environmental impacts, around assessment, deployment of solutions, campaigning for behavioural changes (such as those points made above), there are plenty of jobs that will be created. The idea of taxing carbon then subsidising investments in decarbonisation is a great principle but safeguards as to how the investments are made is important; otherwise it gets reduced to tokenism.
All the technological solutions (such as carbon capture, use and storage, hydrogen based energy carriers) trotted out are already available though not necessarily commercial. It’s not so much a question of availability this time around but how the government can help make the economics work by helping to create scale. Singapore has done well in this historically with infrastructure and the latest example is the district cooling system applied at the upcoming Tengeh HDB estate. There are other opportunities similar to creating multi-utilities synergies in Jurong Island a generation ago. When you have stronger regulation on waste management and then provide the waste treatment services efficiently at scale, it will be taken up. And new jobs will be created.
The difficulty in the current existing narrative is the traditional marginal thinking prevailing. We behave as if the green economy is an add on, either to parts of the economy or a layer upon the whole economy. The truth is, whether we see it that way or not, it’ll pervade the entire economy, and it’s going to transform things. That does not mean marginal thinking is not useful – we still need to think about the incrementals but target the systemic differences across all sectors first, then work out the incrementals.
I’m honestly really glad that our government rhetoric has gone on the green bandwagon. And knowing Singapore, we want to be able to deliver on our goals and make a reportable difference. However, I think it is vital to really interrogate those plans and consider if on a overall scheme of things, the plan is actually really green.
Looking just at the key areas; beginning with parks and trees – City in Nature pillar. The setting aside of land for more parks and planting more trees is definitely welcomed – but I’m not too sure if the destruction of trees/grassland to make way for further developments is progressing at a faster rate than the increase in parkland and trees. Is there some overall measure instead that the government can hold itself accountable to? Or if actually it just serves to slow down the destruction, can we also be transparent about it and confess when will we actually be increasing rather than decreasing green land and green cover?
On the Energy Reset pillar, Singapore is rightly described as an energy-disadvantaged country especially when it comes to renewables so I think we can be forgiven for still having to resort to fossil fuel for most of our baseload power. However, I think the opportunity is really not in putting solar panels on HDB, or doing small things to optimise efficiency of our plants. The real opportunity is in improving the energy efficiency of our buildings and ideally banning completely individual air-conditioning units. There’s a real waste in having individual units stacked one on top of another in a single row as in HDB flats because the hot air from one compressor is just feeding the one on top of it and once you reach high floors like for my unit, I’m wasting a tonne of energy keeping my compressor working. And besides that, our vehicles is another huge opportunity – using the same principle of freezing our vehicle growth, can we simply not ban the internal combustion engine on passenger vehicles by 2030? Our COE system can just dole out the last COEs to ICE cars and from now on, only allow EVs for passenger cars to get COEs? Then by 2030, most of our roads will be EVs – never mind the charging infrastructure; once people who wants to drive buy the cars, the market incentives to bring about charging and all will come.
And there are industries whose energy efficiency can be improved further, not just buildings – which by the way is more or less pretty well managed by BCA’s green mark certification system. The government can and should take the lead by making sure all of their facilities are green. 30% of schools being carbon neutral by 2030 is a little slow in my opinion given that more schools can simply fit itself with solar panels (even for education purposes) and do a host of other things like composting food waste, doing grey water recycling. Yes, Singapore managed to close the water loop for most part but encouraging grey water reuse would be able to improve water efficiency further.
Talking about water – how about having potable water supply pipes vis-a-vis non-potable water? So that we can reduce the energy intensity of our water treatment? Well, maybe the cost doesn’t add up as well – but all of these decision making process and sustainability considerations can be made more transparent as well so that citizens can be more involved. Accountability is key when it comes to environmental governance and sustainability – not just voicing out of plans.
Singapore had too many budgets last year I kind of lost track. There was a lot of support from the government here and there; it was good the new leaders are demonstrating that they are able to draw from the reserves during times of need and try and direct it towards those who need them. This is very different from our government’s approach in the earlier years of managing the economy. Of course, there will be some people who think of these as dangerously populist.
This year we have 1 budget so far (to be fair the year has really kind of just started), and things looks pretty boring in my view. It is a very safe, ‘same-old’ kind of budget, which in my opinion, reflects once again a lack of imagination. There’s a lot of just recycling old materials, old scripts, and to a large extent, wishful thinking. Job supports/subsidy assumes that the economy will recover or that firms are not just taking advantage of them to keep zombie operations alive. They are also generally contingent on those sectors eventually getting an uptick by the time subsidies end. Government tried to signal that if needed, they’ll step in again (as DPM Heng mentioned during the CNA programme), which reeks of moral hazard.
There had been talks about the desire to make manufacturing a significant part of our economy; but somehow the budget doesn’t seem to be devoting much to that area. Little doubt we are still stuck with thinking we would just be using tax incentives to attract MNCs to position themselves in Singapore. How about developing the domestic sector? We do have excellent firms which are local firms part of the international semiconductor value chain – can we cultivate more of that? Are we doing any R&D necessary to help these firms? Are our polytechnics and university working with these firms? Are we developing a workforce that can enter jobs created by these firms? How is the government spending its budget to make these things happen?
There is more ‘enforced spending’ kind of stimulus in the form of vouchers again. This time it’s called CDC vouchers for heartland kind of spending – hawker centres and shops. Maybe that will help to ramp up digitalisation more; and you are also handing out small sums to many people so the marginal propensity to spend is high, and that can generate some multiplier effect. But what is the longer-term supply-side impacts of such measures? Likely nil. Why not use those funds to pay for all the digitalisation stuff in schools to facilitate more remote learning? Why rely on means-tested subsidies rather than blanket subsidies? In any case the rich people already get iPads and they can be given the chance to opt out of the free one if they already have one. That saves the hassle of the poor people making applications, going through means-testing, etc.
Then there’s the question of funding our budget – which of course is not exactly clear since we drew from reserves and there’s no mention of returning the funds to the reserves. How about enforcing our claims on intellectual property generated through our research grants and all the money that NRF has put to work? How about putting those IP to use in terms of commercialising something that we can manufacture domestically? Or if they are not yet ready, how about selling it to some private sector in Singapore at a concessionary price and then part of the upside income from the commercialisation of the IP goes to our national coffers?
I’m just throwing out new ideas and they could all be bad ideas. But to me, the problem I’m observing with our budget is that there’s insufficient bad ideas because there isn’t much new ideas. And that playing safe, that ‘it’s always been done this way’ kind of calculations in the background, is getting more dangerous in this brave new world.
For a while in my earlier work with Singapore companies in the Sustainable Energy space, I was looking at carbon credits and trading; and as an economist, I looked at it in very simplistic terms when I think about having a carbon market, or a market for carbon – especially when thinking about not just the credits to emit, but also offsets or basically net negative carbon projects that can help to zero out certain emissions elsewhere. By trading these tools, you could theoretically make the entire industry better off because the ones who are polluting less could benefit from lower cost of production if they are to purchase emission allowances or even the offsets from others; while those who are unable to switch to less carbon intensive technologies will have to pay more, thus raising prices, reducing demand for their goods and so on.
The idea is for the price signals to reflect the environmental cost of carbon so to speak. But reality is simply so different from what textbook economics contains. What exactly counts as a carbon offset is really not that clear. We could say that power generated using solar power is generally avoiding carbon emissions from power generated by carbon-dioxide-emitting power but that is not an offset of carbon-dioxide (which should be negative). Besides, if the solar farm was built on land by clearing primary rainforest, then the project is actually reducing the environment’s capacity to absorb carbon – that is surely a net carbon positive project over its lifespan or even more.
Of course, the way these things are accounted is different from the way I’m speaking of this because there’s an industry out there which is built around generating these credits/offset. We are still a long way to go in terms of trying to align the incentives in these things so that our economic system is well-aligned with principles of sustainability. But it’s great that the journey has started. Let’s just hope the counterproductive, harmful kind of greenwashing won’t eradicate us before the alignment takes root.
I’ve been writing about education in a series I call ‘Zero-base Reconstruction’. And I probably will continue to write in this series. Why? Because I have plenty of ideas what can make education better for our future generation in a manner that will result in a better future, that will help us make better use of what we as humans accumulate as knowledge. Mass education was created for an Industrial Age to train people for industrial jobs in factories and to manage bureaucracies where corporations reign.
The future will not be one dominated by industrial factories or full of corporate bureacracies (even if there are still giant tech companies). The workers of the future will not be succeeding through complying to corporate policies or norms but trying to win by generating and executing on good ideas – for products, and service. And many new industries will open up that is about making human connections. Coaching one-to-one and in groups will become important; they will form core parts of HR in organisation. Mental health care will grow – in terms of developing new apps, services that help to deal with stress, train our minds to deal with the newer challenges of the world. Caregiving sector will also grow as people survive to older age and younger people will have to learn to serve them and make genuine connections.
All these will take place in parallel with increasing automation of significant parts of jobs which we used to think of as respectable: accounting, lawyering, audit, even PR. Hence the human connection aspects of most jobs will become more important because ultimately, the consumer is still human, and the most important decisions are still made by humans. The ability to think, to be creative in new contexts, new environments, under new constraints will be way more important.
The world needs teachers who can prepare our next generation for such a future; who can cultivate empathy, help people learn to make connections with others (and not just abstract concepts). And that’s why I chose to be a coach. How about you?
I wrote about teaching mistakes. And I thought it was more important than problem solving because for most part of the mass education system, we are not learning to specify problems properly. This is just about one of the most important skill in life but we realise that in schools, it is the teachers learning how to specify problems clearly while students are only trained to find answers to problems.
Over time, because the system is gamed, students merely learn to recognise the signals in the problem statement that will prompt certain responses or answers without necessarily making the genuine connection between the problem and the solution. The trick to change this, I believe, is to teach ‘mistakes’ – ie. problem specifications and then for people to learn to be able to look at the problem through many angles.
This approach more often than not eventually leads to problem-solving more than when one just jumps into a situation trying to solve some vaguely-specified problems. The issue with getting people to try solve problems without even teaching them how to identify one means we get people entering the workplace learning to create new problems to solve rather than looking for the right problems to solve. That creates those bullshit jobs that I’ve previously commented about. And also career-maximisers who would be happy to start fires which they put out and then get themselves recognised for putting out the flames.
Equipping our next generation with problem-solving capabilities is about diagnosis of problems, tracing and investigating the root causes and then taking a bigger, open mind approach to finding a solution rather than being anxious to take the hammer in the toolbox to strike just about everything thinking they’re all nails.
This is part of a series that ponder over what we should be teaching in schools and to our children to prepare them adequately for life. We covered ideas like visioning, heritage, empathy – all of which relates both to life and also suggest how these things can be more consciously infused into what we teach and the way we teach.
Today I want to cover teaching about mistakes. And I don’t mean generically the concept of mistakes. I mean like real things that we have done in the past which constitutes mistakes: decisions made about regulations, country policies, failure to detect wrongdoing, making wrongful arrests and so on. Like sharing about the lead-up, the events from various perspectives and calling out the mistakes made, analysing them.
And the reason I put up the sustainability banner for this article is because any unsustainable practice we apply in our economy is a mistake (and there are many examples to draw from). And it is important to understand what are the kind of conditions and incentives that create that. It is also necessary to appreciate that mistakes are often controversial in that it may seem right in certain dimensions and wrong in others. The idea is to examine the perspectives and the conditions driving these perspectives.
For example, the use of coal-fired power is a mistake; but we acknowledge that it was what brought the world to a level of production and technological advancement that allows us to understand the problem better, and figure out how to deal with it. Calling out a mistake is the first step in trying to understand problems better and work towards solving them – which is yet another skill we want to equip our next generation with. Uncovering ‘mistakes’ of mankind, of national governments, of organisations can be worked into the subjects of Economics, Business, History – even the Sciences. Some may wonder what are the merits of teaching about mistakes but remember once when we thought the earth was flat? That was a mistake made in the past that we don’t want to repeat. Yet there’s now so much misinformation that there seem to be a resurgence of people believing in the flat earth. So let’s not take mistakes for granted – sometimes it is not obvious something is a mistake and often people making mistakes would want to cover it up and make tonnes of excuses for them.
Now while we try to normalise calling out on mistakes, we want to be able to learn to move forward together regardless of who made the mistakes. We need to help one another overcome that playground instinct of putting blame on people as though eliminating someone would make the world a better place. But I’d probably write another post about it.
