Category Archives: Life

A friend was working through a bunch of data and trying to understand if residential living density had anything to do with a sense of belonging or general well-being. It was hard to uncover these parameters because we had to control for many other socio-economic factors at play. In Singapore, the good thing is most of these people owned their own housing, so rent-vs-own is already controlled for. Then there’s income, the size of household, and difference between the amenities in old (less dense) vs new (denser) estates. Too many confounding factors.

Another friend whom I posed this question to said that often, there are just plainly things we can observe and appreciate without having to mine through data. Sometimes, the desire to mine through data to ‘prove’ something is actually just getting a false sense of security. After all, there’s lots of scientific studies which are not replicable.

When it comes to fluffy factors like sense of well-being or belonging, maybe falling back on anecdotes, and our gut instincts, helps a lot. Because these things are just not quantifiable and when you ask a large number of people subjective things, the categorical result tabulation does not create that much objectivity within it.

Rather, the best way to understanding the phenomenon, might be to simply open your eyes and ears to observe, to speak to people, to actually conduct it from the perspective of the people themselves. To use ethnography.

Governments around the world are highly pro-business. And if they are not that supportive if private businesses, they’d at least lend some hand to the public corporations. Which means things might be more difficult for the employee, or the common worker.

But small business is also an area the government cares about and surely that is in the right direction? Perhaps so. But programmes for small businesses are hard to administer and corporate welfarism for small businesses in lieu of individuals can still be very inefficient.

Take for example giving enterprises grants to work on the business strategy. It sounds good (particularly for the consultants) but to prevent adverse selection there has to be some kind of bar to make sure the business is legit; and then you have to make sure the consultant is good as well. These sort of checks and balances ends up squandering more resources and results in inefficient allocations more often than not. At the end of the day, the funds goes to people who know how to do the reporting rather than those who would really benefit from it or going to that which would end up benefiting society the most.

That may be seen as a necessary evil in the absence of better alternatives. Maybe the solution is to stop channeling resources this way? Directing these investments into more common infrastructure and general programmes that uplifts more businesses, reduce general business costs might be the best approach to promoting businesses. Enhancing economic efficiency can improve competitiveness – even when it doesn’t give the civil servants as much brownie points with their bosses.

If you can make administrative work highly predictable, such as estimating the specific amount of time it takes to fill up a form, the number of people it takes to process the form; streamlining the processes in order to filter out exceptions that need more deliberations or processing, and be able to tag a time it takes to it, you’ll be able to create a system that takes out most of the inefficiency in administrative tasks.

The greatest challenge isn’t that there are administrative tasks. Of course there are. But we don’t know how long it takes to do it. And even when people tells us we will hear back in 3 days or 5 days, it doesn’t happen. Because backlogs build up and companies, departments do not make provision to hire more staff or put more resources at work processing admin. They rather allow it to be a bottleneck.

For example, one needs to register the foreign immunization certification with Singapore’s National Immunization Register (NIR) and get an all-clear before putting up the application for Dependents Pass for the kids who had their vacination overseas. And we are not talking about Covid-19 vaccines here. Just the normal ones. Even if there are sufficient people processing Dependent Passes at Immigration & Customs Authority (ICA), the lack of personnel at NIR can be a problem. Because an application to NIR usually takes 20 working days to complete has taken more than 30 working days and we have not heard from them.

Singapore government have been known to be efficient and effective because we think deeply about such problems, about optimising processes and making the customer service journey for people more humane. But in recent years, with digitization, automation and a bid to shed manpower or get them to do ‘higher value services’, have resulted in people falling through the cracks and the lack of manpower to deal with exceptions that pops up.

This is highly inefficient; because the lack of transparency about what’s happening at the NIR is costly: it has already wasted over 30 minutes of my time calling, speaking to officers, getting them to escalate issues, repeating application reference numbers. And that’s across myself, 3 officers (including the one who picked up and was silent the whole time until I hang up after waiting for over 2 minutes because I could hear the background call-center sounds and harbored hope he would return to his desk from his toilet break). All these time could be spent processing the application itself.

Sometimes, saving the world is about solving these problems.

If you make $2000 a month, working about 20 days, your single work day is worth about $100 to the boss. If he dangles $100 in front of you and tells you that if you don’t take any sick leave for a month, you’ll be given $100 “incentive”. Most of us have 14 days of paid sick leave in a year so by right, the $2000 salary ‘budgeted’ for more than 1 day of sick leave. But it seemed like a win-win for you to continue working, getting paid, and for your boss to continue extracting value out of you in the meantime, especially since the value you can bring him is potentially more than $100/day.

But what if you’re sick, what if you are at risk of spreading illness to others in the company? What is the price you are actually paying? How about your family, and your colleagues? And the society? This time around, because of the pandemic, there was a law and it punished this man. It is deeply unfortunate for him, his family who needs him and the income. But if employers are doing these sort of things to their workers, and pitting their workers against their own health for the sake of work, should the law be stopping them?

Laws are not the cure-all, and we’ve seen that countries with strong labour laws typically end up just discouraging paid workers, causing higher rates of unemployment. So we need to build a culture that rallies around the labour and staff, and frown upon such employer practices. We need a culture of helping one another so that such incentives have no claim on us.

I don’t really like administrative tasks. Do you? They are pretty good for feeling somewhat productive. At least for most of us. Being able to fill up a simple form that gets you through to the next stage, or file a report to get bite sized information to your boss that he can bring to his boss or see a bigger picture than the nitty gritty can feel ‘productive’. But this is part of a longer chain of work that must all take place before real work happens.

Admin that keeps information flowing is useful and productive only when decisions are made based on them and action taken. The reason why consultants are often able to make recommendations that can bring about cost savings in big companies because somewhere somehow, there’s always someone churning out reports that no one is actually reading or bothering with. But no one told him to stop so he didn’t stop. And he is probably afraid to find out that he’s been wasting his time all these while, if he does stop and no one notices.

And people also don’t spend enough effort designing admin and processes that makes life easier for those who are doing the admin work. More importantly, the work ought to be more useful to them than their bosses. We’ve taken for granted that admin tasks are only for those receiving it but someone working on admin tasks can benefit from the discoveries in putting numbers together, aggregating things. If we can create intuitive platforms that generates dopamine hits for little admin tasks done by a worker, that’ll be a greater use of technology than the attention-hungry social media platform.

When businesses think there is a shortage of good employees, it is high time to consider if the issue could be that there’s a shortage of good employers. While the government thinks about building up good manpower and talents for the companies they want to attract; they also need to consider the quality of employers and jobs created in Singapore. One of the reasons for Singapore’s success is the constant fine-tuning of this.

Our government agencies through design and by policy have a deep understanding of the two-sided nature of the labour market. And there’s recognition that in order for there to be employment, have to balance the demand and supply for labour delicately. This means that having some kind of liberal immigration regime is important, so that gaps in our domestic workforce can be closed.

Nevertheless, over periods of very serious dislocations of the skills demanded and supplied by our domestic workforce, there can be problems of foreign labour being demanded more than domestic labour; and with a huge pool of companies based here but unable to find suitable staff. Restructuring the economy is painful business and it is hard to tell whether the situation is temporary or permanent. Being able to continue dreaming about what is the future economy and suite of jobs made available in the economy for Singaporeans is important.

I spent some time listening to what George Yeo had to say about Singapore and his conception of cities. I found his insights incisive and pretty valuable for Singaporeans who are serious about creating a future for our nation. It’s great that we do have people like him, Ho Kwon Ping, Han Fook Kwang, who are providing valuable thoughts to challenge our country to do better and to consider our circumstances with new perspective. I’m thankful also for the presence of Institute of Policy Studies and the work they do in creating such open conversation.

Whilst I had the fortune of spending a few years in Chinese High where such open dialogues about the policies and approaches in school were welcomed, even embraced, I also went through a period where the administration became defensive, practiced “open conversations” merely in name. Town halls that I experienced in my subsequent work life mirrors those assemblies that I had in school. I don’t know how much of my generation was brought up to think and question status quo in these ways, and I fear that as a consequence, such open, public dialogues and airing of intellectual views are going to be limited.

My generation have gotten used to the notion of “open dialogues” or town halls being peddled around as part of our cultural value but what is truly expressed tends to be the suppression of dissent, and questioning of people’s motives for genuine questions asked. I wonder, how many more loving critics (as Prof Tommy Koh would put it) have the courage to emerge as the baton of our country’s leadership gets passed on to the new generation.

Coal is still responsible for 40% of the world’s electricity generated. And Oil was still responsible for 30% of the world’s energy consumption. Meanwhile we think that the world is making big strides towards decarbonisation. Yes it probably is now, and it seems to be so more than ever but the truth is, the world, several decades earlier, had less carbon in the atmosphere, was consuming less energy and certainly not emitting as much carbon dioxide.

The issue is that solar plants, wind turbines, offshore wind are all very visible. Even when they generate not that much power. A single coal fired power plant complex can generate way more power but is typically tucked away somewhere, by some coast where there’s some small jetty ferrying coal from some mines elsewhere.

Electric vehicles, EV chargers, though somewhat uncommon in Asia Pacific for now, are still considerably visible. So are apps showing you where chargers are once they become prevalent. It would seem everyone is trying to do their part for the world. But the ocean liners are hidden out of plain sight. Together with all those bulk carrier vessels ferrying coal from the countries of origin to where the coal power plants are, the container vessels are powered by dirty marine fuels which are typically from oil. Not the nice flowing gasoline or petroleum that runs our cars, not even slightly yucky diesel but much heavier, long carbon-chain fuels which emit more carbon dioxide.

And oh, the trucks moving long distances and carrying the containers which were lifted off those ships, they are also running on fossil fuel. The stuff which a slightly less visible, that the bulk of the real economy runs on, is still pumping so much carbon into our atmosphere. So if we restrict our thinking about energy transition just to electrification and renewable energy, we are seriously losing a lot of the big picture.

How many students are an average teacher in Singapore responsible for? How many teachers have responsibility for a single student over the course of his/her education in that single academic year? Over the years, there’s always questions raised in Parliament (or more recently here) and even internally within MOE about class sizes in Singapore. The answer has always been around considering resourcing for the students, more activities, more inputs, better quality, etc. And the conclusion, explicit or implied, is that we are progressing, improving and please don’t distract us from doing the good job we’re trying to do.

Maybe it’s time to stop giving non-answers? Maybe it’s time to say, look, our teachers are pretty burnt out, we’re making them responsible for too many things and parents are having higher and higher expectations on the schools without playing a stronger part in raising their kids themselves! So what if you send them for classes, or give them expensive toys that stimulates them, or expose them to different summer camps and experiences and so on. What are you teaching them? What are the values you seek to impart and how much time are you spending on that? How much of you; your attention, your capacity, your life are you giving your children? And how much are you outsourcing?

The most important human resource in the society that is responsible for moulding the future is not our teachers but our parents. In allowing the social narrative to load the responsibility on teachers, we are short-changing our children and our future generation. MOE should perhaps start education for parents, training them at parenting and stop shedding their responsibilities for their children to the system. Because that is the most important capability development that our society might need to help our next generation.

It’s 2007, Bear Sterns was suffering from the failure of their subprime funds and there were initial signs of warning on Lehman Brothers. My classmates and I at Hwa Chong were preparing for the A Levels. There was homework and mostly, a completed copy of mine was being passed around to be copied. “Please copy with understanding”, I reminded everyone.

There were two types of people in my class who were copying my homework. There were the ones who thought, “if I was doing the same things as everyone else, then if we are all wrong together, I’m ok”. There were, of course, those who actually copied with understanding, could catch my mistakes and then made their answers better. Some were kind enough to tell me and help me do better though others were more competitive and preferred to get ahead of me in grades.

Are you chasing deniability or chasing excellence? And when chasing excellence, do you think of it only in terms of outcome-based performance, or socio-moral performance?