Category Archives: Life

It’s the Christmas season and a period of lots of shopping, mostly for others rather than oneself. Gifting is a tricky affair and most economists think it’s a bad idea to give someone something in particular. In fact, that might be the reason for Boxing Day; where you box up the stuff you don’t want from your Christmas gifts and give them to the less privileged. Yes, it is not another day to shop, and certainly nothing to do with fighting in the boxing ring.

It is much better for you to offer a cash gift and let people do the shopping themselves for what they actually need. Yet this can feel hyper-rational so the modern economy settles for something in-between by giving shopping vouchers instead. It is cash already spent on something but allows you to go through the process of choosing what you want on yourself.

And then there’s a whole economy and market out there which simply caters to selling products which are specifically designed to be gifts. These typically feature fancier packaging and more frills designed to pass the message ‘I’m being extravagant with you’. They are also environmentally unfriendly and produces much more waste than we need to.

Peacock feathers may be necessary for the peacock to attract a mate; but being environmentally wasteful to impress our fellow earth-dwellers probably is not wise systematically. Let us not be fooled by the ways of our culture.

Companies have long recognised that hiring talented people off the job market is an important aspect in market competition since the labour market became much more open and knowledge workers became much more mobile. In the past when most employment were seen as lifelong, companies really only had to focus on competing on getting their products and services out.

Labour was previously seen as largely rather ‘fungible’; it was probably more important to get cheap workers than good workers because in the traditional labour economics, quality of labour wasn’t so much a quantifiable parameter.

No longer, but there are two ways to think about this competition. We can hire talents to make better products, perform better services for customers; and at the same time, it takes these talents off the market for our competitors and thereby strengthening our position. For those with monopoly power, the second objective might be more important than the first.

This is because the monopolies tend to have the power to pay for these talents through the market power they weld on both ends: both the labour market as well as the market for their customers. They are big enough to be able to squeeze the more commoditised labour while paying big bucks for their ‘talents’, and also pass on some of the costs to customers.

There is a price to pay however, for talents who are in these hoarding entities; (1) they may end up being unfulfilled or unsatisfied; (2) they tend to end up being disempowered rather than empowered in these environments; (3) they are conditioned to take less risks.

(2) and (3) contributes to (1) but the dissatisfaction can come from the bureaucracy and continued need to keep up with appearances rather than practice genuine innovation. (2) happens partly because monopolies are great businesses or entities that can survive poor management thanks to their power. Finally, (3) is a result of these environment that tends towards status quo and entrenched power structures.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the biggest monopoly out there is the state.

What do you care about is not always something your body, personality, character imposes on you. You can make a choice whether to care or not; and a lot of it depends on the goals and purpose you have selected in your life. For the longest time in human history, what people care about is true basic survival, and also survival of the tribe, the family.

When we talk about survival today, it is actually a different level, there’s more than just physical safety, and having a filled stomach; it is often also about psychological safety, dignity, and some degree of a filled ego. Likewise, we start to subconsciously (or consciously) care about a lot more things than we used to.

With so much to care about, there’s that tension to between being able to not care about non-core objectives, to be willing to be criticised for being single-minded – against trying to juggle and balance just about everything and potentially achieving none of your core objectives.

What are clothes for? To protect us from elements, to cover us, to make us look good, give us a certain sense of identity? Probably all of them? So what does appropriate mean here? From a perspective on weather and climate, or activity, or culture, or identity?

Dress codes are cultural innovations and we need to see how we are interacting with the culture whenever we dress in certain ways. The awareness of this allows us to gain some agency to decide, what we are really dressing for and which goal we want to pursue in our choice.

Of course, I’m really not really talking about dressing but the many other choices in life we make so subconsciously or without conscious thought that we take them for granted. We forget that we are playing by cultural rules, we even forget that we actually have a choice in terms of what purpose we can choose to serve.

Over 10 years ago, there was already a study published by the Boston Federal Reserve about wealth transfers created by credit card systems. It wasn’t about debt, or the psychology of spending card vs cash. It was simply about the fact that merchants do not pass on credit card fees only to those who pay by card but instead, makes everyone pays for it by not practising price discrimination on

Why do you think credit card companies want to pursue high income card-holders? Because they earn money from merchant fees! And the more you spend, the more they earn. And obviously when they are giving you a $300 cashback when you first spend $3000 on your first month, they would have already made back about $90 from merchant fees on your expenditure. Any sort of ‘cashback’ system below 3% merely incentivises you to spend more while allowing them to still reap fees on your spending.

There’s no problem with forcefully collecting money from the merchants and retailers, then rebating customers parts of that in order to encourage customers to use credit card payments. But the issue with merchants charging customers paying cash the same price, is that it disproportionately puts the burden of fee payments on cash-paying customers.

If we are debating all the time in democracies how taxes and various government wealth transfer programmes should be worked out, why do we not think through about the kind of wealth transfers that the financial system we “trust” is performing in the economy?

I’ve often taken stance against the mainstream education system that we’ve been cultivating our ability to optimise along certain parameters; and that the predictability of our system means that ultimately, the meritocratic system tend to entrench privilege. Let’s pause for a moment and not be too bothered with inequality, privilege and unequal access to opportunities.

Rather, I want to consider the fact that those people who have privilege and lots of cushion is life are not encouraged enough to take sufficient risks in their personal and financial lives in order to benefit the society.

Each year, our education system serves as the threshing floor to separate out the smart and orderly from the ones who are too disorderly, or dull ones. This is so that we can bring the brightest into civil service eventually and try to benefit our country. Yet within civil service, they are taught to be even more orderly, to try and keep most of their views that may be against the status quo private, to not contradict existing decisions in public. That is, to not take too much risks, to be basically driven by fear of being left out of the system that protects them, that gives them a career, and elevate them naturally in exchange for a few years of hard work.

Personally, I don’t see how this is good for a country that is at the frontier of development and going further, when we no longer have a roadmap to follow. This is a point where we need creativity and innovation; and that is simply too difficult when we don’t give our people the girth to fail, to recognise that creativity requires us to fail. Seth Godin even says creativity is a commitment to fail. So for all the grooming and privilege, I’d expect these privileged boys and girls to use their privilege to fail, to fall so that the country might rise through real, original innovation.

I’ve been reading Liz and Mollie’s No Hard Feelings and it’s been pretty easy and nice reading especially delving into different psychology of anxiety, stress and other emotions at work. Given the richness of our work life these days, we all have some kind of love-hate relationship with it. The key challenge really is the emotional management involved in work.

There’s often pent-up anger, resentment when there’s misalignment, when there’s the feeling that it is unprofessional to share negative stuff at work. And it is tiring to have to try appear positive, to always be subjugating one’s true emotions to the need to appear professional. The book encourages us to embrace it, to understand, process and use the emotions at work.

Because emotions, and genuine sharing can build trust. And at work, we need that trust and psychological safety to thrive. One of the key things they taught about dealing with our emotions is to recognise the relevant and the irrelevant emotions to the decisions we are making. And learn to draw upon our relevant emotions to make decisions. It means not doing just what we feel like doing but to question whether what we ‘feel like’, is relevant to the decision at hand.

Definitely worth more pondering.

We’ve reached a stage where we are producing goods of zero or negative marginal costs. Digital goods, those goods with huge amount of network effects. Why do the users, who are actually generating net overall social benefits from consuming still have to pay for these goods? Because they are controlled by a business, one that is for-profit and thinking about how to make more.

The need to make more profits for shareholders somehow means that we have to manufacture that scarcity, and to convince people to pay because now it is not about covering the cost of manufacturing, but simply, about extraction of value that a good or service brings. Manufacturing scarcity can also mean creating a perceive need and hence demand.

All kinds of advertising, puts some kind of pressure, some kind of stress on you. It induces anxiety by encouraging you to think that you’re not good enough, where you are is simply ‘not there yet’. It gives you a clear gulf and prods you to close that gap in order to move on in life. That ‘gap’ it draws your attention to, is the manufactured scarcity.

Sometimes, it just pays to think through what is real scarcity for us, and what was manufactured by someone else for us.

How would you like to spend your Sunday? Would you be working and preparing for the week ahead? Or would you unwind, stay disconnected for the rest of the weekend? What would be a waste of time?

Do you see rest or sleep as a waste of time? Or doing work during what should be rest or break time?

I think neither, you do what you got to do. But time is constantly wasted on social media, giving attention to things not worth a bit of it, doom-scrolling, revenge procrastination and so on. Again, paying for a taxi, or someone else to do things in order to save your time, and then squandering it on social media is not wise. So please stop it already.

I recall that when in Singapore, we introduce new politicians, they will tell you a story of how they have struggled from a humble background and then against the odds, rise up and do well in life to be in a position to contribute to the society as a politician, to serve the people. And they can tell you somehow they empathise with the people because of what they have gone through so they will be able to serve you better.

I wonder what kind of humility that really is. Because the story is about how despite what we think about the system, it is working. That if the system can uncover and reward someone like me, and allow me to carve a path to where I am, then there isn’t really all that much to fix, that if you too had my tenacity, my capabilities, you’ll rise up to be in my place one day. So what I’ll do is to try and maintain the status quo, so that people like me, can continue to succeed in the society.

I think sometimes humility is acknowledging the privilege that they actually had to be in the place where they are. And to say that they want to be able to use the privilege to help those who did not have that fortune, who did not have the opportunity. The story can be different – and when we are not trying to justify ourselves for where we are, but acknowledging it is perhaps by God’s grace that we find ourselves in the place we are, then we can connect with one another as humans. As fellow sojourners walking along the path of life. That we are not saviours of one another, because we are incapable by ourselves – rather, it is the privilege given to us by the sheer grace of God, that we can use to lift others up.