Kevin Low

I talked about the strong, aspirational goals around climate change mitigation and adaptation. For some reason, because the boomers had really wild dreams and set their resources, and efforts to it then achieved just a small fraction of their dreams, we got scared of setting goals. Just because the boomers helped drive such a period of strong growth, stability and advancement, we are worried we can’t live up to our goals. We forgot they didn’t quite live up to theirs.

We sometimes achieved different things. “Back to the future” expected hover-boards but we got instagram instead. It doesn’t mean we have to be worried about setting wild aspirational goals.

At the same time, the boomers have taught us to keep thinking about making lives better. Living longer, being richer, enjoying more materials. But we forgot that giving people more time is good, and getting good natural environment is good – not just for the people but for earth as well. We can aspire towards nature, conservation and heritage – not just more gadgets and fancy stuff. So our goals about the climate can be bold even if it doesn’t improve lives the way we think about it traditionally.

Better environmental stewardship can lead to cleaner conscience, healthier bodies and better mental health. Our focus on economic growth, money and finance, the macroeconomic indicators of inflation and employment are all distractions compared to the issues around future of mankind. Yes we need to manage short term survival but not at the expense of mankind in the longer term.

So we need to learn to be bold with our goals, to take them seriously enough that they drive us nuts when we fail them. And we need to come together around them – regardless of whether we agree how bad things are in the current state. We need to establish that farther-ahead, clearer vision of where we all want to be as a planet.

I consider myself to have spent all my career since I left school (and academia) in the energy industry. It just happens to be the industry that is essentially in the nexus of climate and economics. Which is just as well because I’m trained in economics and have such a keen interest and passion in the subject. Even when it is just a simple mental model that orients us to look into incentives as drivers of behaviours and human decisions, it powerfully describes what happens from scarce number of variables.

The way man’s use of energy have developed throughout history has more or less been the same. It has always been driven by economics, by the productivity gains we have in terms of bringing up the standards of our living, and that in turn grants greater ability to harness more energy and the ratchet turns. Climate turns out to be somehow a victim of this ratchet. It was some kind of collateral damage that appeared small at first and then snowball, and soon it becomes life-threatening. Not to any particular life, but threatening life as we know it. We can no longer ignore it as we face more volatile climate; with one of the hottest summers in Europe just this year, and increasing frequency of supposedly rare flooding events.

As it also turns out, the way we have built our communities, infrastructure, cities are not exactly the most resilient towards climate changes, or natural disasters for that matter. So there are many overlapping problems across energy, economics and climate.

First, we need to be really clear on our strong, aspirational goals around climate change mitigation and adaptation. Next, we need to get the energy technologies, and energy security issues sorted out. Making sure there is good alignment with these goals. Then, we need to make sure we are behind them pushing for the economics to eventually work – just as the non-market forces helped drive space technology and the development of the internet.

Hope to address these in turn for the coming days.

Is this the life you want?

Recently there were more attention put on the demand-side of the picture when it comes to the modern Singaporean lifestyle. Woke Salaryman had a post about being average (more about the real average rather than your imagined one); and CNA had an article around the resurgence of the FIRE movement. Whether it is a movement or not, and the direction that people choose, there had been a long-time recognition that the kind of fire and hunger that Singaporeans used to have in earlier days of nation building is no longer the same. There is more questioning of what exactly are we pushing ourselves for.

Of course there has to still be the political narrative, being a community, united and being aware of the threats. But we cannot always be building ourselves up and trying to get better on metrics we don’t care about. We need to know what we are all trying to build ourselves towards. There was a period about getting better lives. Now that we all managed to realise that, what is the next step?

The government is keen on understanding what we want as a people as much as to shape that together with us. Forward Singapore is an interesting concept to take part in – how, I’m still not too sure but I have to hold on to the belief that we can all still take these things seriously, tap into the listening ear of the government.

I believe they will harness our passions, talents and the resources to drive ourselves towards it. There’s also this need for more consciousness about what we are striving for, what we need to give up in the process and who is giving up what – ie. the social contract. The speech and cogent explanations about the social contract in Lawrence Wong’s speech at the launch of the initiative is good. I really appreciate the contrasting views he raised on some principles and values we had previously left unquestioned – competition, meritocracy, and emphasis on self-reliance.

Ultimately, we need to consider, what is the Singapore we want. Because we know that if we are not building a Singapore that Singaporeans want; then sooner or later, there won’t be a Singapore for anyone.

We caught the movie Lightyear which was supposedly the favourite movie of Andy (the kid from Toy Story) and where the character Buzz Lightyear came from, which of course resulted in the toy figurine which he got. While it did turn out to be a flop for the strength of the Disney-Pixar brand name as well as the Toy Story franchise, I felt that there was a pretty important and relevant message that the story had.

The struggle I believe was the slow pace of it, the fact that the message wasn’t really properly emphasized repeatedly, and the problem of introducing controversial distractions (such as things like representation, etc.) Anyways, the message that I thought was important is that our mistakes can be the fertile soil for many good things and we should not subject ourselves to trying to correct or redeem mistakes without observing the true nature of the impact our mistakes had.

We’ve been conditioned to think of mistakes as a problem rather than a way to learn what would be right. And there’s also the idea of redeeming one’s mistakes – trying to make things right. These are all probably well-intention-ed but an unqualified belief in those principles would be disastrous and in the movie, the Buzz who became ‘Zurg’ was exactly one who acted in that manner. Clearly, we pick that up and it appeals to us because we are so focused on ourselves. We are able to try convince others to look past their mistakes but we are unable to do so ourselves when we are the ones making that mistake.

I’ve written substantially about what our culture tells us about mistakes and how we should be taught about them. Because mistakes are telling us something valuable about the world and ourselves, but if all we want to do is rush to make things right – sometimes we truly miss the takeaway.

A recruiter (from one of those search firms) approached me in connection to the position from a prominent company in Singapore (without disclosing who it was). I did a google search on the details of the job description and I found a job posting for that company. The title in the position was lower but the description is the same overall. I’m not too sure what this meant but a friend of mine thought it’d be interesting if I had gone ahead, apply for the job position and tried to negotiate a sign-on bonus given that I helped to save the company some fees from the recruiter.

I’ve written about the business of recruitment before and honestly, I wonder what is the value they bring. Maybe yes, they did create some value in alerting me to the position; but both the prospective employer and employee could just strike a separate bargain without them. Perhaps it makes sense for us to pay the recruiter a certain fee to be in the picture to help us negotiate a better deal with the prospective employer? Or maybe the search firm can guarantee to the company they will search for someone to take on the role again if the current person leaves within certain amount of time, and taking less or no fees off the next candidate who is suitable.

Still, I truly wonder what are the real skills that makes a recruiter his or her living. Maybe it is a niche that can be cultivated. After all, a property agent gets to know a location and the amenities better; they also focus on thinking about different demographics and their needs to serve the people better. And then there are the financial planners or insurance agents; they may go beyond the conflict of interest and think about the life stages of potential clients and what exactly are good products to offer. Recruitment companies needs to cultivate their network of people in the particular field. The difficulty is that people are starting to hop around a lot more and move around in different niches; and at the same time, the needs of the firms are transforming even if they remain in the same ‘industry’ so to speak.

Recruitment as a business is going to get tougher. And corporate customers of these search firms need to know that their bargaining position are getting better.

There has been a lot of activities in the sustainability space. Not just projects, opportunities for various different companies but individual professionals have been presented lots of job opportunities in Singapore and Hong Kong. The situation is a bit of a musical chairs because everyone are looking for experienced individuals but there are only so few of them so then it becomes a competition on salaries.

Companies need to think about the individuals as people and not just human resources; they need to think about what it means for them to progress in careers or how they have progressed. In a bid to hire, they may end up causing trouble for these individuals as they place higher expectations on them even when they don’t really have the actual fit needed (mostly because who they might be looking for do not exist in the market).

Then there are companies who are basically hiring ‘cheaper’ juniors and then using contractors to help train these juniors to hopefully get to a level of competence that will serve them well. Most of these juniors will actually leave in search of other opportunities; others might stay to continue building up the practice.

Ultimately, the question to ask both the individuals and the companies is whether they have levelled up in the process. Because it doesn’t really matter the salary you’re offered or how many clients you manage to take on assignments for. The longer term metric that keeps those good things going, is knowing who you’re serving, what you’re serving them for, and actually being able to serve it.

So there was a recent announcement about how the ministry of education in Singapore is raising Teacher’s pay by up to 10%. Across the board. Well not exactly a proper across-the-board raising because they are going to raise at varying percentages – perhaps based on level of seniority. Then there were genuine voices of concern about work-life balance. I’ve so many friends and family who are teachers and they echo the same thing. The fact that the work load issue is not arising for the first time already reflects that it has not been solved.

So many times, when people are talking about increasing Teacher-student ratio in the classroom, our leadership would talk about how there had been academic studies that teacher-student ratio does not improve academic performance reliably or that it correlates poorly. Yet that should not be the only metric we care about. We don’t want burnt out teachers; it is a caring profession and people need to have that emotional time and space to take care of themselves before they can care for others.

Now if teaching is so challenging, why do we still have so many teachers? It’s because there are so many people in our society and world who are not just interested to make a living; they want to make a difference. And they want to be able to know their work matters. In Singapore, while the system is not perfect as a social leveller, the education system is in many ways the main channel for people to move up the social ladder. Teachers are uniquely empowered to take on this role and give encouragement that really matters.

So policymakers have to know this and be clear in their minds about what the teachers really are there for. Because the more red tape, the more silly structures that prevent teachers from making a genuine difference with their work, the more discouraging it is. The pay raise will help to a certain extent. Giving more time, especially making sure protected leave period during holidays are genuinely protected; and making sure teachers are not over-working. And finally, putting less obstacles in their way of making a difference in the lives of students. Maximise time with students, minimise time with papers, marking, invigilation, reporting or administrative stuff. You’ll probably see the system being less organised from a top-down perspective – but you might see a better outcome.

Where do creative ideas come from?

I could have titled this post with that question. Or I could talk about writing product reviews. In fact, most of my writings are commentary on things; and that’s what product reviews are essentially about. So product reviews or the way I approach it, is exactly the same sort of approach I take towards most of my creative writing or even storytelling.

It starts with observation and close observation. That sometimes get mixed up with ‘thinking’; because we do try to ‘think’ and recall things about our experience with a product, or anything, in order to come up with our views about it. But the truth is that when we interact with a product, that itself already underlies the experience. And we have to be observing it to begin to have an awareness of that interaction.

Take for example, toilet paper that we use daily. What can you say about it? What have you observed?

How often do you think about how many ply it is. Or the texture: is it soft, moist, too dry, powdery? Then the perforation along each section: is it well perforated? Does it tear well or easily? I hate it when the edges don’t tear well and you’ve got this long tiny strip at the end that doesn’t go off. Some of the paper are so poorly perforated, it doesn’t tear well and you end up having shredded pieces at the end.

And then, does the different ply within a sheet stick well together? I hate it when I lift off only one or two ply on top and there’s some left which goes back into the reel when you pull and that creates such a ridiculous conundrum where the different ply sticks to the wrong side or drops off as you tear it. Absolute disaster.

Finally, the core; what is the color of the cardboard; does it smell stinky? Does it feel thick? What can you use with it? How would you recycle it?

If you were to simply engage the world a little more, even with the simplest and most mundane things in life; it can be so infinitely more interesting. And it all starts with observation.

When you discover you’re bad at something, what do you do?

Would you stop and give up? Or find out what exactly makes one good? Or even better: find out how you are bad at it? Then what? What will you do with those truths you discover? Does it just take practice? How conscious must you be in doing the right things? How much are you willing to change your gait, your approach, your habits, and mindset to get it right? Will you hire a coach? Or will you find someone good and ask them ‘coach me’?

Which attribute is making you bad at it?

Is it the time it takes for you to do something? What about the thought patterns and thinking that goes through your mind to figure out what you have to do? Is that the part which is cloudy and hard to make clear? What is a map that can help you? Have you gone out and try and identify a framework or structure for thinking? Who do you normally approach when you encounter such challenges?

If you can work on all these, you’d be able to learn anything and do everything – up to a reasonable extent. But are you willing to do it?