Kevin Low

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.

When we don’t want to be caught up with the outcome, we sometimes stop ‘caring’; but there’s the ‘I don’t care’ which translates to sloppy work because of fear that efforts would be in vain, and there’s the kind of ‘I don’t care’ that is about trusting in the process more than the recognition of others, more in bettering oneself than bettering how one appears.

When we say we don’t care about the outcome, it might mean following a process that we know surely leads to an outcome we don’t want and because we don’t care, it doesn’t matter. But it can also be because we don’t care about the outcome, that we are not too caught up in it such that we end up undermining ourselves in the process of getting there.

Yet it’s not that hard to tell it apart. It’s more of our brains pulling a trick on us and making us pretend to be confused in order to escape the mental responsibility, to wriggle out of actually putting in the effort, facing our fears and biting the bullet. Think about which ‘not caring’ are you devoting yourself to.

When you’re working out in the gym, you’re not strengthening or growing your muscles, you’re breaking things in them. When you’re reading a book or learning in a classroom, you’re conceptualising connections, not yet formalising these connections.

It is when you sleep that your muscles are repairing, building up; and when you’re asleep that your mind is consolidating the things you’ve learnt. Work gets done when you are resting and rested. Sleep is not for the weak or losers, it is for the wise.

Singaporeans are not getting enough sleep whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Even when we don’t have that negative a perception of sleep, we find it really difficult to combat all the other competitors of sleep especially the screens that we keep staring into. It’s time to allow sleep to reclaim a bit more of our lives. It is not wasted on sleep, but it’s wasted for lack of sleep.

I was looking at the various jobs fair and booths that are set up around the different satellite towns and shopping malls of Singapore. These centres have replaced the traditional community centres where such government initiatives traditionally are ran in.

There’s the prominent ‘skills future’ logo. It is the name of a government agency in Singapore. And of course it also is the name of a scheme where the government basically funds Singaporeans to undergo skills training. One of the biggest thing that the agency does is to look at mapping skills required by the industries and then try to bring people up to standard or bridge skills gap in order to ensure there’s sufficient supply of labour into newer industries. The idea is to transit and transform our labour supply while meeting the demands of the new economy. It all sound pretty compelling.

But I wonder if skills are the real gap. Because the underlying premise here is ‘if only people have access to the skills’ – the government ended up supporting a whole training industry to blossom out of nowhere. Suddenly, there are plenty of people claiming to be experts in one area or another training people en masse in Python, Qliksense, etc. A quick review of YouTube will show that there’re tonnes of free video tutorials for all of these ‘skills’. The guidance on the computers softwares that these courses offer will allow the non-savvy participants to exactly perform the tasks required but not exactly learn those skills.

What is needed is to bridge the attitude gap; the campaigns should be targeting to change the attitude of people towards training and learning. Supporting people in terms of providing allowances during training is a good incentive. Allowing people to offset their training cost is not as good. You want people to take ownership of the learning rather than feel like they have a voucher bundle they need to use up.

Besides, getting a job is really more about attitude than skills. Ask any employer and you’ll know you hire for skills but that’s usually the easy part – finding the right attitude is often more important.