Industrialisation & labour

When a country industrialises, it pulls workers from the farms and agricultural sector to a city or industrial core and draws upon some of the various economies to eventually drive some degree of prosperity. Such as the economies of scale, economies of agglomeration, and efficiencies coming from technical advancements whose costs are maintained by concentrating a lot of labour in a small space – a factory with a single line shaft for example.

The benefits of industrialisation and the surpluses of products do not naturally go towards the workers. As long as there’s influx of workers from the rural areas, wages are held down. And living conditions in cities were really bad. The means by which the masses gained affluence was usually not by the benevolence of the capitalist but the fact that government, industry associations and other influences pushed up labour standards and the bargaining power of labour. Public investments in infrastructure, education, healthcare helped to improve quality and sustainability of labour.

Jobs are ways to increase production; but they are also a means of distribution in the economy. Unfortunately, they are not always distributing the spoils of the economy in a sustainable way that helps us thrive. Because there will be a time when industrialisation and economies drive out labour in favour of capital. Imagine when goods can be produced purely by capital. Then employment no longer is a relevant metric; rather, ownership of capital determines ability to consume. Labour cease being a valuable factor of production.

More significantly, market economics tend not to provide a good way to distribute income (and by extension, wealth), even if it allocates limited or scarce resources well given most (but not all) context. Public economics helps to plug the gap; but we need more and better brains there to work out all the learnings we need outside a market-based dogma built over the decades of market triumphalism. The point of industrialisation we are at calls for a different paradigm towards jobs, production, consumption and distribution.

Good Schools III

Is every field a good field? Is every job a good job? I think we have to admit that the notion of goodness in schools has to do a lot with this society’s worship of grades by parents and this naturally transmit to the younger ones.

Giving up on suggesting every school is good might be a step in the right direction to acknowledge that the problem lies with a society whose values need some updating. Yes the “elite” schools have Oxbridge interview guidance but is that what every student needs?

What we need is to tear down the hierarchy where academics represents a hygiene factor on which other attributes such as sporting or music excellence can only serve as bonuses. And it is not just an issue of the system. The system changes the government implemented shows a good commitment to the desire to change our culture.

So maybe the next step is to clamp down on the private education sector like the way China did?

PSLE Woes

It is PSLE season during the pandemic year again – and the kind of response just shows that we once again failed to change the culture. MOE tried to change the stakes with the new system, but they need to target the culture that needs changing; the culture around what it means to win, and what it means to be ‘good’.

What is good for a kid has become whatever gets the kid good grades rather than what gives the kid a good challenge and enables them to deal with adversity. This is why we have people crying over spilled milk even when they are in their 40s. A better approach to parenting would be to encourage the child and say, you’ve tried your best and I’m proud of you braving through this. In the first place, the crying of the kid and the pressure she felt is a reflection of the kind of expectations she sense from the parent. And having the parent exhibit this sort of ’empathy’ by crying alongside reinforces to the child that throwing a tantrum at undesired outcomes is the right thing to do.

That was a missed opportunity to teach a kid how to bounce back, how to be brave, and to encourage rather than to assign fault (to someone else). I really liked the recommendations and thoughts from the counsellors towards the end of the article. Whatever pain a child feels from a difficult exam, is not an affliction from the school or MOE, but from the parents and the expectations that is placed upon the child. It is only right for SEAB not to comment. They don’t have to answer to anyone for the level of difficult of an examination.

Labour and value-creation

Karl Marx once argued that all value comes from human labour and that capital owners should not be allowed to profit from their ownership of capital. Perhaps that was a time when labour is often needed to operate capital, to work the land in order for capital to be ‘productive’. To that extent, it is probably right that labour always had a disadvantage in bargaining against capital because capital is often more concentrated in the hands of certain owners. Or that the dictates of capital can easily be reassigned and concentrated to maximise bargaining power.

This is much harder with labour, and that’s why there were periods in history where labour unions were important. And there are still many societies today, especially in Europe that ensures significant participation of unions in industrial decisions and even policy-making.

The truth is, we’ve been using human labour as a way to distribute economic gains to the broader masses. And it has worked as far as the economy transits towards being more and more knowledge-based as equipment got better and capital starts being able to produce goods and services without as much labour inputs. Yet we might be moving to a point where there’s insufficient jobs for everyone, including knowledge-based ones, as capital come to be able to produce goods and services for our economies independently without labour. And yes, I’m thinking about more automation, more data-driven operations that only require periodic human interventions, and so on.

We must start considering how to distribute capital and wealth better; and to allow the strata of the society commonly contributing to ‘labour’ side of the economic equation to start owning capital and learning how to use the capital to generate the returns sufficient for them to continue surviving without utilising their labour as much. Or that labour can be channeled towards greater social needs such as caring for the old and young; some of these which may have to be funded more and more on the taxes on capital and wealth.

What you do vs who you are

What do you choose when you have aspirations? What you do, or who you are? When I was 9, I wanted to be a librarian. But it was because librarians get to be at the counter to see who borrows what books, and to put the date due stamp on the books. They get to change the date due slips on the books when they are full, and they work in a quiet environment.

I was thinking about what I want to doing rather than who want to be. Because what being a librarian is about organising information, about helping people to access to knowledge they want. It is also about safeguarding the ability for libraries to do so, by making sure people return the resources they borrowed on time so that others have access to it too. It is also about increasing public education and awareness of things that matter: culture, heritage, arts, science, and lots of common sense. The 9 year old me made no such connections nor cared that much about all that.

When we are younger, our parents explained professions and jobs in terms of what they ‘do’; very practical elements. A police catches thieves, the lawyer fights court cases, a doctor sees and diagnose, then treat patients. But in order for us to appreciate the greater purpose of these professions, to be able to aspire ‘to be’ rather than to aspire ‘to do’, we will have to develop greater appreciation of what these people are ‘being’ when they take on the roles. It will involve understanding what policing does to public security and now, to the cyber space. How the legal profession creates avenues to address justice on all sides, and means to ensure laws are applied properly. Or that doctors not just make people better but play a role in public health, confidence-building and psychological comfort to those who are unwell.

As we learn to train ourselves to develop visions for our role and professions, we become better professionals, and work with greater motivations.

Electricity Costs

I buy electricity on the open market in Singapore. So when the bill came for the month of August, it looked pretty crazy. I have never seen my averaged cost of electricity actually exceeding the retail package pricing.

Of course I’ve allowed myself to be subject to the volatility but I wonder how often people really bother to understand or check their cost of electricity. For most part they might be using the overall cost as a proxy for consumption since they usually assume the electricity tariffs to be fixed. Well, that’s if you’re on a retail package. And even then it is fixed only for a certain time period.

I begin to wonder if there were any events and outages in the power system in August that resulted in some of those crazy rates. And with gas shortages in the world, things might be changing in the market quite a bit. People were even warned of the rising prices on the papers.

And this makes understanding the energy transition even more crucial for ordinary people like you and I. Getting a clearer view of the options for energy security for Singapore, greater transparency of the plans by the government, how far the market will be playing a role in determining the energy mix vis-a-vis policies to ensure a low carbon energy future.

Besides how much our electricity cost us, we should be also wondering how much it is costing our future and the earth.

Estimating Growth

I wrote about how we tend to overestimate mental strength and underestimate physical strength. The story is a bit similar with growth; we tend to overestimate our ability to grow and change in the short run. We would think that we can achieve some crazy target or try to force ourselves to get from Grade E to grade B in a few months. They are probably not impossible, but it will take a lot of effort and even if we plan well, things might not work out so well.

On the other hand, if we allow those short term lack of performance to cause us to be disappointed and discouraged from trying on and on, then it would be a pity. Because we tend to severely underestimate the potential for change and growth in the longer term. Even if things don’t seem to go as planned in short term, interestingly, once a direction is well-set, the longer term situation tends to be more optimistic even though more time tends to cause people to think more things can go wrong.

But more good things can happen because of that too. We severely undervalue and underestimate what we can accomplish over longer period of times and tend to think whatever happened in the short term will simply stay the same. If you’re unhappy enough about your situation, you’d tend to change it.

Bored-outs

Dr Wu who wrote about the resignation tsunami anticipated for Singapore, recently introduced us to the idea of bored-out (as opposed to burn-out); apparently it is not a new idea though. What I found hard to reconcile with was the idea of sinecure which involves a position that is actually paid but ‘without work’. Maybe the harsh psychological impact is really in the sense that you’re expected to ‘work’ but then there isn’t work. And there’s that added psychological impact of being paid, expected to produce something and yet allowed none.

Even if your deeper purpose isn’t aligned well with a job, it is important that we see what the role that we have is serving. Even if it’s cleaning a space, we ought to be conscious how we are improving the health and environment of those in that space. Of course, being able to interact with the beneficiary of the work helps. But often we don’t get the chance for the direct feedback.

I think there is truly some severe psychological harm in depriving people of making that connection, creating meaning and purpose from the work. But the truth is baring the extreme case of the Frenchman cited as a case, it is difficult that a company would be so extreme in treating an employee. It is important for the company to help employees appreciate the vital nature of their jobs as well and how it falls in place in the grand scheme of things. Rather than to make them feel like they are amongst just a bunch of replaceable cogs moving a heartless system. Fear is a great short-term motivator of work, but also a great motivator for people to leave.

Real Estate

Everyone needs a house; and places to do different things. And real estate is about really creating and providing spaces for people, for activities in an urban setting mostly. The thing is, for most part, there is a lot of matching activities going on. Because people don’t tear down houses when they move, they just sell it to someone else.

It is one of those things that are kind of completely unique (no two locations or houses are the same) so as long as people have strong emotional attachment to specific locations or sense of place, it is difficult for it to be commoditised. Hence the transaction costs involved are really high; and they are often tied to the underlying prices of the assets when they change hands

Another phenomena is that the prices of these assets will change based on the ability-to-pay of the ones buying them. This means that as the overall ability to pay of the economy rises, the prices rise. The value increases without the actual activity of building, searching, selling, incurring that much more costs. How can a society capture and share this value better without all becoming property agents? Henry George’s ideas and perception of land as a property is worth revisiting.

Strength

What is strength? More often than not, in the world of showiness and social media curation, strength shines forth in being more human, revealing your imperfections and failings, more than appearing strong. After all, what does appearing strong really mean?

Through my coaching I discover that we all tend to underestimate what we are physically capable of; which is why we are often so awed by athletes hitting benchmarks, breaking records, and just being ‘super human’. We celebrate all of these, and we then not to see or focus so much on the crazy amount of hard work, focus on techniques, and iteration between monitoring performance, brainstorming how to approach improvement, and then actually achieving those improvements.

But we also overestimate our mental strength; and we often think we are capable of handling stress that we aren’t able to. We overpromise our bosses on the work we can accomplish (especially in terms of deadlines) and fail to juggle everything eventually. We do not expect that the mental capacity it takes to juggle many things competes with the ability to actually execute and do them well.

Rebalancing this would be important.