Aligning Incentives

How much should we price convenience? We should probably price it based on the damage it makes. If you’re picking up something on your way and that saves time for someone else, it does cost you that tad bit of time so it makes sense for that someone else to compensate you up to the cost you’re bearing.

These transactions can result in efficiency in the system. But the cost have to be identified easily. When we place the onus of providing a plastic carrier on the seller of wares/goods, we are getting them to price convenience to the buyer. Unfortunately it is usually mispriced because the material, production are not all the cost that goes into the lifecycle of the plastic bag.

So even though the individual marginal costs holding all else constant are rising slowly, the joint social marginal costs rises really quickly. As usual, when costs are dispersed and benefits are concentrated (just like tariffs on sugar in US), you have an issue. We cannot ignore the importance of aligning incentives here and if the government wants to pander to the market and take the microscopic view, we’re all doomed to fail.

Being helpful

Say your colleague approaches you for help and you offered some directions which he or she has tried. The colleague retorts “Hello, I’m not stupid”. How would you respond?

Not that it happened in my workplace but I brought up this question because I’m thinking about the spirit that drives us to be helpful. Whether it is about being able to solve a problem, provide the psychological comfort (“you’re not alone”) or just to be liked. Almost definitely a combination of all but the litmus test is probably whether you’ll help the colleague again in the above situation – if you’ve proven to be useless and unappreciated on all fronts.

On the other hand, when you ask for help, what are you expecting from the person you ask? Are you hoping for identification, for problem-solving or relationship-building?

Humans are such fascinating creatures.

Shiok

The Danes have “hygge”, the Finnish have “sisu”, the Japanese have “ikigai”, deep concepts that tend not to have linguistic equivalence in other languages, conveying something profound. I was wondering if there was any Singlish equivalent and the closest I came to one that had that kind of positive connotation is “shiok”.

Which makes me wonder about the quality of our culture and what truly we want to identify more with, and to celebrate. Of course, at the bicentennial experience in 2019 we explored traits of self-determination, multi-culturalism and open-ness; the self-determination part still won out eventually at the poll.

The thing about self-determination is there is very little as a collective that we can really latch on to celebrate as a cultural identity. Likewise, shiok seemed to be about common experiences of pleasure but can still be highly subjective (“shiok meh?”). Within the notion of self-determination, there can also be elements of resilience in face of adversity, and some quiet strength. Yet these things don’t feature much in Singlish.

If we continue to just think about “kiasu” and “kiasee” as Singaporean traits, tell ourselves stories about fear, losing, anxiety and death, we are just perpetuating a very negative narrative that no doubt drives us in the direction of a mental health crisis. We need a positive Singlish term embedded in our culture to identify with.

Curing meats

I left about 1 kg of marinated chicken breast in the fridge for almost a week – having forgotten about it. It was closed in an air-tight container and I thought I’d try roasting it anyways. It turned out to be pretty good! In fact better and crispier than what I’ve previously done.

It was time and the ingredients which helped to draw moisture out of the chicken to the right level such that the roasting brought out a better texture and flavour. And it dawned on me how many things in life do take time and a combination of things to get better. In the modern world where everything seems rushed for time, I’d seek out these things that takes time and become exponentially better because things that compound non-linearly are usually undervalued.

Which is probably why marinated meats while often having been kept longer, actually fetch a higher price. Well actually there’s more to it than that but I’m just pointing out an arbitrage opportunity that our modern lives seem to produce.

Public or Private Sector

I once had a lunch at a friend’s place and her Dad simultaneously praised public service jobs for being good, stable places to be (he tries to get her daughters to join) while being critical about the work of public servants (“what do they do?”). I cannot be sure when he was being serious but one thing for sure, our views of public sector work is muddled and often confused.

Likewise I have someone in my family who used to think private sector is bad. Because it’s all about the bottom line and profits. I often say, well, you could also see that public service is often about meeting KPIs, which isn’t that different even if those KPIs are to drive some underlying good for the public. The chase for numbers and quantifiables is evident and taken as a natural product of “scientific management”.

Having been in both I think it is important to see that a large bureacratic private organisation can be not so different from a ministry while a newly set up statutory board can be not so different from a start-up. Often the skillsets valued would not be too different even when they place different weights on the specifics.

So it boils down to what you want to grow in. Public sector work will be more big picture from day 1 while private sector may involve greater dive into details and big picture work only later in your career. These generalisations are not super helpful and as I already made it clear, there’s a need to look at a specific job role and organisation in order to make the decision. Public or private itself is more of a label that tells very little to someone who has not any experience of either.

Feedback & Criticism

Being candid without reproaching people is a skill – it is subtle but somewhere along our upbringing we come to associate people with their actions and/routines as much as we allow those things to be part of our identities.

Habits can be changed, personalities can be transformed. It’s not just about believing in yourself but appreciating how the environment you allow yourself to be in, the things you read or watch, the people you interact with have an impact on you. That means when someone criticise your work or actions you can simultaneously take responsibility (knowing you can change and improve), whilst also not letting it assault your identity (seeing that your work is not actually a direct reflection of your whole self).

I think the something along our upbringing is when we try to nudge our children, peers or friends to change by giving the warning about their identity (rather than a perception of it). For example, we say to children don’t be a smoker rather than don’t take up smoking. We say people are geniuses rather than saying they have a genius (which by the way, is the original way of expressing the concept).

Seen in that light, our inability to give honest negative feedback without feeling/acting like we’re assaulting someone is the same thing as when we receive those sort of feedback. We think we’re assaulting because we feel assaulted. We think it’s being judgmental because we feel judged. Being able to do these well are not “soft skills” – they are life skills.

Perfectionism the enemy

Bought something from Shopee which arrived after I needed it so I gave it a 4-star review but was hustled by the seller to change it to 5-star on account there was nothing wrong with the product. Left a Carousell review for a very kind and nice seller but on the punctuality point I put 4-star (good, rather than very good), which resulted in him getting only 4.7 stars from me. He deleted his “Thank you” message which he left after I said I reviewed (it was requested by him).

I have nothing against star ratings for review systems and I’ve personally benefitted from kind reviews by previous buyers. But I think the system is broken because it pushes people to desire perfect scores which is not practical nor useful at the system level. Engaging in this mutual pleasing defeats the whole reviews system just like how people in most US restaurants expect a tip and it is no longer tied to service quality.

Of course, the platform gains in short run by attracting more sellers on it but in long run if the review system is broken or perceived as just a pack of lies, they lose their value.

His Story

The world have been in chaos for a couple of decades now. It started barely 20 years after the end of World War I. It wasn’t just physical war but there was the Great Depression before that, the runaway inflation in some parts of the world, and the seeds of communism growing. And then even when WWII ended, we had a series of proxy wars during the Cold War period.

But nevertheless, problems starting being solved, people who were fatigued from the world wars, the tragic deaths realised it was important to unite in the right ways. The blueprint for a new world order became laid down in the centers of gravity of the world.

It was hard work but nevertheless, it was about getting on the right trajectory, the right bandwagon, and we’ll see double digits growth in things. Maintaining peace and stability gives rise to natural growth as investment in the longer term rose. Interest rates started falling without as much consequence on inflation, private investment into longer term assets soared, helped by the socialisation of longer term government borrowings, helped by imaginary sense of control investors have through the establishment of sovereign risk rating systems.

Incentives everywhere were getting more aligned towards pumping up GDP numbers, increasing political rhetoric about competition, and investing into the right places. The military-industrial complex took hold because it made sense to industrialise everything and create more wealth; though they were mostly distributed to the industrialists.

These are the conditions of the world that gave the world the Great Moderation, unprecedented growth and lifting of people our of poverty. It has also given us a growing climate change problem, a global economy that was resilient in some ways but more fragile in others.

We all have a choice whether to perpetuate these. Whether to make history, your story.

Social Narratives

I was reading this interesting take on the woke meritocracy by Blake Smith. The similarities to Singapore is uncanny not least because we have similarly competitive systems that have evolved to take into consideration academic grades and a myraid of criteria for university admissions.

What is more similar, despite cultural differences in our preferred kind of leadership, is the narratives expected of our elites and accordingly engineered into the social consciousness. The point has become to narrate one’s background in such a way as to simultaneously acknowledge the existence of inequality but to subtly suggests the system of meritocracy is still being able to pull up able members of those seemingly disenfranchised groups.

The contemporary ideal, increasingly, is no longer someone so charmingly personable that others forget he is in fact a ruthless competitor, but a person who so convincingly narrates her having overcome some kind of social injustice that others forget she is in fact a beneficiary of systems of privilege.

Blake Smith

These stories are no doubt powerful and casting skepticism do not help with building up the social fabric. But what I want to point to is the fact that we ought to have a more objective view of the meritocratic system and be more aggressive in combating the downside of the system.

One of the key assumption of the system is that merit as defined by the prevailing narrative and system is independent of your access to resources and opportunities. That is just patently untrue. If the inequalities are actually perpetuating structural inferiority amongst the disenfranchised, then how are we dealing with that?

Why me?

A humble unasuming man who has done good work for a community where he has been voted to lead the committee for the neighbourhood. He asks God, ‘Why me?’ And takes on the responsibility in trusting in God to lead and guide Him. There is still the ‘Here I am’ moment when he takes up the responsibility but his confidence is not in himself but in God.

His brother had been a fit young man, always exercised and practised healthy habits. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and it was not discovered until late stage. He asks God, ‘Why me?’ And accepts the diagnosis, trusting in God’s plan for him. There will be the struggles, the “what did I do to deserve this?”, but also the acknowledgement: “the days of man are numbered by You Lord”.

Genuine faith is not about being triumphant in your own circumstances but in the victory that God has won on the cross. And each win or lost in the life we live on this earth are but tests – all of them seeks a faithful response. We will not always pass them; but I want to show here that the Christian faith is not one-sided, all positive but much broader and encompassing so much more.