e pur si muove

I will be giving a talk at the upcoming APS meeting in Denver. Also taking a few days to enjoy the great Colorado outdoors with l’oiseau rebelle and company.

Moral of this week’s Youtube Monday: If you can rap in English while looking like the steretypically Asian cool wannabe (what’s with the large, dark sunglasses?!), and dance jerkily, you too can be a Certified Public Accountant in Hong Kong.

The Ministry of Manpower has released a press release [pdf] entitled “A Statistical Profile of Older Workers: Participation and employment of our older males compare favourably with other countries”. If you scroll down to page 9, the actual paper begins.

It’s a very interesting paper, considering that it is not only demographic analysis of older workers in the Singapore workforce, it also does a comparative study of how such statistics stack up with other economies. I don’t have time to consider the latter, so I will be concentrating on just the former. And with that prelude, let’s jump right in with one of the big punchlines:

Encouraged by the increased job opportunities amid strong economic growth over the past two years, a record high proportion of the older population aged 55 & over are now participating in the labour market¹. The labour force participation rate for older males and females was significantly higher in 2006 than a decade ago, helped also by the extension of the retirement age to 62 years in 1999.

You gotta love claims that are not substantiated by detailed causal studies, or in this case, statements that aren’t even presented with any kind of correlation analysis. There is nothing in the paper about regression statistics to even show that such a correlation between gainful employment of the over-50s and a stronger job market even exists. Maybe it’s presented in a different paper. I wouldn’t know. But from an academic standpoint, where’s the justification? Which brings me to the next paragraph:

Following pronounced gains in 2006, the employment rate for both males and females aged 55 to 59 and 60 to 64 hit record high in 2006, with 78% of men aged 55 to 59 and 60% of those aged 60 to 64 in employment. The corresponding rates for older females were 43% and 25%. This suggests that efforts to improve the employability of older persons, amid a tight labour market when employers would be more willing to turn to older workers, have helped more of them secure employment.

See previous comment about regression analysis. Also like many academic suggestions, these do not quite encompass the entire spectrum of possibilities here. See my conclusion.

So who are the people still working? This brings me to:

Weighed down by limited opportunities for higher education in the earlier years, the older cohort has a relatively less educated profile than their younger counterparts. More than half (55%) of economically active residents aged 50 & over did not have secondary qualifications compared with about one in five (20%) for those younger (Table 3).

So the majority of these workers aren’t very educated by today’s standards; it is worth noting that the data presented in Table 3 (p. 14) show that only 13.0% of the 50+ age group (15.4% of males, and 8.8% of females) have a poly diploma or degree, which I daresay is already widely thought to be the acceptable minimum qualification for young people looking for their first jobs.

What is really eye-opening, I think, is this next paragraph:

Older workers were more likely to be self-employed (26%) than the younger cohort (12%). Many of the self-employed are working proprietors, taxi drivers and hawker stall holders.

Reflecting their relatively weaker educational profile, the majority (68%) of
older workers were employed in lower-skilled jobs such as cleaners, labourers & related workers (18%), plant & machine operators & assemblers (16%) and service & sales workers (15%). These occupations also registered an above-averageb incidence of older workers among the resident workforce, especially for cleaners, labourers & related workers where more than half (53%) were aged 50 & over. The incidence of older workers was also high among working proprietors and plant & machine operators & assemblers (both 40%). In contrast, only a small proportion of residents working as professionals (10%) or associate professionals & technicians (14%) were aged 50 & over (Table 5).

I’m tempted to say that these are worrying numbers. Let’s say “many of the self-employed” means 51% of the self-employed are owners of mom-and-pop stores, taxi drivers and hawkers. Then this means that at least 51% x 26% + 68% x 74% = 63.6% of the workforce are in entry-level jobs. Instead of becoming a greying workforce of benevolent business leaders and wise academics, it appears that we are becoming a nation of greying McDonalds’ ah mahs. Given reasonable correlations of being low on the career ladder with limited income and limited savings, that’s really something.

More than three out of four (77%) older workers were employed in the services sector in 2006, with the proportion higher among older females (84%) compared to older males (74%) (Table 6)… Administrative & support services (42%) and hotels & restaurants (38%) had the highest incidence of older workers among their resident workforce in 2006 where around four out of every ten workers were aged 50 & over. The former industry covers businesses involved in employment activities; building-cleaning activities and investigation & security activities.

The paper goes on in the omitted section to outline plausible reasons for why this number is so high. (It would be helpful to know the figures for younger workers to frame these numbers in their proper context.) But it lends credence to the anecdotal evidence for lots of old people at those McDonald’s counters

The usual hours worked per week among employed residents aged 50 & over averaged 50 hours for full-timers and 20 hours for part-timers. Among full-timers, older workers tend to work longer hours compared to those younger. The proportion of full-time employed older residents working at least 50 hours a week (35%) in 2006 was higher compared to those in their 30s (30%) or younger (23% for those aged 15 to 24 and 27% for those aged 25 to 29) (Table 7).

This is by far the most disturbing part of the paper. In the United States, it’s the young, single and upwardly mobile yuppie that works the insane 110-hour work weeks expected of entry-level investment bankers, and it’s the 50-year-old with a family that takes every other Friday off so the entire family can take a long weekend trip to go camping in the woods with their gas-guzzling SUV. In Singapore, however, old people seem to work harder than the younger ones. It’s hard to tell if the differences in the percentages are significant, but I assume that given the huge statistical population (N ~ 3 million), even a 1% difference means a lot. Of course, working over 50 hours a week could mean 51 hours with overtime, or 120 hours without. I have no data on this confounding effect.

So on to the most important part, about wages. This section of the paper was subtitled “Wages commonly rise with age, especially for managerial and professional groups”, which convenient neglects the fact that the majority of older workers are neither managers nor professionals. (As argued above, the proportion of managers and professions is estimated to be at most 36.4%.) For this reason, I will gloss over the data on these groups and skip directly to the majority case:

The impact of age on wages was less obvious for the manual and lower skilled workers. As these jobs tend to be ‘physical’ in nature, age may become a hindrance to better pay. For example, wages of cleaners & labourers peaked at an early age of 30 to 34 at only 1.1 times that of their younger counterparts aged 25 to 29.

Similar wage trend was also observed for lower skilled white collar workers. The wages of sales & service workers were the highest for those aged 30 to 34. The exception was the group of clerical workers whose wages peaked at the age group of 55 to 59, before declining for those aged 60 to 64. However, the rise was more gradual than those in professional and managerial positions.

Again it would be really helpful to have more statistics than the median salary. How about at least the interquartile range, if not a full and complete report of the distribution profile? But even the median data show interesting trends. It’s worth your time to look at Chart 4 (pdf, p. 19, paper p. 11), where the graph shows that salaries essentially flat-line across all age groups except for managers and professionals. Even more worryingly, older service workers are being paid significantly less than younger ones, despite working longer hours as previously reported above.²

In fact, if you run a simple correlation analysis breaking down how much the average wage³ is in any given sector of the workforce as a function of the number of people in that sector, you get the following plot:

A very scary plot, in my opinion, since not only does it show that the highly paid old worker is few and far between, it shows that most old people are stuck in the mass-employment, low-earnings sectors. This correlation is even moderately strong (r-squared = 0.34). Undoubtedly this is hampered by the lower educational standards of the previous generation, and it also suggest that upward mobility is severely curtailed without decent qualifications even despite an entire career’s worth of experience in their respective fields. (I doubt, for example, that a toilet cleaner at 20 aspired to still be a toilet cleaner at 55.)

In short, there is a reasonable indication that the typical older worker is not rich and comfortable with a fat retirement nest egg, but rather earning very little and working very long hours, and hence by plausible hypothesis, doing so because they are broke and can’t afford not to work long hours. (It would be nice to substantiate this statement with wealth data too rather than pure earnings data, but I presume this could work in a pinch.)

Based on this reading on the data, it is then hard to justify the rosy tone of the conclusion. But there is something else too. Perhaps from a pure manpower standpoint, more people gainfully employed is always a good thing. But I can’t help but feel pity for the people who still have to work at 60, much less those still working at 65. Is it necessarily a good thing for a 65-year-old to be employed? Or have to be employed, which is really the pertinent question, I would think. It’s a critical question, one left unanswered by this study.

Meanwhile, I hope that I won’t be a poor male taxi driver, still struggling to earn enough to eke out a living when I turn 65.

Reference

1. “A Statistical Profile of Older Workers: Participation and employment of our older males compare favourably with other countries”, Ministry of Manpower Press Release, 22 Feb 2007. [pdf] on Sprinter.

1. The data series started in 1991. From the original source↩
2. I am assuming that the average older service worker on average works more than the average younger service worker, based on the reported data that the average older worker on average works more than the average younger worker. If you don’t see the difference, never mind.↩
3. Based on the available data, I calculated the average wage as the mean of the median wages for the 50-54, 55-59 and 60-64 age groups.↩

Thanks to meatspace friend Rambo Tan, who sent in this article on Prince Pickles, the new Japanese sensation:

Prince Pickles, a perky cartoon character with saucer-round eyes, big dimples and tiny, boot-clad feet, poses in front of tanks, rappels from helicopters and shakes hands with smiling Iraqis.

The cutesy icon hardly calls to mind the Japanese military that conquered and pillaged its way across Asia during World War II, and that is just the way the country’s leaders want it.

As Japan sheds its postwar pacifism and gears up to take a higher military profile in the world, it is enlisting cadres of cute characters and adorable mascots to put a gentle, harmless sheen on its deployments.

[...]

Officials in Tokyo say their cute offensive is working.

During Japan’s mission to Iraq, the military decorated water trucks with a figure from a globally popular Japanese soccer cartoon, variably known as Captain Tsubasa in Japanese, Flash Kicker in the United States and Captain Majed in Arab countries. “Everybody loved it,” said Aki Tsuda of the Foreign Ministry’s aid department.

“Cultural diplomacy could be one of the most effective tools of Japanese diplomacy,” said Hiro Katsumata, a research fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore.

“In a decade or two, younger generations in many countries who love Japanese cartoons will start to fill leadership roles,” he said. “Japan can benefit from that.”

Somehow that just sounds ominous.

I poked around for a bit on the Japanese Ministry of Defense’s website but turned up nothing on Prince Pickles. I did however find this Manga Defense White Paper¹ [pdf]. featuring such adorable characters as Kai, a girl who likes animals, and the Spirit of Sakura. The human characters travel back in time to the feudal period of Japanese history and in the process learn about surface-to-air missiles (p. 11), the new organizational hierarchy of the Bureau for Internal Affairs² (p. 25), and why American and Japanese flags should shake hands (p. 15). Of course, there is absolutely no mention of Iwo Jima, Syōnan-Tō, or Pearl Harbor, or why there is such animosity against Japan in the region, especially from from the Chinese and South Korean quarters…

Maybe Mindef should take a leaf from their Japanese counterpart’s book and invest in Mr. Kiasu promotional cartoons lauding the prestige of National Service, both in Singapore and abroad.³

Or has something like that already happened?

Reference

1. Cuddly characters front Japan’s military aspirations, International Herald Tribune, Feb 16, 2007.

1. as liberally translated by moi.↩
2. Again, a liberal translation.↩
3. Imagine what Mr. Kiasu would look like if redrawn anime style…↩