The only new issue with ‘leaking talent’ is the name. You may remember ‘quitters’ and ‘brain drain’ as previous appellations ascribed to the same phenomenon.

Singapore, [SM Goh] said, is leaking talent. Not just ordinary talent, but its best and finest.

- Nazry Bahrawi, “Singapore is leaking talent: SM Goh” TODAY, March 15, 2007

First, the sundry concerns with this article:

[T]he question bothering [SM Goh] was whether Singapore could continue to do as well over the next 50 years as it had done in the past.

I cannot help but recall at this point Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. A dystopian future, if ever that were to come to pass. I wonder about this question too. At least the people in power appear to be thinking about these issues too, even if they don’t have the answers yet.

“The issue which we are most concerned with is the loss of our own people at the very top,” said Mr Goh. “These are bright young people, children of very well educated Singaporeans.”

Some may study overseas, and the best ones were harvested straight away by companies there. And this often starts a spiral that ends up with Singapore losing these talents.

“They do not want to come back to Singapore. They want the experience of working in foreign universities, banks and companies,” said the Senior Minister.

And often, two or three years down the road, these talented Singaporeans marry overseas and settle down there.

I challenge the premises of these few paragraphs. How often is “often”? Quote me statistics, facts, and examples. Certainly the vast majority of Singaporeans on government scholarships do return home. And there are many, many personal examples I can think of of people studying abroad for whom anything other than returning home to family, relatives, friends and home is anathema.

Without such evidence, I can only compare the efforts of above statements to scaremongering. Is there really a mass exodus of talent on the order of 300 or so a year?

Even if they were to think of moving back to Singapore later, some find houses here too expensive. Others are put off by Singapore’s shortage of space. Still others prefer the lifestyle in America, Europe or Australia.

“They don’t come back; we lose them,” he said. “This is a very big problem for us because if we lose the top 0.5 per cent from the next generation, Singapore will have a much lower ‘peak’. The world is now competing on human resources and talent.”

So how much is a lot? I use the number 300. Let’s take a quick estimate of what 0.5% of every graduating batch of university degree holders translates into. Digging up a few statistics, we can estimate how many people1 So assume that 4.4839 million citizens are equitably spread over an average lifespan of 72.4 years2 gives an average of 61,932 citizens per year. 0.5% of that gives 310 citizens per year.

So that’s the stark, naked truth isn’t it. Assuming SM Goh’s figure of 0.5% is significant, an appreciable fraction of the Singaporean talent is concentrated in 300 Singaporean students, year in, year out.

That was why Singapore, too, has had to turn to talented people from other countries, get them to work here and eventually turn them into Singaporeans. That was the only way to ensure that Singapore’s population “peak” would remain at a high level, said Mr Goh.

The rest of the article comments on how the civil service has been losing many people to the private sector, and how that signals a need to revise salaries in the public sector. Again. I will let other bloggers deal with this one.

Now that we have some idea of context, look a bit harder at why Singaporeans leave. By far the most important is the experience of working and studying3 abroad, and the opportunities opened up by doing so. I really don’t see that the fuss is about here, apart from perhaps attacks of green-eyed monsters. There is incredible value in the experience of living abroad - having to take care of oneself, interacting with others in a foreign culture and exposure to new mindsets being only three of the most obvious - that is quite frankly impossible to duplicate if one only lived, studied and worked in one’s home country. And only the most myopic of Singaporeans would think that Singapore has the world’s best schools.

My point is simple: there is nothing wrong with living abroad per se. One should even expect the best and brightest to want to live abroad. The world is much bigger than the tiny island of Singapore, and it is only natural to demand the right, as labor in a highly globalized environment, to work in the global economy. If our talent is to be truly world-class, and more than just the regular self-effacing variety, it should have the opportunity to learn from the very best in the world. Whether or not opportunities are located within or without Singapore is ultimately immaterial.

The real question is also badly framed, for several reasons:

  1. Singaporeans who live abroad don’t always leave Singapore forever. This is by far my biggest gripe with this article. There is a real slippery slope in the argument presented in the article, namely that once top talent leaves, it leaves for good. There is no doubt that this is true for some people. It’s a statistical inevitability. But it’s definitely not true that all quitters are quitters for life. The case examples of expatriate Indians, South Koreans and Taiwanese in particular indicate that a lot of students from these countries go abroad to study in Europe or North America, work for something like 10-20 years abroad, then return home to invest their newfound wealth of capital and knowledge to stimulate the growth of industries in their home countries. The same is becoming increasingly true for mainland Chinese. The real question, which was conveniently sidestepped with the slippery slope fallacy, should then be framed this way: of those who work and study outside Singapore, why are there so few who many eventually return to Singapore?
  2. There is nothing wrong with not returning to Singapore. Since we’re talking about the best and brightest, it’s only reasonable to assume that they are capable of logical reasoning. And regarding adults thus endowed with reasoning faculties, we have to assume that such people are making informed decisions to not return to Singapore. So these are rational people making personal decisions with their lives. So on what moral basis are other people allowed to criticize such people for their actions? How can such actions be considered immoral and still be compatible with the notion of a global labor market? You can’t have a globalized economy without a mobile globalized market, after all.
  3. Money isn’t unimportant. Living in Singapore is expensive, and jobs in Singapore have to be appropriately renumerated to reflect that. That much is alluded to in the article. But that also means that fairly-valuated jobs can be very expensive for companies to afford lots of them. And is it really an offense for smart people to want to be paid what they’re worth?
  4. Money isn’t everything. Life is ultimately about tradeoffs. But money is far from the only important factor. If preference for a different kind of lifestyle is a significant issue, perhaps policymakers should look long and hard at what exactly is it about countries like the United States that attract Singaporeans away from their homelands, be it the democratic ideals, the American dream, or even a hankering for garbage disposals and dishwashers.

As usual, the convenient use of a slippery slope argument allows the difficult, critical questions to be left unanswered:

  1. Of those critical 300 Singaporeans a year, how many actually end up leaving with no intention of ever returning, and why do they want to leave for good? If the numbers are very high, why do so few return?
  2. Why should Singaporeans want to stay in Singapore? Let’s be pragmatic here. Forget the excuses of patriotism, ignorance and fear of the unknown. What are the concrete reasons for people working and living in Singapore?
  3. For the Singaporeans currently living abroad, what kind of incentives could entice them to return? If you really want people to return, they gotta have real good reasons for doing so.
Footnotes
  1. SingStats 2006.↩
  2. being twice the median age of 36.2 years.↩
  3. The article doesn’t actually explicitly mention studying, but it’s worth lumping that in here too.↩