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[This Dear Diodati column comes from lightbulb, a Singaporean currently working in a prominent Silicon Valley hi-tech company. I've edited the draft emailed to me, as requested, but I've tried to remain faithful to the original content. The author has requested to remain anonymous. The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect my opinions. As always, feel free to write in your contributions!]

Trends of the past five years or so in Singapore indicate a dismal future for our country. Here’s why:

Higher ministerial salaries have negative implications for our country

The justification for raising ministerial salaries¹ is that public servants have to be paid what they are worth; otherwise, they will all go to the private sector. This is wrong for several reasons. Firstly, ministers are not paid paltry sums of money. S$1.2m per annum is already an obscenely large sum for any profession, even high finance: any increase is morally unjustifiable. The money culture that now pervades the civil service is the first sign of decline.

Secondly, let’s compare our country’s leaders with the leaders of great corporations. Exceptional companies are formed by people with vision, drive and enthusiasm. Companies that overpay their CEOs (like Enron)² normally don’t have a large chance of long term survival. Here in the Bay area, you have places like Google where CEOs are paid a mere $1 per year with almost all of their assets tied to stock options. Yes, they can make tons of money but they also risk losing all of it.³ Great people like these live and die by the company and that is something that deserves respect. But do the ministers “live and die” by the country? Their salaries are guaranteed, regardless of how the economy or society is doing.⁴

Thirdly, reports on ministers’ performance are hopelessly one-sided. When the economy seems to be doing well, the national press immediately reports the good news, attributing the success to our ministers. The converse, however, is always blamed on “globalization, outsource, growing superpowers of China and India” and other such stock excuses. It’s never the ministers’ fault when things go wrong.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Fourthly, raising ministers’ salaries undermines the government’s moral authority to lead. By focusing on the money one can make in the public service rather than the actual service to the country, the public service will have a harder time recruiting people who truly want to serve instead of just greedy people looking for a high salary. The PAP has has been in power for such a long time partly because of its perceived moral authority. There was a time long ago where that was probably the case. Projecting this image of highly paid public service elites merely reinforces the image an insensitive, aloof, and mercenary government. This is dangerous because public service is a glue that holds society together. Right now, that glue is losing its grip and things are falling apart.

Fifthly, raising ministers’ salaries widens the income gap between rich and poor, which has already widened rapidly in the past five years. An increment in ministerial salaries might be minuscule relative to our GDP, but that hardly compensates for the destabilizing effect this will have on a society already plagued with various inequalities. Modern Singapore arose out of the swamps and kampungs of the 1960s not just because of the Old Guard of the PAP, but also because people then lived lives full of hope, even while they lacked material wealth. Successful companies today value their employees who do well; top executives understand that no matter how much vision and talent they possess, it is their people who actually get things done.

Today’s leaders of Singapore need to learn to appreciate what the common man does for his country. Without this basic courtesy, there is no reason for Singaporeans to remain hopeful.⁵

The wrong people are ending up in all the wrong jobs

Singapore Inc., the conglomerate of the Government and government linked corporations (GLCs), controls a large fraction of the economy, yet is hiring the wrong people and putting them in all the wrong positions. The public sector is fond of playing musical chairs with senior civil servants, transferring them between directorships of organizations with little or no relevance to their previous portfolios. Job performance appears to be immaterial in such job shuffling. Many people know of ex-generals and high-ranking officers who retire from active service in Mindef and end up in diverse fields from finance to R&D. But do all these civil servants really have any experience or working knowledge of the fields they end up commanding? If not, how can we expect them to do a good job?⁶

Yet if the truth be told, if any of these mid-career governmental “elites” tried applying for a job in the Bay Area, their résumés would most probably end up in the trash. What have any of them really accomplished? The chaotic, free-market of the private sector is a stark contrast to the well-rehearsed choreography of the public sector. In the real world, one applies for jobs and for them. One’s worth is proven by one’s results. Yes, people can and do switch careers midfield in the real world, but that also normally means starting at the bottom and working yourself up again. Nobody is entitled to a high-ranking or high-paying position in a career switch, so why do some civil servants think they deserve noblesse oblige?

It is therefore heavily ironic that the government keeps telling the people not to adopt a “crutch mentality”. It’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black. How many high-flying civil servants and ministers have actually succeeded in the real world when they left the public service? I can’t think of one. GLCs don’t count. The government claims that many of the talents they hire could easily defect to companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. It’s self-delusion. I have many friends working at such places and I really doubt if any such companies have use for a civil servant whose skills are mostly not transferable to the private sector. And how many civil servants, acclimatized to the easy life and iron rice bowls, can really handle the stress of an 80-100 hour work week in any reputable finance institution?⁷

Herein lies the problem. When people who don’t know what they are doing get put in charge of organizations that direct our country’s development of the country, we are in for a very rough ride, one that will get bumpier, even derailed, with increasing competition in the near future.

Few graduates of local universities are prepared for the real world⁸

It pains me to write this, but this much of the brutal truth must be said of Singaporeans who graduate from Singapore universities. Many - not all, but many - of these young graduates are ill-prepared to survive the cruel reality of the world outside school, let alone the world beyond Singapore’s borders. Maybe it’s the cumulative effects of brainwashing from local schools, the government, or even their parents, but many of them lack the initiative, drive and independence to make it in the real world. Few of them have any interest in geopolitics and world news (rubbish from the Straits Times doesn’t count). Some will even put themselves into massive debt immediately upon graduating by marriage and buying a HDB flat before having made a single cent. Many others will continue to live their parents, never feeling the need to pay rent, cook or do one’s own laundry.

And when it comes to working, some graduates I’ve met seem to have learnt nothing useful in school. They wait for orders to be dished out to them and lack the initiative to work independently. Worse, they have no passion for anything; the passion to take the initiative to do their own research; the passion of believing that one’s work has value; the passion of actually enjoying what one’s work; the passion to have a long-term vision of the future. If there are passionate Singaporeans working in Singapore, I have yet to meet them.

One of the reasons why I am here in the Bay area is because I like working with smart, talented people. But more importantly, I want to work with people who truly believe in what they do, where a job’s more than just a salary. Life here in Silicon Valley job market is far more cutthroat than the Singapore job market, and I shudder to think how many of these young graduates would be able to survive in such an environment.

Summary for the medium-term future

In the next 15 years, I see a society that will gradually fail. Singaporeans will be obsessed with their perception of a massive influx of foreigners taking away their jobs. The income gap between rich and poor will continue to widen. Many young graduates will chain themselves financially to Singapore by buying “subsidized” HDB property and end up struggling to make the mortgage payments whilst making ends meet. The continued rot and inefficiencies of the government will only serve to accelerate the deterioration of society. Yet at the same time mechanisms like the GRC system will make it virtually impossible for viable opposition to rise to the occasion and displace the ruling party. That, coupled with the ascent of the BRIC economies⁹, will make for bleak times ahead.

1. Editor’s note: There have been far too many posts on this topic to cite them all here. See my post entitled Looking at salaries using standardized peanuts.↩
2. Editor’s note: See my post entitled Looking at salaries using standardized peanuts.↩
3. Editor’s note: This is a point that is often overlooked when quantifying the total pay package of the top executives of technology companies. Giving employees stocks and stock options gives them a direct, vested interest in wanting the company to do well.↩
4. Editor’s note: See Alex Au’s summary of the criticisms leveled against the current method for determining ministers’ salaries on Yawining Bread.↩
5. Editor’s note: The now-classic citation for this has to be Catherine Lim’s seminal essay The PAP and the people - A Great Affective Divide (The Straits Times, 6 November 1994). She has revisited the topic in subsequent essays, notably One Government, Two Styles (The Straits Times, 20 November 1994, no online copy available), PAP and the people: A return of disaffection? (The Straits Times, 26 August 2000), Utopia or dystopia? (The Straits Times, 10 May 2005) and Be mindful of the affective gap (The Straits Times, April 5 2007).↩
6. Editor’s note: Of the last five sentences, I added four of them; only the third sentence derives from the original draft. Adding this context helped frame the rest of the essay.↩
7. Editor’s note: IIRC, a 80-100 hour work week seems typical only of entry level positions. It is not immediately clear someone undergoing a mid-career change would be put in an entry level position. Demotion relative to previous rank, yes, but it just seems unlikely that there are 40-year-old investment bankers in hedge funds, for example.↩
8. Editor’s note: this topic has gathered some attention online recently. See takchek’s and Fox’s and Eunice’s and blub’s posts. Since I did not graduate from a Singapore university, I choose to stay out of this discussion.↩
9. Editor’s note: the author wrote ‘India and China’ here, but I’ve put in BRIC because there are quite a few other countries which have great potential to become the world’s next economic powerhouses.↩

I read on MyAppleMenu Singapore, not without alarm, about a Malaysian newspaper’s article on the Singapore government’s decision to regulate “online newspapers and broadcasters.”

According to the article, blogs and “chat sites” are excluded from the new licensing requirement. No explicit mention of podcasts, which could be a gray area.

One might ask, why is it that the government has been so lax in regulating the online world as it does just about everything offline? One possibility is a genuine interest in allowing citizens to express themselves online. Another much more pragmatic reason is that the online world knows few geographic boundaries.

Here’s a gedankenexperiment for you. Suppose an online newspaper is set up somewhere (say, East Timor) that hires Indonesian and East Timorese staff. Amongst other things they cover Singapore news to the extent that the Singapore government considers them an online newspaper. The Singapore government wants them to be licensed and pay expensive fees. The online newspaper can’t afford to and refuses.

The question now is this: what can the Singapore government do about it? Suing them is unlikely; how can you sue an entity in Singapore when that entity has no assets in Singapore?¹ They could impose punitive measures, like journalists not being allowed into Singapore unless they coughed up. But what if they do all their interviews by phone, email or webcam? Short of aggressively filtering and blocking all their IP addresses in the spirit of the Great Firewall of China, it’s just impractical. Even then savvy journos could bypass simple filters using anonymous networks. And if their website ends up banned in Singapore, using anonymizing proxies can circumvent that too. Think Elgoog for example as a way the enterprising Chinese netizens have invented to circumvent their censorship.

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I think half of all this is an excuse for the Singapore censors to grub at the online world. Once you have reason to block specific IP addresses to stop  emails from personae non grata online, it becomes that much easier to justify banning their websites too. After that, banning their ISP could follow suit. Oh, and then you might say “Hey, with anonymizing networks like Tor anyone could bypass our filters. Tor traffic is beyond our control, we’ll just have to ban it all to be safe.”² And then for the lack of a virtual nail, a virtual kingdom might very well fall. A slippery slope, yes, but one I could easily imagining becoming real.

Since we’re on the topic of slippery slopes, this is a good time to segue into what I think the other half of all this is about (emphasis mine):

“If an online newspaper is allowed to operate without licence, while our licence is renewable every year, fair market competition is not possible,” explained a print journalist. “It’s like fighting with one hand tied behind you”.

His argument, not without basis, is that newspapers are expensive investments involving high operating expenses while an online website costs very little to operate.

This unequal contest would result in declining newspaper sales – as is happening in the West – or its eventual demise over the long term, which is to nobody’s interests, he said.

I am not denying the truth of competition, but either there was quite a bit left out from Seah’s article, or there is a serious slippery slope hiding in this sentence.

Truth is, who really knows what everyone’s best interests are, or even anyone’s best interests? Maybe I’m hopelessly biased toward faith in market mechanisms, but a business ultimately has to survive on its own merit. To do so in an ever-changing market, it will either have to shape up or ship out. Attempting to reshape the market like Microsoft, . If a company goes out of business, yes it sucks for the employees and stockholders, but ultimately doesn’t it just boil down to some kind of Darwinian competition of economics?³ Maybe businesses go bust because they are outmoded.

Is print media a dinosaur in a world of mammals? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I don’t like the insinuation that the print media needs to survive in order that the world doesn’t go to pieces. Should the print media deserve a more level playing field by tying down other players? Are print media and online media in the same market to begin with? You tell me.

Reference

1. Seah Chiang Nee, The Star, “Net over e-news sites“.

1. I am not a lawyer. I’m not advocating a mass exodus of dissident voices with commercial aspirations to Timor Leste. Maybe there are transnational legal treaties that take care of the issues of jurisdiction I am outlined here. What do I know?↩
2. Think I’m being alarmist? Consider the words of Alex de Joode, a pioneer in anonymous remailer technology: “By setting up a remailer I would make it very difficult for one country to put censorship in place, since the Internet is global every person with a modem can use my service and circumvent censorship legislation, this person can speak freely and should not fear retribution for speaking what is on his mind. I’ve had trouble with the Singapore government because someone there questioned the rulings of the President, but that is exactly why the remailer is there!” Source: CMC Magazine, September 1997, A Brief History of anon.penet.fi. What kind of reasonable censor would allow such a loophole to exist?↩
3. Disclaimer: I am not an economist. I’ve taken freshman economics, that’s really about it.↩