e pur si muove

“CNA…kwality journalism as always” - b_catenin

Thanks to b_catenin who discovered this massive Channel NewsAsia FAIL.

On the surface, this insipid article seems like nothing more than the typical bland coverage of the Olympics. However, the choice of accompanying photo makes it blindingly obvious that at least one person, probably more, is asleep at the editors’ offices. That is most certainly not an Indonesian flag on the badminton player’s shirt!

If you’re wondering what country’s flag that is, it’s India. The confusion is understandable when one takes into account that in Chinese, India is 印度 while Indonesia is either 印尼 or 印度尼西亚, and that both Indonesians and Indians are relatively dark-skinned.

Still, when you add this to the increasing pile of evidence that Channel NewsAsia does a really terrible job of journalistic inquiry and fact-checking, it is really not at all surprising that the Singapore media doesn’t have a particularly sterling reputation anywhere.

For once, I’ve read some positive news regarding Temasek’s investment in Merrill Lynch. The Financial Times of London has just announced a new wrinkle in the Temasek-Merrill deal, one that means well for Singapore:

The Singapore investor had negotiated a reset clause, which meant that if Merrill were to issue new stock at less than $48 a share within 12 months, the bank would compensate Temasek for the difference for each share held. The result was that Merrill had to hand back $2.5bn, which Temasek plans to re-invest immediately along with a fresh capital injection of $900m.

[...]

Temasek’s proposed $3.4bn holding in Merrill Lynch is subject to regulatory approval. Depending on the take-up of Merrill’s $8.5bn share offering, Temasek’s stake could rise from 9 per cent to closer to 15 per cent. Any holding above 10 per cent would require formal approval from US regulators.

This apparently means that Merrill Lynch will effectively reimburse Temasek for its paper losses so far. Good for them!

Still, it’s pretty obvious that the big Singapore-side investors have massively underestimated the magnitude of the current US slump. One can only hope that they’re really in it for the long run.

References

1. Sundeep Tucker, Financial Times (London), Temasek ploy pays off at bank’s cost, 2008-07-29.

Again, the Singapore press trots out, from the usual sources, the hackneyed complaint that people who break their bonds are morally deficient ingrates.

There is nothing new in these arguments.

What’s more interesting, though, lies beneath that veneer of smear. On the same day comes more comments on complacency:

‘Our people must realise that being No.1 is very temporal. 

‘We better keep on honing that…Make sure that our young people are hungry. If our young people are not hungry enough, bring in hungrier ones from overseas. Make them feel hungry, increase the hungriness index.’

Strip away the rhetoric, and the stark truth is exposed: Singapore simply cannot continue to grow along its current trajectory. Other countries, other economies, they’ll catch up.

We already know that. We already know the solution: move toward economic activities that require more brain cells that what Fox calls the Ctrl-C-Ctrl-V type job. We have moved away from physically menial jobs to mentally menial jobs, but in order to stay one step ahead, we’ve got to move yet again toward something more ‘value-added’.

We need people to do creative jobs, and yet we cannot find the people to do them. Singapore simply lacks people of appropriate caliber to do them. It’s a problem not unique to Singapore either. The world lacks such people, and desperately wants them. That’s why talent in this century can serve a global pool, not merely a local or even national one.

This is not news either. What perhaps is new, though, is looking at both threads together. Who are the people taking advantage of the global labor pool? There are the scholars that return and others that leave. Are those who leave deficient in moral fiber, or are they simply gravitating toward better deals spun in a free-for-all international arena?

Which scholars leave? Perhaps if these scholarship agencies were to examine their personnel files more closely, they may one day realize that ironically, the people who leave are disproportionately their best and brightest. Bond-breakers aren’t leaving in a huff and then working double-shifts at an assembly line job to pay their liquidate damages; many of them end up at big-name companies like Google, Microsoft, UBS and Merrill Lynch.

Why do scholars leave? If it is as simple as taking the better of two deals, why are scholarship agencies offering the worse deal, despite what they claim during their marketing sessions of taking their charges seriously and offering to nurture them properly? Are scholarship agencies offering careers commensurate with the rates on the global labor market - rates almost certainly higher than those on the regular market? And how about opportunities? perks? fringe benefits? work environment?

Why would people want to get stuck with staid, stolid government careers when they think other people can offer them more challenging, more exciting, better-paid jobs? The proletariat classes have found job security to be based on nothing more than empty promises. Six years of indentured labor is not an asset, it is a fatal liability, a sign that Singapore scholarship agencies don’t trust their recipients to do the right thing. Is it any surprise, then, that the recipients chafe under this paternalistic, supercilious arrogance?

The government agencies handing out scholarships have the power to tilt the balance. They set the rates, they set the agenda. They can make better deals than the ones that have served our country so well in the twentieth century. The government makes a big deal about maintaining Singapore’s competitiveness, and not being complacent. Yet it seems to turn its blind spot on its immense complacence regarding Singapore’s competitiveness in the top-echelon labor markets.

Low-wage policies can only go so far in the current economic climate, as inflation eats away at real incomes and other rapidly-developing economies undercut large swathes of jobs held by Singaporeans in the late 20th century. The only way is up and forward, yet their policies are still firmly entrenched in the vision and rhetoric of our Founding Father. It is no different with the crème de la crème that is so actively sought out by so many people.

Now for the last interesting twist - are the poor better scholarship holders? No doubt that it’s fantastic policy for upward social mobility, but the flip side is that they are obviously the ones that can least afford to bail themselves out. Controlling for that one factor, I cannot think of any reason why they would be less likely to break their bonds. Gratitude can very quickly give way to resentment in the realization of the vast array of opportunities that open up in the process of schooling.

The missing ingredient is this: scholarships are not the only route to a college education at a good school abroad. The ever-growing list at the Incomplete Guide to Financial Aid for Singaporeans is testament to the opportunities being created by universities and private foundations to fund students falling into precisely this category: the bright but underprivileged. And in fact, the increasing number of needs-blind financial aid sponsors shows that one doesn’t even need to be poor to have a foot in the door - there is no significant reason to think that merit and poverty are in any way correlated. The Singapore scholarship agencies are already falling heads-over-heels to clarify that being poor has nothing to do with being any more or less deserving of opportunities for higher education.

At the end of the day, who’s the bigger fool - the Singaporeans who are leaving, or the Singaporeans who continue to harass and mock ex-scholars ten years after the fact, and despite their grandiose schemes have little to show for their efforts?

People are free to mock us who have chosen to leave, but they choose to do so at the expense of revealing their own ignorance.

Thanks to Fox who told me about these articles.

References

1. Fox, Next Stop Wonderland, ST: Still adamant that scholarship holders serve their bonds, 2008-07-23. 
2. Zakir Hussain, Straits Times, Still adamant that scholarship holders serve their bonds, 2008-07-24.
3. Jeremy Au Yong, Straits Times, ‘Closet socialist’ Philip Yeo favours poorer students, 2008-07-24.
4. Jeremy Au Yong, Straits Times, Key to staying No. 1 - young people who are hungry, 2008-07-24.
5. Hoe Yeen Nie, Channel NewsAsia, PSC, A*STAR clarify scholarship policies following Philip Yeo remarks, 2008-07-26.

Glass Castle: Born in 1965, you in essence grew up side-by-side with the nation of Singapore. Could you talk a little about the evolving expectations for women in society over your lifetime?

Sylvia Lim: I did not feel it in my family as my parents treated boys and girls similarly. But I have seen evolution outside of my family. These days, it would not be acceptable to ask a girl not to further her studies so that her brother can do so. Another phenomenon is that being a homemaker is now a luxury compared to the past, when economic pressure and the cost of living was not so severe.

Jolene, a long time blog reader, informs me that one of her new projects, along with collaborators Athena and Reine, has reached fruition. In Jolene’s own words:

We’re pleased to announce the launch today of a new webzine focusing on women’s welfare and gender relations in Singapore and the region. The inaugural issue includes an interview with NCMP Sylvia Lim and an explanation of the aims and aspirations for this new online community.

http://www.glass-castle.org/

Updates to the main zine are every other Monday, but the blog will be updated on a more frequent basis. Please have a look, and have your browser bookmark ready if you like what you see!

The quote at the beginning comes from an exclusive interview with NMP Sylvia Lim on her experiences in male-dominated sectors of Singapore society, from her early days as a police officer to her current portfolio as NMP.

Feminism to some connotes bra-burning fanaticism, but in reality it’s more about gender equality from the women’s point of view. While it may seem abstract and remote, and hence a non-issue to some readers, Jolene lists some common examples of inequity in her inaugural editorial in Glass Castle:

Here’s a few example of sex inequality in Singapore: poor women are purchased from neighbouring countries to be all-in-one cleaners, sex partners and wombs. When husbands force intercourse on their wives, the law does not see this as rape. Women are bombarded with advertising insisting that our bodies are problems requiring solutions.

(Glass Castle’s list doesn’t include one example too painfully obvious to mention: no national service for Singapore women. It’s not just about women when it comes to gender inequality.)

And yet it’s the women whom, all too often, get the short end of the stick. Glass Castle continues with this:

We do not accept that inequality is part of our culture that must be preserved against Western imperialism, modernity, or anything else. Women everywhere - in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, not just in the West - are facing down inequality. For thousands of years women in most places had almost no say in what the “culture” of “their” societies involved. The “cultures” of our immigrant ancestors included crippling women in the name of beauty, and throwing living women into fires when their husbands died. Culture does and must change.

If you care about changing our society for the better, do check out Glass Castle and say hi to Athene, Jolene and Reine, the team working hard to bring you news and analysis on the women’s welfare front.