[Beerinkol]

Thank you Mr. Scoobal for your response. I would like very much to address the points you brought up.

I read your article and I noticed that you are writing using economics to make your point. Though I agree that there is general malaise and a deteriorating and unsustainable model is apparent I am sure that you do not understand economics. Economics is a little understood discipline and not easy to grasp. hmm...if it is little understood, you seem to believe your understanding is better than mine?

Singapore does not have primary resources or space to do much. We therefore need foreign capital and the right industries to maximise space use. There were 2 approaches adopted by resource-scarce Asian countries. One was to develop in-country capabilities and industries, the other was to grow quickly by attracting foreign capital. S. Korea, Taiwan, Japan took the in-country approach while Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia took the other. S. Korea today has many home grown success stories disproportionate to the countries' size and Singapore has very few.


In fact without constant flow of foreign capital we would be doomed. That is also what I wrote. But it is because of the choices we made earlier.

We also struggle with home grown industries not because we are not smart but because of our size, there is little scale to throw out thousand ideas based on thousand experiments and trials for at least one meaningful one to float to the top. You don't have to be good at everything. You're right but our homegrown names are disproportionately small relative to our GDP which means our dependency is high on foreign capital.

We therefore rely on foreign capital to do all these things. Thus the manufacturing in the early years and Pharma in later years both via foreign capital. Yes. All the way we depend on foreign capital. That was also what I said.

Productivity is certainly a major issue and as long as cheap labour is available, productivity will suffer. Agree on this. You agree on this? Of course it is common sense but common sense is not so common in the PAP these days.


You seem to have identified all the issues - such as growing divide between rich and poor, social cost etc but you seem to have used to used your version of alchemy economics to put all this together. For instance the slave labour of the confederate states cited makes no sense at all and there are many others. Hello, I used as an example of an unsustainable system. Just like them we are unsustainable. Not that we are identical but both are unsustainable. When slaves were available, they did not implement approaches to increase the yield and modernization hence using more land. An economy such as Singapore's where the income divide is so big that some simply fall into poverty when wages cannot catch up with rising cost, is also unsustainable.

The issue is not cheap labour, It is the overcrowding and the accompanying social costs that is the issue. Even Singapore entrepreneurs chase the region for cheap labour. Friend, it is cheap labor that has caused much of the world's economic problems not just Singapore. Cheaply available labor especially skilled labor meant that much of the developed world faced downward pressure on wages in last 2 decades as corporations move freely to regions with cheap labor. The only way to counter that was to raise productivity and technology innovation to compete. This was the strategy neglected by the PAP.

Of course overcrowding is a problem. That is ANOTHER problem. Even if there is no overcrowding, but wages are too low relative to cost of living, it would be a problem. There are places where this has happened e.g USA where wages for middle income has remained stagnant as cost of living rose.

The appropriate model is sustainable employment for citizens, the economic climate to allow citizens to develop in their career and skills and see a growth in real income as they become better (productivity increase) over the years. This then directly impacts the social climate in a positive way. This government appears to run out of ideas, applying bandaids such as search for cheaper labour and hold on to sunset industries. Skills upgrades and productivity is not mutually exclusive. Strangely, after you start off by saying I don't understand economics, you failed to present a case showing which part of economics I don't understand.