TR EMERITUS

Is that a good strategy for a developed country with healthy reserves? In poor, developing countries, it makes sense to attract foreign MNCs. They mobilize resources like labour and land which would otherwise be idle, as well as provide capital. But in a fully developed economy like Singapore, resources are not only fully employed, but stretched. In fact, the demand for land is so great, the resulting high rent is making many businesses uncompetitive, except locally where customers have no choice but to pay the high prices demanded, even if the products or services are subpar. There is also not enough workers. To attract MNCs, the government has to allow them to employ foreigners, leading to overcrowding, social friction, high cost of living and the displacement of Singaporeans. MNCs are not here to transfer know how and trade secrets to Singaporeans. They are here to maximize profits. If the government offers them very attractive incentives like low tax, assistance to relocate and train workers, guarantee them rights similar to local companies, help them enforce copyright and therefore profits, etc, they would come. In exchange, they promise to create a certain number of jobs for locals. However, there are many ways to circumvent the promise. For example, they can bring in their own managers and specialists and encourage them to apply for PRs without having to give up their citizenship. Once approved, they become locals and count towards creating local employment. If another country offer better incentives, these footloose MNCs will move on. Employees who have gotten PR-ship can drop the PR and move on with the company. What will Singapore gain in the long run? We have had so many pharmaceutical MNCs here. Have we produced one world class pharmaceutical company? No, we have only produced a few small companies servicing the MNCs which will die a natural death when the MNCs move out. IPhones are assembled in China by a Taiwanese contractor called Foxconn. The Chinese workers make a meager salary working in dehumanizing plants. Foxconn makes a decent profit but the bulk of it goes back to the shareholders of Apple. Even the raw materials are sourced from other countries. How does it benefit the host country in the long run? To produce any world class company, even if it is a small, niche company, the entrepreneur has to be running the business himself, years on end, fine tuning and improving all the time, with a supportive home environment. He will never produce a world class company working for others. If Mr Chan thinks “capabilities will be acquired over time”, he is sorely mistaken. It will only be created if we are chasing our own dreams, day in, day out. But it is an uphill task when rent and cost of living is so high and top talents prefer working for MNCs, GLCs and the government. Since independence, our government has sought to attract MNCs because that’s the main thrust of its strategy. MNCs have helped us in our development when we were a developing economy. But we are now fully developed, and stretched. We would do better to nurture local companies than to attract even more MNCs to compete for finite and limited resources. MNCs have their own interest, which is to maximize profits regardless of externalities to the host country, including jacking up cost of living, pollution, congestion and disrupting the locals’ way of life. When we are no longer attractive, they will move on, leaving us to pick up the pieces. At some point in time, we have to start chasing our own dreams, not that of others.   Foong Swee Fong      Read More →

As Singapore's population ages, we must work smarter and welcome global talents- Heng Swee Keat. I totally agree with Heng SK's statement and in fact, this is something that every thinking and informed Singaporean alearly knew. There is no need for any pap scholar, general much less the deputy prime minister to remind Singaporeans. Knowing how to say clever things brings no value to the table if the root cause are not effectively tackled and solutions are not forthcoming. In the near future or we might have alearly arrived, those aged 60 and more in our population will be more than those aged 16 and younger. It is a scary thought and a rude awakening for many Singaporeans. Going forward, our spendings on healthcare and related issues will increase substantially and our economically active people will decrease if we take away immigration. Our society will lack the drive, the energy and the vitality to power ahead. Some years ago when I was in Guangzhou, I saw so many children playing in the alleys. Children are their hopes and their future. I said to myself that China's future is so bright and promising. Ours, on the other hand, is so dim. The hokkien description is jia pa dan si. I won't be surprised that in my lifetime, I will be able to see many young Singaporeans leave Singapore for greener pasteurs elsewhere because of shrinking opportunities and a very stressful lifestyle here due to an incompetent government. Immigration is a quick fix to our falling birth rate but there are serious trade-offs and there is a limit to it. Moreover, they will become old too and that will compound our aging burden. Their primary objective for being in Singapore is to earn a good salary and not to support our aging population. We have many Suckerporeans but they are not sucker foreigners. We cannot stop our citizens from growing old and I hold the useless pap governments from the Goh Chok Tong era through to the lhl government fully, fully responsible for our falling and falling and falling total fertility rate (TFR). It is a very rich government that lacked the political will to act decisively over the decades on our falling TFR issues. Period! There are many reasons why young married couples do not want to have children but chief among them is our very high cost of living, the high cost of bringing up a family coupled with job insecurity etc. AMK GRC MP Darryl David deserves 2 tight slaps for once saying that he has never came across anybody who told him that our high cost of living is the reason that discourages young couples from having children. Obviously he has not walked the ground enough or he has been sleeping all those past years or very likely, both. Unless and until we can effectively arrest and reverse our super pathetic TFR, we are left with no choice but immigration to top up our population shortfall and I hope that our book-smart ministars are fully aware that when real hard times befall on Singapore, the first to say bye bye to us are likely to be their much loved PRs and new citizens. Singaporeans are living the consequences of a severely fallen TFR under successive sleeping pap governments with so few of them realising it. Singapore will pay very, very dearly whether in our NS intakes or police intakes or even our truly and not those eveready yes this and yes that political newbies etc because of successive pap governments that lacked the sense of urgency, political will and slept over too many years on our TFR issue. Think.   Simon Lim      Read More →

This is a modern ‘rephrase’ from one of Karl Marx’s many jotted side notes. Needless to say, the verbiage and the twists that academics can spin with this is many folds and unfolds; the sometimes needless iterations. I would recommend reading on Paul Mason’s take on this. But for me, extrapolating from the above ‘rephrase’, what if we have a perfect technological machine/s that drives marginal costs to zero? The value of labor in this process eventually dissipates. Does it mean capital can capture the whole value proposition? But in our understanding of globalization, which means low production costs, higher productivity, efficient supply chain, scalability, the end game is more labor buying more goods. The mass consumer market. Isn’t that the reason why Singapore Inc is in China and India? However, if labor value dissipates, how does capital gain from mass markets? Who do you sell to when people can no longer work and generate no income? But what if the perfect machine is not a machine but information. Free and unadulterated information. What if the cost of information goes to zero? Information is important for today’s technology. There is no question that ICT and with IOT (5G), new services powered by individuals not just big companies will flourish. The tech sector in China was not driven by the CCP but by (free) individuals, who copied (knowledge-information), by now, in some sectors way advanced of the US. “....The tech sector's ruling triumvirate of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) built their success on technologies developed overseas, including the internet itself. Like firms across China's wider information and communications technology (ICT) sector, the success of internet companies was greatly aided by returning Chinese expatriates who had gained knowledge through study and work abroad. Taking Baidu as an example, the firm's co-founders, chief operating officer and former Big Data Lab director all received their postgraduate education and foundational work experience in the US. From 2000-2006, Beijing's Zhongguancun technology park (the heart of China's ICT sector) registered an average of two firms established each working day by such returnees…” [ 1 ] There are countless other examples. Small businesses operating out of homes rely on the internet to market their wares etc. No surprise supermarkets that are just locations for others to display their wares are going, going, some gone, like ToysRUS. Physical displays are replaced by online displays. And this ongoing cultural consumption will accelerate the declining brick and mortar businesses. The days of globalization that salivates at division of labor, low costs, mass markets are gone. Globalization will increasingly be about localization, self sustaining industries, blockchain supply chain, ethical and moral considerations. The perfect machine is in fact only possible with information (AI). The perfect machine does not have to take value out of workers, but basically shifts the paradigm from mass markets to customized markets. From mass brandings to individual brandings, from mass consumerism to selective communities of consumers, less about price but communication. Let’s take a critical analysis through the capitalist eyes. If you want more profits you need to make information scarce. You need to control information to monetize it. Facebook, Google etc sells personal info to advertisers. Instagram captures key words in your conversations and the next instance, you see a list of those words in your app even though you never actually search for them. Information is now weaponized between US and China, in a beggar thy neighbor policy. In a capitalist world, profits or dominance is the primary objective. And yet, we can envisage a different world. The ‘Fragment On Machines’, and this has been said, is not Marx beyond Marx, but Marx against Marx. It postulates a scenario that signals a post capitalist world that does not pit class against class, it does not drape everyone in some Maoist uniforms, but allows for individualism and work that is more meaningful. And part of this possible utopia is that as Alvin Toffler said decades ago, the growth of prosumers. The consumers are increasingly also producers, example; people who sell from homes. In this post capitalist world, the bourgeoisie can also be the proletariat. And hopefully, this brings us to a more balanced political equation. But as history has shown, when we jump from one technological age to the next, there are those that will still be working in the old tech era. Hence, minimum wage is a good way to prevent these people from being a destitute class. Hope is no felicity but an ideal.     BK      Read More →