Again, more rubbish aiming at making people run faster in a pointless rat race.

The Dear Leader:

They’ve got to decide whether the country is going to go up or down. If the country is going to go down, then economy will go down, people’s incomes will be down, unemployment will be up, then property values will go down.

Message: if you don’t help the country to ‘go up’, your property is going to lose value. So buck up!

Next:

If the people have confidence in the Republic and the Government, flat prices and values will rise “as it has been going up every year” historically, said Mr Lee, who as Prime Minister had in 1964 pushed the HDB to launch the home ownership scheme.

Wait. Before that, we were told that if the economy of Singapore “goes up”, then our flat prices will rise. Now instead it’s if the people have confidence in the Government, property prices will rise. The first version made some sense — property prices do tend to rise when the economy is doing well. But what has confidence in the Government got to do with property prices? Confidence in anything could be mistaken. If people have confidence in the Government but the economy takes a dive nonetheless, why should flat prices rise?

Note the subtle shift — first it’s ‘if you work harder, your property will gain in value’. Alright, that makes sense, I’ll work harder. Then shift the frame — ‘if you believe in us, your property will gain in value’. Wow, faith can move mountains after all!

Moving on, the Dear Leader’s hidden agenda is blurted out in the next paragraph:

Noting that home ownership “motivates Singaporeans to work hard and upgrade to better flats for a better quality of living”, Mr Lee said: “More important, Singaporeans know that the HDB flat gives them a tangible stake in worth. If Singapore prospers … they share in the growth … The HDB story reflects the social mobility in Singapore.”

Really, it’s all about motivating you to work harder and contribute to GDP! And as a reward your property values increase. Never mind the fact that the prices of the properties you’d like to upgrade to increase in tandem, so they still remain out of your reach. As long as your properties enjoy a nominal increase in value, it doesn’t matter if your purchasing power continues to decline!

It gets better:

Pointing out that owning of a HDB flat was “a store of value that can be monetised when needs be”, he said home ownership had been critical for a fledgling nation with “an immigrant community with no common history”.

Oh, that old trick again, reminding us of those Bad Times when people said that Singapore wouldn’t make it. Where, pray, is one supposed to stay after “monetising” one’s abode? Move in with your children, of course! If you have no children, serves you right for not doing your duty for the nation! You’ll just have to downgrade to a lousier abode and pocket the difference. That’s progress for you.

“If all of the 900,000 HDB flats built over the past 50 years were rental flats, Singapore would be a very different society today. We would not have the stability, progress and prosperity that the stake in home ownership of a growing asset has made possible,” said the Minister Mentor, reiterating the assurance that young couples would get sufficient help from the Government to own their first flat.

Straw man. Who ever proposed making all public housing rental flats? Also, the hidden agenda revealed again. People need to be made to think that they possess assets that are growing in value, so that they will be motivated to work harder and contribute to the prosperity of their overlords. It doesn’t matter if the only way to “monetise” that asset is to downgrade their living conditions.

Also, I think we are all very interested in hearing how the Government will provide “sufficient help” to young couples to own their first flat, but for whatever reason, the nature of this help is not revealed. Instead, the reporter chooses to emphasise the exhortation to be grateful for the Government’s brilliant idea to continuously inflate housing prices.

CNA attempted to justify the ridiculous ‘cooling off period’ proposal by pointing to the fact that “Australia has a three-day black-out of election advertising and Indonesia has a three-day cooling-off before Legislative Elections and a two-day cooling-off before the Presidential election.”

This is a disingenuous comparison. The Australian black-out bans election advertising. So does the Indonesian. LHL’s proposed ban, in contrast, does not apply to party political broadcasts.

This only makes it all the more transparent that the purpose of the proposed cooling off period is to allow the PAP to make full use of its media dominance to in effect have an extra day of campaigning via the mass media, during which the opposition parties will have little exposure.

From the beginning of Chapter 2 of Edward Shils’ Tradition:

The inherent durability of material objects of stone, metal, and wood, and the durability of the physical landscape enables the past to live into the present. The costliness of the scarce skill and materials which have been invested in the making of material objects counsels generally against their deliberate destruction. It is often economically advantageous to maintain older buildings. However wealthy a society and however wasteful it is of its resources, it does not regard itself as able to afford, in every generation, to demolish buildings surviving from the past and to replace them by those of greater convenience and of greater conformity with contemporary taste. The most energetic policies in the modernization of the stock of buildings in a contemporary metropolis still leaves in being a large number built before the lifetime of the persons who live or work in them. Buildings have usually been built to last; intentionally “temporary” buildings are exceptional. Palaces, the seats of governments and parliaments, churches and temples, buildings for commerce and for public administration, academic buildings, museums, theaters and buildings for musical performances built long before the birth of those now living, mark the cities of the earth. The fame of a city depends on having such buildings.

Many residential buildings of more than one hundred years of age still exist although architectural tastes have changed, standards of amenity and convenience have changed, and the pressure for more concentrated use of space has increased. Nonetheless many older residential buildings survive, frequently with modification, because their occupants are willing to pay the cost of maintaining and “modernizing” them. Others have survived because their occupants could not or would not pay the price demanded for more recent buildings. Sometimes the cost of “modernizing” buildings is so great that it is more economical to destroy them and to replace them by new buildings more suitable to contemporary taste and usage. Sometimes their maintenance is too costly to justify the expenditure. In countries in which the ownership of the buildings is in private hands, the consideration of profit from neglect or demolition and then replacement makes old buildings vulnerable. In socialist countries, enthusiasm for novelty, hygienic social ideals and the desire to build visible monuments to the efficacy and benevolence of government lead to the destruction of old buildings. Considerations of familial piety and local and national pride in past achievements sometimes give motives for their maintenance and renewal. By and large, old buildings are always in danger from within themselves and from their users and proprietors.

I find it interesting how both the private profit-oriented and socialistic factors are at work in Singapore’s context (which partly explains why the destruction of old buildings is much more extensive in Singapore than elsewhere). The ruling party /government (there is little difference between them here) is profit-oriented and is quick to demolish old buildings in favour of making profits on selling new ones. In addition, it has that socialistic “enthusiasm for novelty, hygienic social ideals and the desire to build visible monuments” to the efficiency and benevolence it boasts of itself. Thus, a double whammy for old buildings in Singapore.

In 1997, having received death threats after a vicious election campaign in which he was branded, among other things, a “Chinese chauvinist”, opposition politician Tang Liang Hong fled to Johor. Lee Kuan Yew threw scorn on Tang’s reasons for going to Johor:

I was baffled. He claimed that his life was under threat. But, of all places, he went to Johor. That place is notorious for shootings, muggings and car-jackings. It did not make sense for a person who claims to be fearful for his life to go to a place like Johor…

…Why would a person who claims that he needs police protection not go to see the police himself? Why would he instead go to Johor? If there is anywhere where people can do him harm, that is the place…

Lee theorised instead that Tang was fleeing the country for good and did not intend to return to defend himself against the 13 lawsuits Lee and his cronies had filed against him.

I was a mere adolescent when this happened, so I have no memory of the political tension with Malaysia that resulted from Lee’s slander against Johor. I derived the quote above from Francis Seow’s book, Beyond Suspicion? The Singapore Judiciary. Seow also quotes, in that book, an excerpt from an excellent letter that Malaysian lawyer Azzat Kamaludin sent to The New Straits Times. I reproduce the full letter here for your edification.

Chok Tong should ask Kuan Yew to resign over remarks

I REFER to the report entitled “Singapore expresses surprise over Government’s stand” (NST, March 20) wherein Radio Corporation of Singapore reported Singapore Foreign Minister Prof S. Jayakumar as saying that the statement in Lee Kuan Yew’s affidavit was made by the Senior Minister personally in his action against Tang Liang Hong and quoted him as saying that “the affidavit was not made by him as Senior Minister nor did he make it on behalf of the Singapore Government”.

The Minister was once the professor and Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Singapore.

His speciality is constitutional law. As such, he knows or should know very well the convention or practice of ministerial responsibility in a parliamentary system of Government.

Kuan Yew is Senior Minister of Singapore, whatever that means. Hsien Loong is not just Kuan Yew’s son. He is Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore. Together with the professor, they are members of a Government headed, as I understand it, by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. Now if the good professor and his Prime Minister insist that Lee and Hsien Loong were, to borrow an expression, on a frolic of their own, then was there not a responsibility on the Singapore Government, at the least, to dissociate the Government from their scurrilous statements?

Indeed, I venture to suggest that in mature jurisdictions with similar governmental organisations, the Prime Minister, as head of the Government, would require his Cabinet members who express views that contradict Government policy or make statements, private or public, that upset foreign relations, to tender their resignations.

Yet all we have heard from Goh, as reported, is that Kuan Yew has acknowledged he was offside, whatever offside means.

It was by any measure a very curious metaphor to invoke. In games where there is an offside rule, such calls are made by the linesman, the one who runs along the sidelines. Are we to perceive that Goh is the equivalent of a linesman at such a game and not the captain of one of the teams on the field or not even the referee? In the metaphor of games, my perception of a Prime Minister is that he/she is either the captain or at least the referee on the field. When a member of the team or player commits a foul, the captain cautions him or the referee sends him off.

Jayakumar as Foreign Minister should know there is no such thing as the private views or actions of a Minister of the Government. And he should also know that in a parliamentary system of Government that Singapore practises, that is not the way to distance or dissociate yourself from the scurrilous statements of his colleagues. Unless of course he and his other colleagues are powerless to do anything else.

Azzat Kamaludin
Kuala Lumpur

So LKY admitted that the bilingual policy was a mistake. How did he find out it was a mistake? Only because, it seems, he learned from his daughter “late in [his] life” that “language ability and intelligence are two different things”.

So we can conclude that:

1. The early bilingual policy was made on the assumption that language ability and intelligence are the same thing.
2. This assumption was not questioned until the Dear Leader’s daughter informed the Dear Leader otherwise.

(2) is shocking. We seem to make major policy decisions without carefully verifying the empirical claims behind them. And we seem to judge that these are “mistakes” on the basis of what one influential neurologist tells her powerful dad.

In any case, I do not see what the mistake has got to do with whether intelligence and language ability are the same thing. Even if they are the same thing (whatever that means), there are still going to be people who are less intelligent and hence less able to learn languages, so despite the policy, not everyone is going to be bilingual. How does the fact that they are “different things” change this outcome?

Perhaps it’s not the policy of bilingual education per se that he’s saying is a mistake, but the practice of streaming by bilingual ability. In that case, the idea that they are “two different things” is relevant since it tells us we should not label people as lacking overall academic potential just because they do badly in languages. But LKY seems to be explicitly referring to the policy of bilingual education, and not that of streaming by bilingualism.

This statement must surely elicit hysterical laughter from the many Singaporeans now waiting in line for their “affordable” public flats:

HDB flats will remain affordable to the vast majority of Singaporeans.

Also:

HDB flats are not merely roofs over one’s heads, but also comfortable homes that we can raise our families in as well as a valuable asset which can contribute to our retirement needs.

How can it contribute to your retirement needs if you have nowhere to stay after you sell your flat? Oh right, I forgot — you’re supposed to move in with your children. Yeah, HDB flats certainly are ‘assets’ if you’re willing to downgrade your living conditions.

Next, compare

We must also be mindful to be cost-effective when designing and building our flats.

with

Residents can look forward to resort-style housing

Should HDB be in the business of providing “resort-style housing”?

Am I the only one who finds JTC’s housing scheme that is “specially for foreign talents” offensive? Why should locals who are just as talented and just as willing to pay for such housing be excluded?

An astute commentator on Twitter spotted this rather odd question posed by Goh Chok Tong:

How do we bond students going abroad to Singapore, physically if possible, and if not, at least emotionally?

As the astute commentator remarks, there’s something not quite right about the order in which the ‘bonding methods’ are proposed. Before considering how to inculcate in Singaporeans an intrinsic desire to stay in Singapore, Goh considers how to physically confine people to Singapore. What are the possible reasons for this? A few possibilities:

1. An assumption that few would want to stay in Singapore of their own free will; that this is an irremediable situation.
2. An assumption that physical bonding is easier/cheaper than any attempt to win people’s hearts.
3. An authoritarian outlook that sees people primarily as untrustworthy and needing strict control; unwillingness to trust mere psychological incentives.

Accompanying the State’s Times feature of Goh Chok Tong’s warning against “religious enclaves” is a list of the “Ten challenges ahead for S’pore”. Second on the list is “How to convince Singaporeans their lives will get better?” Anyone find this a little strange? Why is it not “How to make Singaporeans’ lives better?” Why is this ‘challenge’ purely about persuading people of the truth of something that may or may not be true?

Is the government assuming here that Singaporeans’ lives will get better, and that it is a failure of public education that most Singaporeans don’t believe that? But if it is so obvious that their lives will get better, why do most people not believe it?

Or is the government itself unsure if their lives will get better, but it nevertheless wants people to believe they will?

Minxin Pei in Think again: Asia’s Rise:

Even when you look at autocracies credited with economic success, you find two interesting facts. First, their economic performance improved when they became less brutal and allowed greater personal and economic freedoms. Second, the keys to their successes were sensible economic policies, such as conservative macroeconomic management, infrastructural investment, promotion of savings, and pushing exports. Dictatorship really has no magic formula for economic development.