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One constant argument that I have consistently been making against a strong authoritarian government, is that all humans are equally capable of making stupid decisions, venerated politicians included (especially so in fact).
Concentration of power in the State creates many extremely negative effects:
1. Authoritarian governments do not bear the costs of their own stupid mistakes
2. The humans who form authoritarian governments, who are subject to the same human deficiencies as the rest of us, e.g. ego, pride, wish to save face etc, hold on to their stupid ideas long after they have been proven wrong, and thus subject OTHER people to the ill-effects of those policies
3. The individual owns their own body, and the individual should be the only person who can decide what they wish to do to their body. The history of Singapore strongly suggests the opposite, when the State has laws governing all such aspects.
An important point is that Paul Erhlich is just a sad little prophet of doom, but only in authoritarian nations do the State play an active role in implementing policies based on his ideas. Freer societies which did not have State coerced population controls continue to flourish, and Erhlich's predictions never came to pass. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done.
I would like to add that my theory on the difference between rich and poor countries has never been about population. The reason why some countries succeed and some countries fail, is because of the institutions that make up the society.
I really should go into more details of course, but that is the subject of another post, another day.
This reminds me of something else: projections of how many accountants, doctors, etc, that 'Singapore needs' in 'X years time'. These numbers tend to have an enormous effect in steering Singaporeans towards certain courses of study (e.g. 'wah! 10000 accountants needed in a few years' time? Shortfall? Ok I'll go and study accounting!)
Their projections always seem to be confidently made. But they are often wrong. For example,
- In the mid-1990s, 'we must restrict the number of approved medical schools', and only 28 got the 'recognition'.
- today, even some doctors from the so-called 'non-approved/non-recognized medical schools' are allowed to work here, and the list has been (re)expanded...
Heavenly Sword:
Exactly. Methinks the powers that be take the concept of "Mandate from Heaven" a tad bit too seriously, to the point where they actually believe in their own omniscience.
No human can predict the needs or outcomes of markets. If that were possible, the Soviet Union would never have disintegrated, and China would have succeeded in its collectivist economic policies.
Gentle readers,
I have added a link to then-PM Lee Kuan Yew's 1983 National Day Rally speech. It is quite... educational.
Han,
In addition, the management of individuals by bureaucratic fiat and rational incentives, there seems very little acknowledgement of Singaporeans as citizens (other than potential irrationality come election time). The language of population policy is heavily slanted towards Singaporeans as mere factors of production - "labour", "bumper crop", "produce [children]" etc.
On your point about institutions, I used to be very much of the school of thought that Third World societies almost inevitably subvert state institutions (cf. Joel Migdal's Strong Societies and Weak States) until I read Julia Strauss' Strong Institutions in Weak States.
Master Heavenly Sword,
Yes, I made an important life decision as a result of such policies and am still grappling with the consequences. Now that I think about it, public policy in this area reminds me a lot of the boom-bust cycles we've seen in bubble tea and other 'entrepreneurial' fads.
Hi Han, I feel that prediction per se is okay since most govts do it as part of their administrative routines. But I guess they or the mainstream media should present the projections with some tentativeness. Another thing we could do is to teach pple how to interpret information critically (including statistical information) - and Master Dansong is an expert on this.
Master Ringisei, you did? So we both did (I made two wrong decisions, so I'm a bit worse off than you) :]
Book recommendation of the day, from HS: Trust in Numbers - by a historian. Very relevant to what we're discussing here.
ringisei:
One of the more amusing encounters I have had with others in my debates and discussions is their puzzlement at my passion for individual rights, because in their opinion I, being such a "hard-headed economics person", should take a more instrumentalist approach towards the management of "human resource". This really goes to show how far the perception of capitalism has been poisoned by the very actions of our government and by the mainstream media.
With regards to developmental economics, I really reconommend Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. While he does not explicitly talk about institutions, he does describe the necessary foundations for the poor to escape poverty and a crucial pillar are the evolution of institutions that guarantee free and fair dealing between individuals. A follow-up would be a study on the role of institutions in creating wealth, some loosely call it "institutional economics" [study is found in a link to the World Bank in the institutional economics link].
Heavenly Sword:
I know what you mean when you say "prediction per se". I'm quite hesitant to use the word "prediction" in its natural meaning when it comes to formulating public policy.
Perhaps a looser term like "forecasting" or "guesstimation" would sit better with me. Everyday administrative routines would certainly require an element of forecasting as you say, and I think this is very reasonable.
It only goes too far when guesstimations and approximate forecasts translate into a comprehensive policy that has a command and control implementation.
O Heavenly one, many thanks for tipping your straw hat this way. It is oversaid, I am hardly an expert, just someone who is very distrustful of numbers spouted by self-claimed 'experts', especially those with titles ending with -ogist, -ician, -ian, and -ist, and therefore the criticality.
Ringisei, the problem may very well be bureaucratic inertia, that is, the 'autopilot' you quote Ngiam the ex-civil servant turned 'referee kayu' whistle-blower as referring to. Remember that I argued in my post on 'The Flowing River of History' that PAP technocrats run the political scene, so the power of parliament is a rather moot-point, since the technocrats in parliament speak the same language of numbers, factors, equations and econo-/socio-/politico-metric models as the bureaucrats in the government.
Academics like Prof Saw are at a disadvantage in their policy advocacy because they are seen as outside the bureau-fraternity and usually have little access to the statistical information stored in the great classified vault of the technocracy. Only until lately, our universities were murky places of political policing and policy correctness. Statistical research was not supported by government funding until lately too (if IPS spent tens of thousands of dollars on a flawed, unrepresentative statistical survey on the election issues, imagine how much money is needed to do a proper one), and only in areas of social policy the government sees as a CURRENT problem, usually resulting from policies that dealt with problems current at implementation.
The lack of foresight is inexcusable for a technocracy that prides and plans ahead. But this is because their foresight is made up almost entirely of numbers. Numbers contain in them inherent theoretical and philosophical interpretations of the world since they are grouped in categories that are laden with theories. The population policy was predicated on a naturalistic fallacy. The categories of 'man' and 'woman' giving off a 'fertility rate' were and are seen as natural categories. My rendition of how they naturalize the whole thing, seeing only the economic and the social as interruptions of the natural and therefore also as instruments of manipulating the natural.
--- Man like woman, woman like man, they make lots of love, they WILL have lots of babies, unless the Wise One steps in with economic measures to halt their natural inclinations. So the Wise One steps in, bedroom, car backseat or otherwise. Then the Wise One realizes in the 1980s that man like woman, woman like man, but then somehow rather marry late or not at all, make less love so less babies than needed, especially among the more nerdy. The Wise One think that nerds do naturally want to make love but are shy, so try to encourage more love through social programs. Then not only that, the non-nerds not shy, so they naturally make more love, have to stop them or else the natural genepool go downhill (but then a lot of good-natured nerds cry foul, so the Wise One back down, very reluctantly). So back to economic measures, dangle carrots, cut back workdays to get nerds to make more love and more babies.
Maybe this will be my next post: making love is as social-cultural-political-economic as it is natural. When the naturalistic technocrats (maybe for them, it is NATURAL) interfere, they just SCREW everything up because they left out the social-cultural-political-economic dimensions from their numbers. But alas, i don't think i will write that post, because if the technocrats do include those dimensions in their numbers and get IT right, we will then be really SCREWED beyond recognition. I am a libertarian with Han on this, leave us alone to our love-makings!
Actually there's a very easy solution to Singapore's population woes, but nobody dares to say it....
:]
Heavenly Sword:
Really? I can't really think of anything people wouldn't dare say. Personally I would advocate opening up our immigration policy.
Master Sword:
O don't tease us! I dare you on the honor of your sword to say it, then on the honor of my earthly pinewood-staff I will say it with you, so then we both die together if we must.
Sometimes an idea cannot be presented to the public before actual implementation, for a preview of it might cause it to lose the magical effect that it could've been capable of.
Therefore, Master Dansong, I will have to keep you in suspense.
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