Today - Pay does not equate talent
Letter from Tan Si An 04:46 AM Jan 07, 2012
MANY of our most able statesmen were from academia, such as Minister Yaacob Ibrahim, Professor Tommy Koh and Professor S Jayakumar. As professors, would they command the salaries of the top 1,000 earners here?
Does that mean professors are not some of the smartest, most capable persons in our population? There is, therefore, no basis for using pay as a measure of talent.
Sixty per cent of our current Cabinet ministers were career civil servants before joining politics. Only Mr Gan Kim Yong has served as chief executive officer in the private sector. (Dr Vivian Balakrishnan was CEO of the Singapore General Hospital.)
Former ministers who left Cabinet last year are now not in any executive role in the private sector. Is it, therefore, appropriate to compare ministers to CEOs?
Successful businessmen-turned-politicians such as Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg in the United States are the kind of established talents we want to attract. Do they not face the same sacrifices, opportunity costs and loss of privacy as all politicians do?
Since they are independently wealthy, pay was unlikely to be a factor. How do you put a price tag on such talents?
A country is not a company, although Minister K Shanmugam once said that Singapore was a city, not a country. So it may be more appropriate to benchmark against mayors of alpha cities such as New York, London, Paris and Tokyo.
Members of Parliament Seah Kian Peng, Muhammad Faishal and Senior Minister of State Grace Fu mentioned that money is not a key factor, yet the latter two wondered if lesser pay would cause problems in attracting top talent into politics.
But this premise is also fallacious. MP Chen Show Mao is a fine counter example. He was a top corporate lawyer who gave up his career for public service, even though he has no chance of becoming a minister.
Other political parties also managed to attract scholar-calibre candidates for last year's General Election, even though they had faint chance of becoming MPs, much less ministers. Were they motivated by pay?
Letter from Tan Si An 04:46 AM Jan 07, 2012
MANY of our most able statesmen were from academia, such as Minister Yaacob Ibrahim, Professor Tommy Koh and Professor S Jayakumar. As professors, would they command the salaries of the top 1,000 earners here?
Does that mean professors are not some of the smartest, most capable persons in our population? There is, therefore, no basis for using pay as a measure of talent.
Sixty per cent of our current Cabinet ministers were career civil servants before joining politics. Only Mr Gan Kim Yong has served as chief executive officer in the private sector. (Dr Vivian Balakrishnan was CEO of the Singapore General Hospital.)
Former ministers who left Cabinet last year are now not in any executive role in the private sector. Is it, therefore, appropriate to compare ministers to CEOs?
Successful businessmen-turned-politicians such as Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg in the United States are the kind of established talents we want to attract. Do they not face the same sacrifices, opportunity costs and loss of privacy as all politicians do?
Since they are independently wealthy, pay was unlikely to be a factor. How do you put a price tag on such talents?
A country is not a company, although Minister K Shanmugam once said that Singapore was a city, not a country. So it may be more appropriate to benchmark against mayors of alpha cities such as New York, London, Paris and Tokyo.
Members of Parliament Seah Kian Peng, Muhammad Faishal and Senior Minister of State Grace Fu mentioned that money is not a key factor, yet the latter two wondered if lesser pay would cause problems in attracting top talent into politics.
But this premise is also fallacious. MP Chen Show Mao is a fine counter example. He was a top corporate lawyer who gave up his career for public service, even though he has no chance of becoming a minister.
Other political parties also managed to attract scholar-calibre candidates for last year's General Election, even though they had faint chance of becoming MPs, much less ministers. Were they motivated by pay?