There you go. On one hand the people must be more concerned about the issues that affect them. On the other hand they don't give a shit. So how effective can democracy possibly be?
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PAP's New Strategy - will it work?
- Thread starter scroobal
- Start date
There you go. On one hand the people must be more concerned about the issues that affect them. On the other hand they don't give a shit. So how effective can democracy possibly be?
Just a quick response - well we agree democracy's not very effective. But it's better than the alternatives which lead to even worse outcomes (e.g. wannabe-benevolent dictatorships?).
If we agree on this - we can move on to discussing how to make democracy work better rather than worse (more fucked up or less in your words).
Then we can try to work towards that. :-) At least like that more positive, right?
The point I was trying to make is a little more subtle. In 20 years' time, the opposition will need a plan B. If they start now, in 20 years time they will have a plan B ready. If it's only feel good election rally fluffy candy, we will all pay the price.
They can already start making their plan B. There is no need to wait. Having substantial policies is essential to building up your brand. There is no need for secrecy. We've had enough of the secrecy. Anyway when the PAP were dominant, it was more like, "there aren't that many secrets. This is my plan, take it or leave it." So in a way there was transparency. You need to start stating what you believe in, and then you'll attract people who want to work for you. You make a plan so that it turns itself into a bigger plan by attracting like-minded people. If the govt doesn't want you to know something, reach out to the sympathetic civil servants, they can leak stuff to you. Maybe the WP is already doing this. And if they aren't, why the fuck not?
I certainly hope they're currently operating in stealth mode or something. Or there is a possibility one day that WP and SDP will merge into one big party: WP is the grassroots wing, the SDP is the policy wing. It could be pretty bad for the PAP if that happens.
Yes, that's my point also.
Democracy and benevolent dictatorships each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Almost all the booming countries of Asia - Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore - they all started out as benevolent dictatorships. Then you must admit that under certain circumstances the benevolent dictatorships were superior. Then only later on, to greater or lesser degrees, they evolved to democracies with greater or lesser degrees of success.
The most admired institutions in America are the corporations, and the corporations are benevolent dictatorships. If you want the best out of the two systems, you might even have to consider a pendulum that swings back and forth between the two.
But the fact is that democracies and benevolent dictatorships are really not that different. In a democracy, you have 3 months of democracy during election season, and for the rest of the time it is almost like a benevolent dictatorship. That is why your leaders matter and it is not enough to say "just have more democracy, it will all be enough."
Thanks for the reading list - very much appreciated (I've not heard of these books before)! Please add to the list any time you come across worthwhile things. BTW do you read Naked Capitalism (a blog)? - it's a good read and links to many other interesting places, and is very economics focused besides.
Re: popular participation, and the analytic gulf that separates technocrats and laymen... Well, yes, but I don't see the solution as leaving people out of the political process - because... well it's a democracy, right? Instead we should look for ways to bring them in.
What can bring ordinary citizens into analytical discussions?
1. Intermediaries of complex analyses - who can relay difficult concepts to ordinary people well - politicians, civil servants, journalists, activists, etc. They might be institutions too - websites, newspapers, blogs, discussion groups?
2. Trustworthy sources of information - which can come in the form of neutral academic sources, etc - basically sources which don't have biased interests. Is this possible? Well at least not blatant vested interests? Possible, yes?
3. Equipping ordinary citizens to handle analysis - well, obviously you can't make everyone a strong analyst - but some qualities can be enculturated - questioning, skepticism, open minds, evidence-based reasoning? I don't know...
Ultimately, even if we can't bridge the gulf completely - it's still better to have democracy, IMHO.
Re: ordinary people aren't interested in economics - well that's part of the deal with "specialisation of labour" right? I don't think equipping everyone with strong economics knowledge is feasible. We should let the civil servants and academy handle the economics - but depend on other cultural technologies and institutions such as checks and balances to make sure they're working for us and not against us?
Re: gov't spending - well I think there are some clear-cut cases where (lack of) spending is uncontroversial, and greyer areas. (E.g. wanting universal healthcare is clear-cut - its precise implementation is grey?)
Well, Cuba is not a democracy - and would we agree that command economies don't work well? So let's leave command economies out. Same with N. Korea. And let's leave out non-democracy failures too.
I'm no economist and don't clearly understand the discussions about Japan's Lost Decade - can you point me to analyses? I'm especially interested in what Japan ought to have done, as exemplified by other case studies - but other than lack of growth, it seems Japan is a pretty good place to live in - which is the point of politics right?
Haven't heard about UK in the '70s too. Would welcome resources. I tend to find criticisms of the Thatcher years (privatisation of public resources, weakening of labour unions, which raise the wealth gap, with consequences a la Stiglitz - similar to critiques of Reagan and subsequent years in the US).
Re: Venezuela and oil - I know production numbers are down. Maybe they're not exploiting workers or the environment as much. No good sources of info on this. Just making wild guesses.
I don't think the oppo parties are being secretive - I think those who don't reveal plans - don't have a clearly articulated plan! (And it's better to not say you have a plan, than to reveal a bad plan people will criticise.)
I don't think oppo parties should look for sympathetic civil servants to "leak" data - they should campaign the way they are now for more transparency and accountability. I met a scholar-friend of mine not too long ago and we talked about changes in the civil service - he mentioned they were debating whether to release data publicly, so that at least the academics can start doing analyses on things. (It's ironic Singaporean economists don't analyse the Singapore economy - but other economies - just for lack of data!) The problems we face in SG are not just oppo parties who are weak in analysis - it's also the obfuscation of data by the establishment. You can't blame the oppo for not having plans when they can't possibly plan.
I don't know how WP REALLY thinks - but they seem much more centrist-right than the SDP. WP and PAP seem more alike than WP and SDP, IMHO, based on the stuff they put out in public.
Corporations have different goals than societies. There is a danger in corporatising too much - having been in the civil service myself - I think the corporatist influence on the civil service has not been all good. Especially the obsession with KPIs and measurable targets in hard-to-measure things. It causes tunnel-vision. And public services are often precisely in the business of hard-to-measure public goods (try measuring preparing young people for the future, maintaining security and law and order, the benefits of infrastructure, or research and development).
S. Korea and Taiwan started off as military governments. Japan was entirely democratic from the start. Malaysia and Singapore were quite authoritarian only in the days of communist insurgency.
The common thread across all these nations were:
1. Government interfered in economic activity (they were not free markets) - either subsidised local industries, implemented protectionism, nationalised key industries, ignored intellectual property rights, etc.
2. Strong spending on social welfare - literacy levels all shot up, healthcare metrics shot up, lots of measures of people's welfare did.
Stiglitz talked about it as the reverse of the resource curse - right? That because these states didn't have mineral resources - the governments of the day had no choice but to develop its people - its only resource. (Makes you wonder about PAP's platitudes about Singapore having no resources.)
So my take-away from the Asia miracle is - strong social spending today leads to growth tomorrow. It also suggests that you can have strong social spending without having a democracy in charge - but I think Asia bucks the trend in this. Many of these states were also Confucian - and that emphasis on education might have changed things. Maybe we also benefited from the Cold War - the threat of Communism might have made governments treat people better - because they might otherwise switch over to socialism.
Democracy is everybody making decisions, right? When the big big economic decisions are made by a few it's not democracy anymore, right? You can increase the percentage of people interested in all this economic stuff from 20% to 40%? Go ahead. Just be aware that there is an upper limit.
When you have big government spending, you are basically behaving like a command economy. Cuba and North Korea are merely grotesque caricatures of socialism. It is a sliding scale, with communism on one side, free market on the other, and a market economy with plenty of government intervention in the middle. Thing is - if you were to spend too much money on welfare, then that policy is a trap because you can't take it away without losing votes. It might become a burden on the economy. If you subsidise businesses, you could get the same problem - they never learn to operate without help. Or when you start dishing out money, the process of allocating a budget becomes a very politically poisonous environment. All these are downsides to big government spending. Schools, hospitals - these are OK. But even education and health budgets are prone to misuse. So there has to be a balance. Then cronyism creeps in. Any large organisation where only a few people control the purse strings will eventually behave this way - banks, communist governments, corporations. No surprise I've listed the most reviled institutions of our time huh.
Japan - I don't know. Their main problem is that they are too in debt because they state affiliated banks "lent" too much money to the people in their 'hood. Then these became zombie loans - they are on the books but you can't write them off too much or the system would collapse. Toyota is OK. Sony is kaput. Their IT industry is like shit. Their foreign policy is in tatters. They don't have a bright future.
UK - I think maybe a lot of the government was not functioning efficiently during the 70s, and also there were plenty of economic crises, a period much like the 2010s. We all point fingers at Thatcher today but she did solve a lot of problems, although she really went overboard on a few of them.
When you have big government spending, you are basically behaving like a command economy. Cuba and North Korea are merely grotesque caricatures of socialism. It is a sliding scale, with communism on one side, free market on the other, and a market economy with plenty of government intervention in the middle. Thing is - if you were to spend too much money on welfare, then that policy is a trap because you can't take it away without losing votes. It might become a burden on the economy. If you subsidise businesses, you could get the same problem - they never learn to operate without help. Or when you start dishing out money, the process of allocating a budget becomes a very politically poisonous environment. All these are downsides to big government spending. Schools, hospitals - these are OK. But even education and health budgets are prone to misuse. So there has to be a balance. Then cronyism creeps in. Any large organisation where only a few people control the purse strings will eventually behave this way - banks, communist governments, corporations. No surprise I've listed the most reviled institutions of our time huh.
Japan - I don't know. Their main problem is that they are too in debt because they state affiliated banks "lent" too much money to the people in their 'hood. Then these became zombie loans - they are on the books but you can't write them off too much or the system would collapse. Toyota is OK. Sony is kaput. Their IT industry is like shit. Their foreign policy is in tatters. They don't have a bright future.
UK - I think maybe a lot of the government was not functioning efficiently during the 70s, and also there were plenty of economic crises, a period much like the 2010s. We all point fingers at Thatcher today but she did solve a lot of problems, although she really went overboard on a few of them.
Well exactly, then you wonder why I was criticised so much when I said that there is a big problem if oppo parties try to run the civil service, or engage with the civil service. When I said big problem it means we have to solve it, rather than it's an argument against the opposition.
In the US there is an open data movement. I don't know if it will ever catch on in Singapore. We are secretive of our data to the extent that we no longer are able to use it effectively or efficiently. I forsee this as one thing that will cripple Singapore's growth in the future.
The opposition parties must signal their intention to engage with anybody who wants to come forward with data and information. Campaigning for transparency and accepting leaks go hand in hand. The more you can tell them "well we'll get the information anyway by hook or by crook" the more the govt will be forced to acknowledge that you don't have a choice but to put information out.
For the WP, the Chinese speaking segment of the population are naturally more politically conservative. It's a reflection of their base.
Yes. It showed them where the pain threshold is. It certainly is not where Mah BT told them.
Shreds? Really?
Just to be sure we are reading the same post, can you provide the link here?
===EDIT===
Ah I see. Ripped to shreds like I did to your highly intelligent comment here?
http://www.sammyboy.com/showthread....-Party-Punggol-East-SMC&p=1326956#post1326956
But no, I dun see it so far happening to "competition always, always benefits the consumers". That statement is still sitting nicely, in its entirety.
Still waiting for your killer blow.
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Hi metalmickey thanks for responding fast (it does take time away from other stuff - affects me too - I appreciate it.)
Re: gov't spending - well, I think most reasonable people agree that utmost left or right is not feasible. So most people are debating what is a good mix. That still leaves a huge swathe of grey (even if we eliminate extremes such as 10% of GDP, or 90% of GDP).
I just think we shouldn't fall into ideological positions such as "big spending is bad" - because first - how big is big? 50% of (non-boom non-recession) GDP? 25%? 10%? Given that all economies are different, and people inhabiting them aim differently at life, wouldn't "big enough" be different for all societies (and isn't the only way to gauge things - democracy - I mean, how else do we determine rather value-based/moralistic things like - "What is a good life?" - unless you think technocrats know what is a good life better than the people living those lives themselves?)?
And second - exact implementation matters. E.g. American healthcare is very inefficient compared to Europe - e.g. http://prospect.org/article/health-nations ; but then again - it can be tricky when you don't have good metrics - for e.g. Singapore has very good education metrics, but our workforce isn't exactly famous, and in contrast, Israel and Germany have mediocre education metrics but great industrial success, and their workers are in demand. (Talking about metrics always gets me sidetracked - look at Sweden, fertility rates are bouncing back up to 1.8+ (and it's similar across Scandinavia) - that's a really hard-to-measure side-effect of strong social spending on child support and education... I don't know if the technocrats have found a way to measure that - but I think in general there're lots of bounce-on effects that are pretty hard to measure!)
So we have established:
1. "big/small" is subjective to the moral stances of individuals in a society, and to material conditions of particular economies
2. details matter - we need good (and loyal) technocrats, good technical answers to enact the moral desires of society
3. it is hard to measure certain effects of social spending
Then you talk about how it's hard to make a reversal against excess welfare - or perhaps say an adjustment of welfare spending to suit current exigencies (boosts in recessions and cuts in booms, perhaps). You also talk about subsidising businesses being not-so-ideal (but we just talked about S. Korea's protected steel and shipyard industries, about lots of nationalised firms in Asian miracle nations - for certain periods in history - and they were weaned off it over time).
I'm wondering if you're perhaps overly cynical about people's and businesses' ability to adjust (esp. when they're forced to adjust by a strong team of technocrats either in the civil service or the academy - who are loyal to their society; pretty much what a mixed economy is about, yes? i.e. free markets except where intervention will improve outcomes, prevent externalities and monopolies, etc).
So, having said all that - it seems to me that good democratic processes and institutions can solve these problems (the problem is can we get good democratic processes?!). People elect representatives who articulate their moral stances. Technocrats provide technical solutions. All this is done without concentrations and abuses (not too much) of power. Because abuses are prevented or punished by removing people from positions of power. Thus, these processes arrive at the (more or less) optimal technical solution to the aggregated moral desires of the society. It's all very idealistic - but it looks like the best thing to aim for, IMHO. (which brings me to cronyism - isn't the best defence against cronyism a WORKING democracy?)
These are my lousy laymen views anyway. Maybe I'm wrong or too idealistic, but it gives me something to aim for in politics, some general principle to abide by. Otherwise - what do we aim for? I'm reluctant to just throw up my hands in despair and say "I wash my hands off society.", or to say "!@#$-it lah, I will just be selfish and act in my own interests."
(Suddenly I feel like it's quite nice to be a sheep. I wish there's a shepherd around I could trust... thinking hard about things just makes me realise I don't know a lot...)
Re: gov't spending - well, I think most reasonable people agree that utmost left or right is not feasible. So most people are debating what is a good mix. That still leaves a huge swathe of grey (even if we eliminate extremes such as 10% of GDP, or 90% of GDP).
I just think we shouldn't fall into ideological positions such as "big spending is bad" - because first - how big is big? 50% of (non-boom non-recession) GDP? 25%? 10%? Given that all economies are different, and people inhabiting them aim differently at life, wouldn't "big enough" be different for all societies (and isn't the only way to gauge things - democracy - I mean, how else do we determine rather value-based/moralistic things like - "What is a good life?" - unless you think technocrats know what is a good life better than the people living those lives themselves?)?
And second - exact implementation matters. E.g. American healthcare is very inefficient compared to Europe - e.g. http://prospect.org/article/health-nations ; but then again - it can be tricky when you don't have good metrics - for e.g. Singapore has very good education metrics, but our workforce isn't exactly famous, and in contrast, Israel and Germany have mediocre education metrics but great industrial success, and their workers are in demand. (Talking about metrics always gets me sidetracked - look at Sweden, fertility rates are bouncing back up to 1.8+ (and it's similar across Scandinavia) - that's a really hard-to-measure side-effect of strong social spending on child support and education... I don't know if the technocrats have found a way to measure that - but I think in general there're lots of bounce-on effects that are pretty hard to measure!)
So we have established:
1. "big/small" is subjective to the moral stances of individuals in a society, and to material conditions of particular economies
2. details matter - we need good (and loyal) technocrats, good technical answers to enact the moral desires of society
3. it is hard to measure certain effects of social spending
Then you talk about how it's hard to make a reversal against excess welfare - or perhaps say an adjustment of welfare spending to suit current exigencies (boosts in recessions and cuts in booms, perhaps). You also talk about subsidising businesses being not-so-ideal (but we just talked about S. Korea's protected steel and shipyard industries, about lots of nationalised firms in Asian miracle nations - for certain periods in history - and they were weaned off it over time).
I'm wondering if you're perhaps overly cynical about people's and businesses' ability to adjust (esp. when they're forced to adjust by a strong team of technocrats either in the civil service or the academy - who are loyal to their society; pretty much what a mixed economy is about, yes? i.e. free markets except where intervention will improve outcomes, prevent externalities and monopolies, etc).
So, having said all that - it seems to me that good democratic processes and institutions can solve these problems (the problem is can we get good democratic processes?!). People elect representatives who articulate their moral stances. Technocrats provide technical solutions. All this is done without concentrations and abuses (not too much) of power. Because abuses are prevented or punished by removing people from positions of power. Thus, these processes arrive at the (more or less) optimal technical solution to the aggregated moral desires of the society. It's all very idealistic - but it looks like the best thing to aim for, IMHO. (which brings me to cronyism - isn't the best defence against cronyism a WORKING democracy?)
These are my lousy laymen views anyway. Maybe I'm wrong or too idealistic, but it gives me something to aim for in politics, some general principle to abide by. Otherwise - what do we aim for? I'm reluctant to just throw up my hands in despair and say "I wash my hands off society.", or to say "!@#$-it lah, I will just be selfish and act in my own interests."
(Suddenly I feel like it's quite nice to be a sheep. I wish there's a shepherd around I could trust... thinking hard about things just makes me realise I don't know a lot...)
I'm gonna interrupt you guys with a comment - let's not be so antagonistic lah. I think we all make mistakes when we type faster than we think - and that's gonna happen on internet forums. We're not publishing academic peer-reviewed journal articles here, yeah?
I'm trying to keep an open mind (but my mind got limited power - so a bit hard to digest all the information thrown at it). Let's focus on the positive things we can do (learn more ourselves, educate others, etc), no need get too hung up about minor mistakes that aren't very crucial.
(It's minor because everything hinges on the word "always". "Always" makes strong statements, which are easy to disprove - I thought the advertising point disproved SgParent's point - but it depends on how he defines "benefit" - if he wants to say a good advertisement makes you enjoy the product more - then it doesn't work. I think by and large we all agree that it would be better for Singapore's political landscape to be more competitive, so let's leave it at that and move on, yeah?)
Ditto. Same thing I worry about. In fact, in some other post, I mentioned worrying about whether they 'love' the ISA.
Begging for something is, like, so undignified.
No, you misread me. Like I said before, the point is not how much you spend, but how well you spend it. What I was illustrating does not mean that when you have big government it goes bad, but rather this is how it would go bad, if it does go bad. I was illustrating the potential pitfalls of government spending. My point is that just like you said, more spending is not necessarily bad, but also it is not necessarily good.
Similarly, democracy or dictatorship, it doesn't really matter. (And by the way, Japan government started out more or less as a dictatorship during the Meiji. South Korea and Taiwan's military governments were dictatorships.) Singapore's golden period took place during a dictatorship, which we all can agree on. And it also later turned sour under a dictatorship. So it doesn't really matter as much as good governance or bad governance. Whatever you illustrated in your example of a well functioning example is just one model that we can consider, and there are many others. But since this looks like the way we will be going, we should try to make it work, although there is a lot of things that need to be done that are still incomplete.
Even when you talk about the power of democracy to enforce good governance, remember this: the most important policies which have the biggest impact on people take a very long time to take effect. The threat of removing people who screw up does not really work. 2 of the worst policies that got Singapore into where it is today are the asset enhancement policy and the national plan to increase Singapore's population to 5.5 million. Both were policies which took place in the 90s, and a few people were quite worried about those policies at that time but they were very few. So the PAP is being punished now for screw ups in the 90s. This is the way that democracy is supposed to work, you can see that it worked exactly how it was supposed to work, and you can also see that it is not good enough.
So yes, even when you build up democracy in Singapore you should also open your eyes big and understand that it's quite limited. Anyway, the government is no longer all powerful in Singapore. People in general have an exaggerated view of what the government can achieve in this day and age, based on what it was able to achieve in the 60s and the 70s. They're likely to be disappointed.
America is a country where you can see that even though everybody has plenty of freedom, a lot of lies get told in the political arena. Then you have to go and study that system and think for yourself why it doesn't work. Issues are raised about deadlock - well we don't have to worry about deadlock until opposition gets their 35% of seats in parliament but why don't we find out everything about the opposition before it happens? The other big problem of America is deficit and it is the direct result of the political competition that sgparent loves. Both parties were for a very long time competing with each other to bring the US into a deficit - one wanted to spend more, the other wanted to benefit businesses and cut taxes. The US deficit is largely a result of that competition.
You don't understand, he was like that from the start. This is a guy who's asking to get kicked in the face every time he opens his mouth.
And I thought I'd already commented on your advertizing example, that it has nothing to do with competition?
Unless your example is about 2 fast food chains, one is good with advertizing, the other not. And if that is the case, the kids benefited because they get the food + bright, colorful advertisement, instead of just the food alone.
So the word "always" still stands true.
As mentioned, having competition that always, always benefits the consumers is only the baby first step.
But before that has even started, we already have highly intelligent people like metalmickey casting doubt that competition is not always good. The same metalmickey who claimed he is in USA but posting comments when it was late night there, who called the White Scums "master" only to then say it's sarcasm, suggested that civil services/Singapore will collapse when an alternative government is formed.
People like him, I labeled "fake Oppo supporters", are slowing/stopping us from reclaiming what's left of this island for ourselves and our children. Whether he does so directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, is irrelevant.
So do you think I should move on, just like that? Or I should post my alternate view, so that people reading this thread can make their own informed conclusion?
Begging? Begging you?
Pls. You have an inflated sense of your importance.
I'm daring you.
Yes, I'm daring you to do just that.
Shall we start with you making a stand with your killer blow?
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