What the SDP Means to Me – Jeremy Chen

[yellowarse]

A sensible and well-articulated piece that echoes the sentiments of many of the young people joining the SDP .

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What the SDP Means to Me (Version 2)

Submitted by convexset on Sun, 05/05/2013 - 02:06

(This is a revision of an earlier version.)

I am from the SDP and help out in the Policy group and also the Ground Operations team (most of my involvement has been with the former though). Let me describe my interpretation of the broad party platform. We want to make necessities like housing and healthcare affordable so people have a secure base to stand on, which gives them the capacity to take risks in business ventures, create value through social causes, and generally lead fulfilled lives with the basic security of a sturdy base to stand upon.

It is well established in economic circles that a society can only succeed if there is a strong middle that has the capacity to take risks and the assurance that the gains from taking those risks are not taken from them (rule of law; reasonable tax rates). (This includes high ranking bankers[SUP]1[/SUP] who, I suppose, have some credibility in discussing business and macroeconomics. So we are on solid economic ground here.)

The SDP wants to level up the economy through improving the education system and raising the level of capability in the economy through improved technologies and process. The PAP wants to do this, but does not behave like it recognizes the economic rut we are in because the prevailing environment discourages productivity investments[SUP]2[/SUP].

While bread and butter issues are what most Singaporeans are concerned about, I think it is important to talk about party principles. Policies flow from principles, and outcomes on bread and butter issues depend on policy. The SDP is at core a party that desires civil rights for Singaporeans. This means individual and group liberties are respected while being harmonized with group welfare. Needless to say, the SDP is a party that promotes democracy, meaning that we believe the people should have a strong say in policy making. (This is how we think of democracy, which some caricature as tyranny of the many over the few.) Finally, the SDP believes in ensuring the material well-being of Singaporeans today and the viability and dynamism of the Singapore economy extending into the future. This is my view of the SDP and would not be too different from how many other SDP members view the principles of the SDP.

I'd like to propose a concise formulation of the SDP's principles in a similar form to 孙中山's (Sun Yat Sen's) 三民主义 (Three Principles of the People).

1. 民尊 (Respect for the People) to represent the SDP's commitment to Civil Rights, which means, precisely, respect for citizens and treating the citizenry with dignity[SUP]3[/SUP].
2. 民权 (Democracy) to represent our commitment to democratic values.
3. 民生 for the material well-being of Singaporeans today, and the long term viability and dynamism of the Singapore economy into the future.

This is what the SDP means to me. Many fellow SDP members think along similar lines. I guess what I am trying to say is this: The SDP alternative is sensible and principled; do consider us.

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• 1.In February, was at a dialogue with Navtej Nandra from Morgan Stanley and I asked the closing question on what would be an appropriate level of social and economic security for a society. I cited the example of a society where healthcare and housing were unaffordable and the middle class has no more capacity to take risk. He did not answer my question. Instead, he spent five minutes reinforcing the point, highlighting that this is an important question to be asked.
• 2.Since the policy discourse in Singapore seems to be fixated on growth numbers, in the language of growth accounting, the SDP promotes investments in the two of the three elements of GDP growth (capital and productivity), leaving out the easy bit which is labour supply. Labour supply expansion should be a short term adjustment tool, not a long term growth strategy as the PAP uses it now.
• 3.This replaces the principle of Nationalism (民族). My own sense is that it is preferable to let a Singapore identity emerge organically from the interactions between Singaporeans (and foreigners) in Singapore.

Jeremy Chen is currently a PhD student at the Department of Decision Sciences at NUS Business School.

 

[scroobal]

There are 2 ways to treat political parties if you are keen to serve society. One is to use it as a vehicle or a platform with a group of like-minded individuals and aim to be elected or help others with a similar frame of mind to be elected. The second is think that the party is the political end and start singing praises about its leader and the party. This guy is in category 2. His write-up is so child-like . Nearly everything is a motherhood statement.

They never seem to learn -http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://bschool.nus.edu/Portals/0/images/navtejnandra-profile.pdf. Still hooked on foreigners and all things foreign. Then they wonder why they do not get much votes.

 

[yellowarse]

This guy is in category 2. His write-up is so child-like . Nearly everything is a motherhood statement.

He is still young. Very bright, but perhaps a tad naïve politically.

But the idealism shines through. This bodes well for the young people coming up through the ranks in the SDP as the electorate is increasingly pushing for our own Ubah. (What's lacking in the other political parties today, including the PAP, is the lack of ideology underpinning policy-making and a strong sense of idealism – the can-doism – among their members.)

The vital challenge for these young folk, of course, is how to translate this youthful idealism into policies that work and benefit the people, and how to win votes by being politically astute and physically connecting with the voters in the heartland.

 

[Thick Face Black Heart]

One thing for Mr 孙中山 to consider:

How to translate his ideas with something which the older generation can related to?

With the population growth so slow, the pre-65 generation will remain a large voting bloc for quite some time to come.

 

[scroobal]

Good points. Agree. He should immerse himself in social and civic activities and in political discussion groups which are not party aligned. That will help him to come across as a politician or political activist with society focus and society agenda rather than a party or party leader groupie no different to Kong Hee followers.

Both VW and PT (yes, both of them again) always sell their ideas, their thoughts around society and country. They recognise the importance of SDP in providing the platform and the means to push these important messages thru.

Hopefully someone can create a roundtable setup for the capable ones amongst the new generation to come together and share ideas and plans in the area of politics and state policies.

He is still young. Very bright, but perhaps a tad naïve politically.

But the idealism shines through. This bodes well for the young people coming up through the ranks in the SDP as the electorate is increasingly pushing for our own Ubah. (What's lacking in the other political parties today, including the PAP, is the lack of ideology underpinning policy-making and a strong sense of idealism – the can-doism – among their members.)

The vital challenge for these young folk, of course, is how to translate this youthful idealism into policies that work and benefit the people, and how to win votes by being politically astute and physically connecting with the voters in the heartland.

 

[metalmickey]

This guy is a mathematician. Saying that this guy is very bright is equivalent to saying that our dear PM is very bright. It doesn't really mean anything and anyway it's not the right type of brightness.

I've actually seen this guy's blog before. He has been blogging for almost 10 years. It's good that he wants to join the SDP and get involved with alternative policy proposals.

There was this time when he proposed a solution on collecting GST. He wanted to make it more progressive: smaller transactions get taxed less, larger transactions get taxed more. If you think about it for five minutes, it is a stupid solution. Because if I buy 10 chocolate bars, I get taxed more, and if I buy 1 chocolate bar 10 times, I get taxed less. So all those people with filipino maids will just end up getting their maids to shop for their groceries 10 times to save money, and those poor people with no time, will still end up paying more tax. It was pretty bone-headed. To be sure, that was just a blog entry and everybody has put up a stupid blog entry at some point or another. But it makes me wonder.

So it's pretty difficult for me to comment on how good this guy is. You don't judge the SDP based upon its manifesto, and I don't judge this guy based on grand sweeping statements like "what the SDP means to me". The right place to judge is to review in full one of their lengthy policy proposals, and see whether or not it makes sense.

The pity of SDP is this: their full potential can only be realised if they're good at producing statistics and numbers to back up their claims. But they don't have access to the numbers.

Some people have talked about how the ideas will appeal to the electorate. Unfortunately good ideas do not translate well to the electorate. You cannot have an exaggerated view that the electorate knows best. You can have a more democratic system than us, like the US, but they cannot do the correct thing. They cannot get rid of their 1 cent coins like we have, they cannot ban handguns like we have, and they cannot switch to the metric system like the rest of the world has.

Everybody knows that life in Singapore is getting tougher. What the SDP can do politically is to illustrate in more concrete detail how life is getting tougher: how much the average Singaporean spends on various things, and you compare it to other countries. Then it becomes abundantly clear that your car and your house is robbing you of everything. Negative attack advertisements like the following can be very powerful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

It won't be that easy to talk to the pre-1965 generation about policy. They won't take it well. For years the PAP established the remarkable balancing act of making welfare and income redistribution dirty words, while at the same time carrying out policy which is remarkably socialist.

I usually take what Mahbubani says with a big dose of salt, but in this article he's basically on the money when he reminds us of how left wing the PAP used to be: http://www.straitstimes.com/breakin...e-singaporeans-ideological-prisoners-20130511

And they moved away from that during the last 20 years. Tharman said that the new cabinet, the one that replace those old guys flushed out in 2011, is more left wing than the old one. That means - SDP - the PAP is going to reclaim some of your turf.

What the SDP has are ideas. Ideas are best communicated through infographics. Use these infographics to illustrate the policy failures of the PAP of the last 20 years. That is my advice. Talk about how income inequality adversely affects the poor or the middle class. Identify the people who are rent-seekers and show everybody how these people are draining off the Singaporean economy. Show everybody how the rich people are paying very little tax. Show everybody how the cartelisation of the TLC economy is imposing a strain on the people by creating an artificial monopoly.

Don't say stupid things like "the PAP is going to raise the GST to 10%". I rolled my eyes at that when I heard that during GE 2011 because everybody knows that ain't going to happen. So when you say something that's not going to happen, you look dumb.

 

[paulhong]

Wow. Jeremy Chen is so impressive. I think he has IQ of 180.



About Jeremy

Hi, my name is Jeremy Chen and I'm currently a PhD student at the Department of Decision Sciences at NUS Business School. This site is where will be I doing a little bit of self-promotion, talk about my research, share some of my thoughts on various subjects and provide some tools and toys that I have created along the way.

If you are interested, here is a copy of my resume/CV.

My Intellectual Interests
I'm very much interested in Mechanism Design, which in its most practical sense is the design of the "rules of the game" so as to align the behavior of self-interested individuals to good social outcomes (such as welfare maximization or "minimal disenfranchisement"). As applied to "the real world", Mechanism Design is about creating institutions that support the interests of an organization (such as performance appraisal systems) or society as a whole (e.g.: electoral systems, auctions of licenses). From time to time, I write about how we can construct institutions that are aligned with social objectives using ideas from Mechanism Design. I came to be interested in Mechanism Design due to my existing interest in politics and public policy so it is not too surprising that my explorartions in mechanism design revolve chiefly around that.

Presently, in my research, I find myself working on discrete choice. I'm part of a industrial collaboration where a choice model called the Marginal Distribution Model (MDM) is being applied to industrial data. That project has spawned a subsidiary theoretical investigation into how to efficiently solve joint product-line selection and pricing problems with a particular case of the MDM and one on realistically modeling substitution patterns. I've also some work on discrete choice under the influence of a consumer recommendation network. All in all, I'd say I'm having a good time.

My Professional Past
In a previous life, I worked at the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) where I worked on developing decision support systems and performing operational studies. I built tools for process simulation, developed methodologies for understanding the vulnerability of networks and grouping "work-centres" that live on a network. But somehow my most enduring work at DSTA is in the area of tender evaluation where I helped develop methodological improvements and created tools to enhance line productivity. As I was leaving DSTA, I left them a tool called tEval, which goes beyond all existing tender evaluation/decision evaluation tools (to the best of my knowledge) in supporting decisions where "combinatorial explosion" in the number of alternatives can occur due to the presence of "configurable options". (It also includes a pairwise comparison-based evaluation mode that removes the "weight distortion" problem that causes rank reversal, but few people care about the math.) In a sense, that parting gift was my way of thanking the organization and its leadership for the opportunities it granted me before I had even earned them (if I had at all).

My Beliefs

I believe in "social justice" and "the free market", and in particular that they can be beautifully synthesized. It is for this reason that I am politically aligned with the Singapore Democratic Party, which I am a member of. I believe that everything should have a price in that positive and negative externalities should be pair for/taxed. I believe that "we are all connected" and all manner of economic (structural) happenstance and social (positional) fortuity lead to the creation of wealth that is incompletely attributed to individuals or groups of individuals. Thus, the collective is responsible to the individual for his misfortune, just as the individual, in this fortune, is responsible to the collective.

My Curious Moniker
All the articles and posts on this website are submitted by some convexset character. So, I've been using the moniker convexset for quite some time. What it means is...

Definition (Convex Set). A set S is convex if and only if for any x,y∈S and for any α∈[0,1], αx+(1−α)y∈S.

I decided on that pseudonym at a time when I was very interested in optimization. (Optimization problems where the objective function is "convex", in another sense, and the set of feasible decisions is convex are "efficiently solvable" and have a host of other great properties.)

 

[paulhong]

To be a successful politician, you have to tell people how much profit you made for your company and what are the big changes you made to your organisation and you must know how to carry babies. Telling the whole world how nerdy or geeky you are doesn't help leh.

 

[yellowarse]

To be a successful politician, you have to tell people how much profit you made for your company and what are the big changes you made to your organisation and you must know how to carry babies. Telling the whole world how nerdy or geeky you are doesn't help leh.

Tell that to the maths geek who became our PM.

 

[metalmickey]

I hope that this guy keeps on being a wonk and not stand for elections. I'm sure any political party would need people like him to be in the background cranking up ideas and feeding them to speechwriters and working out political strategy. Just don't put him anywhere near a podium.

I also know what a convex set is, and I also know optimisation. I just dowan to tell the whole world about it, that's all.

 

[zhihau]

but the idealism shines through.

he sounds like a perfect candidate to be a teacher! :p:p:p

 

[scroobal]

Aiyoh. I nearly fainted when I read post 6. Agree with MMickey and Zihau.

He has no clue how to operate in different paradigms. I even wonder if he knows why incest is taboo. You can't let this guy lose on voters. They will certainly move from convex to truly vexed.

 

[yellowarse]

I hope that this guy keeps on being a wonk and not stand for elections. I'm sure any political party would need people like him to be in the background cranking up ideas and feeding them to speechwriters and working out political strategy. Just don't put him anywhere near a podium.

Every political party which is seriously intent on forming a govt will need its share of policy wonks. At this juncture, policy is Jeremy's strength and he knows it and that's where the lion's share of his contribution to SDP lies.

As I said, he's still young and politically naïve. Give him time; the maturity will come.

 

[Thick Face Black Heart]

Tell that to the maths geek who became our PM.

The pinky may have a math degree but he is not a geek, just a goon.

 

[Thick Face Black Heart]

I even wonder if he knows why incest is taboo. .

You haven't been paying attention. Incest is taboo because its objective function does not admit a convex solution set.

 

[jw5]

You haven't been paying attention. Incest is taboo because its objective function does not admit a convex solution set.

Poor Jeremy. Kena tekanned by Jeremy for being an idealistic young man keen on politics. :(

 

[metalmickey]

This thing about Jeremy being an idealistic young man - convexset.blogspot.com has been around for almost 10 years. (The oldest entries are no longer there). He's almost as old as me, and is a few years older than - say - Nicole Seah. He's probably already older than Paul McCartney was when he broke up the Beatles.

ie in a couple of years the term "young man" will no longer apply to him.

This policy analysis thing - the name of the game is wisdom. This is what we're looking for and what we expect. (btw I haven't read a lot of his stuff closely so I'm not yet blasting him).

 

[scroobal]

He is not suitable to do policy work. The guy can't read people. EQ is low. They probably impressed by his scientific work. The guy is a rocket scientist.

 

[mei mei]

Maybe he is a future candidate for the opposition?

 

[Bababala]

He is not suitable to do policy work. The guy can't read people. EQ is low. They probably impressed by his scientific work. The guy is a rocket scientist.

.
So you have a very high EQ huh?