The Future of Singapore Part 2

I like to think about Singapore, and my wife enjoys talking about Singapore with me too.

Today, I had the chance to attend some lectures about the region, as well as the current economic situation facing Singapore. The main question is, what should we do as a nation, with the current situation at hand in which there are rising economic giants in the region, and neighbouring countries that are catching up?

In a previous post, I had touched on this too. After attending the lecture today, I had some other thoughts. Singaporeans in the early days have been through a lot to build up the nation. The leaders then thought long and hard, and came up with a formula for success, given the economic situation then. We also adopted a system in which we left the major decisions to the government, which in turn tried to be a good government by attracting the best of the best talents in Singapore via various policies/schemes.

All that was fine when the economic situation does not change as fast as the speed of an electron. When information was still carried by sea and air mail, and overseas telephone calls were expensive, we can afford to wait for the government to help us analyse the economic situation, and come up with broad directions on where to head for next. But when information moves at the speed of the electron, and deals are made or broken over the Internet, we can no longer wait for the government to go through their process before we act. By the time the government comes up something, it may be too late to act.

Another thing to consider is how we have been teaching our people. We have taught ourselves a sense of competition. People are always competing against one another. We compete in school, to see who has the better score for PSLE, who gets to go to a better school (we rank our schools too, based on the results of their students). Then it is who gets the better GCE 'O' level results. And so on, as we move into tertiary education. We compete to get scholarships, and thus securing for ourselves good jobs with good prospects either with the civil service or with the private sector.

The result? This stringent selection process means that those who eventually get selected for top positions went through the process, passing each time, never failing (if they failed, they get weeded out of the selection process). It makes one think if these selected leaders of the future are able to face failure. For life is about failures. We have to learn to handle our failures and turn them into future successes. If Thomas Edison had succeeded in making the light bulb on his first attempt, he would not be remembered for his spirit.

I think the future lies not in following the current and past model for success. Yes, the government has brought us so far, they have shown us what worked, what brought success in the past, given the economic situation then. However, if we try to apply the same process to a different economic situation, it just may not work. What we need to do now is to educate our people to learn to think for themselves, to decide on their own paths, given the understanding they have about their own abilities and the geographical, political, economical and social situation in Singapore and the region. And our education system must be able to instill a sense of competition in our people, without instilling in them the fear of failure.

And we need to change the way we think about competition. If we build an airport, and subsequent a neighbour follows suit and build their own airport, it is not because they are out to compete with us, to steal our business, to kill our advantage in that area. No, they built an airport because it is a requirement of their own economic growth. We should not be looking at how to undermine the developments going on in our neighbouring countries, or how to compete with them to get more business. Instead, we should be focusing on exploring new areas of business, we should be looking at how to exploit the new economic situation brought about by the growth of our neighbours. If economics is just a zero sum game, then the future of the world is bleak, since it means that there is no way for mankind to benefit as a whole.

Thus, the challenge for Singapore is to develop a people that can think for themselves, that can make their own decisions, and know how to handle competition in a healthy manner. This, I think, is the first step in bringing us towards becoming a first world state, with the economic resilience and the human quality to match.