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For today, Dr. Chang arranged for a discussion at the ongoing hamster convention; he looked a little... changed, but this being Mr. Ham, I mean, Dr. Chang, I let it go. These Opinions Do Not Reflect Those Of The Blog Dr. Chang: Ah, a human. The Gender Behavioural Workshop isn't slated to begin for an hour, but this means that we are free for a quick one-on-one chat, yes? Me: Uhm, just an observation - for the upcoming Singapore General Elections, from admittedly anecdotal and sample-size-limited observation, it seems that even controlling for other variables such as age, females are rather more likely to be incumbent supporters, relative to men. Might you shed some light on this phenomenon? Dr. Chang: *claps paws* Well, well. Voting patterns based on gender have been well-studied, but the prevailing trend in most - Western - developed countries has been women moving to the left, most notably probably for the Democratic Party in the States. Since this is not the case in Singapore, it behooves me to propose an explanation, and I can offer several possibilities, offhand. First of all, your incumbents have, for a long while, implicitly claimed a sole political legitimacy - i.e., opposition parties are irresponsible bicycle thieves. I'd say that, particularly in Asian societies, women tend towards being more obedient, risk-averse and conformist than men, which becomes conservatism in the "don't meddle with the status-quo" sense. It should be understood, however, that this effect is largely independent of the existing status-quo. In other words, as a thought experiment, imagine that it had been the Workers Party/Barisan Sosialis - itself once the left wing of the current incumbent party - that had prevailed. It is my suspicion, then, that a fair proportion of existing incumbent supporters - not all female - would have rationalized their support for the WP/BS, for whatever reason; not that this is wrong, mind.  This is also not wrong at all. (Source: forums.hardwarezone.com.sg) Secondly, I suspect that they might be more socially-conscious, and base their opinions on group identification. Just for example, a lady might discern that grammatically-challenged and boobie-loving forumites tend to be for the opposition, and therefore wish to disassociate herself from their preferences. However, this may not actually be the soundest policy for basing assessments on, being, if I may say so, unjustified truth-value-undefined belief. Me: Actually, I've got a weakness for this sort of fluffy logic, as happens with invisible magic skyfathers - it's simply so... adorable. You just want to squeeze it and muss it up. Dr. Chang: As it happens, a third explanation would be that women tend to subscribe to a "fixed alpha" mentality in general, and prefer male status rank to be permanent. In this scenario, the incumbents can be considered to have established themselves as a patriarch - hmm, the analogy's becoming mildly inappropriate. Anyway, you can observe this in Nature, when the new big cat kills or drives off the old alpha, most of his harem tends to rapidly gain new insights into fresh paradigms and right thought, and... Me: Um, just a moment here before I get blackballed - you're Dr. Chang Shu, right? Dr. Chang: *disappointed* I'm Dr. Richard Chang, Hartung Chair of Evolutionary Psychology at the Hamster Institute for Advanced Gender Studies. If you want Dr. Chang Shu, he's down the hall, second left. Umma not gonna let me finish, then? This Is Not A Poll Hor Dr. Chang: Ah, I see you've met Dickie. Clever fellow, that one. Some of the most realistic and clear-headed thinking that I've come across. He's finding it hard to get funding, I hear, but you can't put a price on integrity. Me: Had quite a long WhatsApp conversation with the high school guys, myself. But let's get straight to the meat, on what will happen, and why it should happen. So, first things first - Dr. Chang, your electoral projections? Dr. Chang: It's a little early, but my current reading is for the Workers' Party to retain their current three wards, and add Fengshan SMC to the mix, with East Coast GRC too close to call - I'd gather that whoever takes it will not get more than a six percentage point margin, i.e. both within 50±3 percent. Eh, let's just call it all, for the sport of it:
[N.B. Handy if not 100% accurate source] With the main precepts and projections:
Me: Sad to say, this analysis looks plausible. Dr. Chang: Heh, is that a hint? Oppie's Apology Me: I suppose it's no secret - nor should it have to be one - that I would greatly prefer having rather more Opposition representation in Parliament. First off, it has to be said that the electoral system has become sorta screwed; to get a voice on national policy, non-incumbent parties are having to jump through hoops under training pretenses against a stacked deck, while residents have what should be infrastructure upgrading entitlements withdrawn, without even going into the abomination that is the GRC setup. This alone, I'd say, would be lucid enough reason to turn to the Opposition. I'm not sure if I want to repeat the dangers of having the supposedly non-partisan state intertwined so tightly with a party, so I'll just throw this out: if auditing a mere 6.4% of the PA had already revealed so much crap, one can just imagine what the full picture looks like! And indeed, after its dear deputy chairman trotted out a "good intentions" excuse, the mainstream media has obligingly gone all quiet on that front, instead spamming AHPETC AHPETC AHPETC AHPETC AHPETC, doubtless also out of wholly good intentions.  Moral of story: Carpets are not to be looked under. (Source: facebook.com) Here, I want to state that I do not believe that any of the candidates are, in two words, baaaadddd people - or good moles. I mean, I'm sure that the incumbents would rather everyone earn at least S$1000 and get a two-room flat, and have their 2.1 children, so the GDP machine trundles happily along, and they don't have to compete for altar space. In the same vein, I don't think that bankrupting the nation is foremost in the minds of opposition members, when they pull out suggestions like minimum wages and cash transfers. Quickly, my take on the national situation:
On that last point - another fact that the mainstream media seldom thinks to touch upon, is that the official incumbent Concept Plan in 2001 had laid out a population scenario of "5.5 million... for the next 40 to 50 years", but which will now almost certainly be hit in fifteen, which itself barely qualifies as "long-term"! Other than the 2008 recession, the possibility of which should really have been included in any models, and at a stretch the 2003 SARS outbreak, there should have been nothing so incredible as to be outside the incumbent planners' vision when the plan was laid out, as to necessitate such a population explosion in the last decade! Given that, it is only reasonable to wonder if the incumbents actually have any grand plan other than spamming FOREIGN TALENT FOREIGN TALENT FOREIGN TALENT STICK SPURS INTO HIDE, and if that's basically all there is to it, why shouldn't some other party be allowed the implementation part, especially if at a lower price?  Moral of story: Jump before being pushed? (Source: facebook.com) Dr. Chang: I'm not sure if this is bloody obvious, but in my not-so-humble opinion, just about all of Singapore's hot-button issues - the CPF, housing prices, immigration and transport - are intimately interrelated, and it really all goes back to what the CPF is, is not, and has become. So, Triple H actually identified the root correctly, but got her arguments wrong. Me: I'm all ears. Properties (In All Senses) Dr. Chang: We've said our piece on the CPF before, such as back in April last year, and so I'll focus a bit more on the "property" part today. I'd gather that there are few topics as universally emotive. People might not have any particular political leanings, or subscribe to any religion, nor ever get married, but they all have got to live somewhere. Small wonder, then, that home - or house, for the rich - ownership and the concept of being a "householder" is prominent in so many cultures, so much so that it is near-synonomous with the Hamerican Dream. Thus, one of the marks of homeownership is that it is manifestly respectable; one could well turn his nose up at dabblers in stocks and options, but a house, well, who could say anything against that? And if property appreciates in value - as it has mostly been doing - then wouldn't it merely be a just reward for good, solid, citizenship? The incumbents have ridden on this pulpit for decades, with the probably-busy East Coast GRC anchor minister going as far as to declare that the incumbents view a gradual appreciation in property prices as necessary. Of course, assuming he meant it in real terms, one supposes that this cannot be carried on indefinitely - if the past generation required only a single-income 20-year mortgage to pay off a flat, but this generation requires a dual-income 25-year mortgage due to the real appreciation, are we to expect 35 years for their kids, and 50 years for their grandkids? Hong Kong might have resorted to that, but there's seriously no reason to follow their lead. Fine then, one might say, surely this logic isn't that hard for the indisputably highly-qualified ministers to grasp? Let home prices stick, then. But, not so fast! You know that CPF "pension" thing, that the incumbent administration very responsibly had each working citizen put aside, to fund his retirement years? What about it, you ask? Well, it's mostly gone into his HDB flat as equity. So, first problem - the retirement funds may exist... but are locked up, and heavily dependant on rising property prices to retain their value. Short of an outright sale, there's no easy method to draw on the monies. Schemes such as lease buybacks have been proposed, but are understandably not all that popular, since they remind HDB "owners" all too directly that they never actually owned shit at all. This is then about the point where some unlucky scholar at the MND stares at local population histograms, and sweats whilst trying to figure out how the hell can a steadily-shrinking new householder population buy over enough flats from the retiring cohort, to keep prices - i.e. pensions - from dropping. If he is of the less charitably-minded sort, he might be cursing at his predecessors for not having spotted this glaring loophole, before realising that many of them were set for life from their multiple properties acquired in the boom years. One could then go on to imagine that his superiors, following the example of higher-ups everywhere, are giving him the "won't take no for an answer" look, which leaves the obvious solution: property demand cannot drop, or you die, I die, everybody die. However, you die later, better than I die now; open up the floodgates and pack 'em in!  [Clip on Youtube] Of course, being a scholar after all, he would probably have recognized that his understudy would be faced with much the same dilemma - probably worse - ten years later, when he's faced with justifying an eight million population, up from 6.9; but, ah, that's his problem. Me: Which is why I was trying to get across, that even for one-party states, "long-term planning" tends to be subordinated to immediate demands anyway. Dr. Chang: Of course, despite the so-called "smart data" drive, one can't even easily get aggregate remaining HDB lease statistics other than by manual clicking, or even how much does a flat actually cost to build. There's an interesting private website on HDB stats, but that's about it. Furthermore, a secondary realisation follows. One recalls that a touted virtue of the CPF was that it is self-funded, rather than pay-as-you-go, which supposedly removes the problem of a shrunken taxpayer base struggling with upkeeping a large retired population. However, once one considers that local pensions are essentially plonked in the property market, it is evident that reality is not quite as clear-cut as that. Consider, for example, a non-rosy but hardly-impossible scenario: Ali contributes S$400000 into his CPF over his 40-year working life, and retires at age 67 in 2035. S$300000 of it has, however, gone towards his four-room flat. Even with all the illiquidity, it wouldn't feel so bad if the real value of the flat had increased in the meantime... but what if it didn't? Definitely, he would be pretty pissed, especially if other common investment vehicles had been doing rather better. Here, it should be recognized that Triple H and pals' call to "Return Our CPF" is probably impractical, but their supporters do have a valid grievance. Me: We can put this another way. Let's say that I have engaged a financial planner to chart out my retirement, and his bright idea is to dump it all into property - no, even better, a single property. Personally, I would immediately show him the door, since this goes against just about every tenet of professional competent risk diversification. However, if you replace that financial planner with "the incumbent administration", one realises that this is exactly what the self-proclaimed long-term visionaries have been doing all along. And they get a free pass on this how?  Singapore, at a glance. Dr. Chang: Which raises the question: why the heck was a pension fund, in a system with few other safety nets, ever allowed to access the housing market in the first place? Surely, if citizens were unable to afford homes after putting aside their retirement monies, the correct approach would have been to commit to keeping housing prices low, instead of pumping pension money in? Me: Well, a cynical interpretation would be to compare this to whole life insurance - which is generally considered a bad deal for policyholders, but gravy for insurance agents and firms. With high HDB prices, the government of the day receives a proportionately larger inflow of funds, for the duration of the mortgage. These funds can then be directed towards whatever use - wise or otherwise - that they have in mind. The attraction to the client-citizens then has been that their investment-property has been appreciating handsomely - so far. Unfortunately, as thoroughly explained above, there's little indication that this "asset enhancement" scheme can continue as a one-trick pony for much longer. True, some criticisms may be disingenuous... but if adhering to the official story is the alternative, I'd take increased wariness anyday. Hmm, I suppose this is more or less what I wanted to say. To sum up: Maybe the incumbents are good... but they definitely aren't good enough to be handed free rein. As for the eventual outcome of the vote, I expect to be disappointed, but that's democracy for ya. Dr. Chang: Come back for the rounding-up and post-election analysis, same time next week! Next: Postmortem 69
Meow said... If I've understood your analysis of the CPF-HDB issue correctly, are you suggesting that a better way would have been to keep prices low to the point where people would be able to service the installments from take-home pay only?
gilbert said... Essentially, yes. I will expand on it soonish in a future post.
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