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Saturday, Aug 23, 2008 - 21:59 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

On Bonuses

"(If Singapore beat China in table tennis) it will be the greatest sensation of the Games."

- Starhub Olympic coverage commentator. Erm.

Unclaimed

That didn't happen several times over as Li Jiawei got her second Olympics fourth-place finish (which has to be said isn't that bad at all), and Singapore's other representatives too fell by the wayside. Wasn't much of a surprise, of course - I remember reading that former national player Jing Junhong gave Li a 20% to 30% chance (I may be mistaken, so don't quote me on this), while the coach gave the team a 10% chance against the Chinese team.

Being slightly curious about these estimates, I wrote a simple simulation script to pull out some numbers, and it appears that to have a 10% chance of winning a standard seven-game table tennis match, a player must have approximately a 44% chance of winning each and every point (assuming both players play at a constant standard for each point, no matter their situation at that time, and that service brings a negligible advantage, which I accept is probably false).

For a 25% chance of winning, the percentage of points won has to be about 47%. Notably, if a player has only a 35% chance of winning each point, he or she has almost no hope of winning the match (< 0.1%), with the result often being a 4-0 blowout. Therefore, it seems that a slight gulf in ability actually translates to a virtual impossibility, form and psychological toughness notwithstanding. So, when the Singapore team was smiling through their finals defeat, they may have just been realistic.

And a comment on the article, "Why They Switch Loyalties", on page 12 of today's Weekend Today - the author listed politics (clearly not in Singapore's case), economics (which authorities would like us to believe is completely not in Singapore's case) and overcrowding (which was previously covered here). Coincidentally the author also pointed to the dilemma of the sixth-best player, but may have been mistaken when saying "However, there are some circumstances in which athletes would not switch nationalities. It would be hard to imagine a Chinese athlete donning a Korean jersey...". Hello, Dang Ye-Seo?


Insignificant

This year's National Day Rally speech by our PM touched on Singapore's woeful fertility rate (of 1.29, far below the replacement rate of about 2.1) and introduced some (more) ways to try and raise it. The easy and always available way is, of course, immigration, but that creates its own host of problems. Leaving that and more SDU matchmaking aside, let's look at the incentives to already-married couples:

Firstly, cash gifts of S$3000 for the first and second child, and S$6000 for the third and fourth ones, as well as a dollar-for-dollar matching savings account capped at S$6000(1st, 2nd)/S$12000(3rd, 4th)/S$18000(fifth child and beyond) for each of them (which probably penalizes poorer parents, since they are less likely to have the free cash to plunk into the accounts). So, that's a direct payment of S$9000 to S$18000 per child.

Now, as the expected direct cost of bringing up a single kid here would probably run into the hundreds of thousands (supposedly S$270000+ from a Straits Times report in 2004, though I couldn't confirm it given the slowness of Factiva), a savings in the tens of thousands (even with tax rebates) is miniscule. Of course, it can be said that children are priceless, but the assumption being taken here is that being priceless is insufficient, and that throwing a bit more money at the problem would help. Personally, I would say that about S$10k would not be a deciding factor (or even a valid contributing factor) for most, if money were the main obstacle.

Put it this way: If insufficient funds were the problem for responsible parents who did their sums and decided they couldn't afford a child, the baby bonus likely wouldn't be enough to make a difference. And if funds weren't the issue, the bonus wouldn't have any impact anyway.

Secondly, there's increased maternity leave. Now, it must be realized that this nice gesture comes at a cost - to the employer. Assuming now that the employer is not running with too much slack (which would be the case more for SMEs), the employer will be staring at two months of paying for zero returns for the first two babies, and a disruption of three or four months for each baby, for which they would have to make alternative arrangements.

The free market says that rational employers would thus (i) offer lower pay to women (which already happens in reality) for the same job as men, or (ii) employ fewer equally-qualified women compared to men, or a combination of the two, and thus parents end up footing the "bill" in one way or another. Before I get slammed for being a heartless jerk and for insinuating that employers are too, this is just basic economics finding a new equilibrium from the previous one, given the past quantity of maternity benefits. Individual employers may well be family-friendly, but this is the big picture here.

To conclude, I daresay these policies will have all too little impact, and would be completely (if pleasantly) surprised if the annual fertility rate does edge above even 1.5 at any time in the next ten years. Interestingly, given the government's penchant for setting targets (Goal 2010? 6.5 million population in 50 years?), there are no goalposts or even expectations that I could find for this issue, which to be fair is at its heart a private one. Thus, to me, it's sort of "We know the results will be negligible, but we have no real answers. Still, we must start to wayang something, even if it won't work, and we won't stick our necks out with any official projections since we'll look bad when they aren't fulfilled."

Once more, to be fair, this is a problem that many other developed countries have grappled with (and mostly failed). So can Singapore be an exception? Hmm.


Cool


Enjoying their Alex Animal Farm cooling pad (inset: Chew Stick and Cooling House)

Eight months of dedicated service sees Ham & Fish rewarded in typical Singaporean "goodies-if-you-vote-the-right-way" fashion - with improved amenities. Snuck down to the Pet Lovers Centre at Vivocity last night upon recommendation by cousin, and was confronted by tons of options for the Cage Upgrading Project. Oh, and the S$30 robos were impossibly adorable too.

Turned out that the chew stick was a little too big to get their jaws around, and they seem to have become too lazy to climb up to the cooling house (though ironically they do chew on the metal edges), but the cooling pad seems a hit. Too bad they aren't happy at being lumped into a "small animal" category on the online store.


Duchess Station? Why not Hwa Chong Station? (Source: LTA)

And it seems that my alma mater will have an MRT station under the school field soon. If that isn't cool, I don't know what is.


After a losing start to the new season ($90/$100), the Challenge enters Week Two:

$80 on Aston Villa to beat Stoke City (at 1.70) - Saturday's prime deal
$20 on Bolton to beat Newcastle (4.10) - Great odds for what should be a reasonably close match...

And just for the record, I managed to crack my injured finger on Thursday night. Took about three weeks.



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