Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Thursday, Sep 10, 2020 - 22:44 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

More Mumblings

There's been quite a bit of settling-in and getting in on projects at the new gig, all those reviews aside, but a bit of time has opened up. First off, some local coverage. It appears that there may be a drive to disallow one's CPF from being used to help pay for one's housing, which relates to the "population and property Ponzi" raised in the previous blog post - I hope it evident that "property prices can only go up (in real terms)" is patently implausible (in the long run, at least), as first illustrated here in 2012, and revisited in 2017 (which is also about the period when The State's Times finally deigned to model leasehold depreciation): how the heck can an asset with a finite lease, only get ever more expensive?

One might, of course, understand this trend from another perspective - that of the CPF (i.e. purportedly retirement) funds being tacitly redirected to the service of the Government('s investment vehicles), which I believe is more commonly termed as "pension raiding" - though this is probably more benign than the usual. The general mechanism would be similar to that which allowed college tuition costs to balloon in the U.S.: once you restrict access to a pot of money solely for some purpose (e.g. education, property), it's no surprise that the price of that asset or service goes up, whether justified or not, especially if that same authority can control its supply (clearly true for Singapore property)

Now, local property policies have arguably been a net benefit for the populace thus far, in that previous generations enjoyed price appreciation above and beyond what they would have garnered, had they left the funds in the CPF. Sure, the median worker might have had to labour incrementally more years to afford the same apartment, but as long as he figured that this dance was continuing (i.e. he could pass-the-parcel on), there was no real cause for complaint. It should be remembered that those vehemently against high property prices online may after all statistically be a relatively small percentage of the population as compared to those already on the property ladder, and it's interesting to note how quickly one's attitude can shift, the moment he signs a mortgage.

The motivations for such a policy are understandable - a government does need some pocket money, after all, if it is not to be arbitrarily held ransom by outside forces. Viewed this way, the higher-than-absolutely-necessary public housing prices were a means towards raising an initial developmental nest egg, which is alright to an extent, I suppose. The trouble, of course, then comes when it becomes evident that prices can get high enough to be untenable, coupled by the population not reproducing sufficiently to create a large-enough next batch of suckers buyers. To that last, the solution thus far has been to import workers to rent citizens' rooms to pay for their retirement, a measure that however is getting quite unpopular... and this is already assuming that Our Most Successful Investment Firms continue to make returns.

Having close to a third of those national savings locked up in what's essentially a one-party state-controlled economy can get stressful, I suppose, and as such we might forgive the incumbents for 5v1 ganking Jamus for free-riding on a minimum wage proposal (though Tharman did have a point in noting that the WP didn't have a monopoly on compassion). We should perhaps empathize with the PM's protectiveness and anxiety over the reserves (if perhaps not the supposed inseparability of party and government) too; as Cold War II develops, it's far from unlikely that smaller nations discover that assets they thought were theirs, become negotiable.

Anyway, back to cross-disciplinary studies, the president of NUS has followed up with a piece about tearing down subject silos, which as also acknowledged, has been mostly less than well-supported in universities, where being known as "interdisciplinary" has oft been a kiss of death, due to being far less likely to earn departmental champions for funding and support, or appreciation in established journals (by the way, R.I.P. to anthropologist-economist-sorta David Graeber, whose Debt: The First 5,000 Years I enjoyed, with some reservations). Then again, it could be argued that many recognized fields nowadays, were cross-disciplinary in their time - one imagines pure mathematicians sneering at second-rate talents who spent their time pondering how rocks fell.



comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: Xenophilia By Fiat


Related Posts:
Riding The Current
Postmortem 69
A Tale Of Two Countries
Properties Of Properties
What It Is (Part Two)
Back to top

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.