:Originally posted by january:
They are not assumptions. It is a straight forward reasoning. But
it appears that singaporean like to have counter reasoning and
seems to make sense that raising pay leading to better economy is
just a assumption.
hey, since when is there certaintly in life. There is no way
government can have absolute knowledge abt what is the cause and
effects of things. we make to make decision based on their
reasoning.
i dun understand why singaporean likes to think there is some
henious plot behind. Anyway, as usual, i think singapore goverment
is smart to know that wave of complaint is common amon citizens and
it is just a come and go issue like many other issues.
at the end of the day, if people voted off PAP, thinking it will
lead to a better government and if voting PAP off is wrong, then it
is the citizen who suffer. Of course, if voting PAP off is right,
then its good.
secondly, are you not saying that by not increasing the pay,
singapore will then continue to do well in the future? that is a
assumption too.
No changing anything is itself a decision. But apparently many
people dun understand things. They tend to blame things on changing
decisions because of memory effect.
you dun feel angry or guilty if you dun remember that it is due to
not making certain changes. If you make changes in decision making,
it is more memorable event in ur brain. Therefore, if things go
wrong, you will tend to allocate cause to the decisions you make..
and you will not think that things go wrong because you did not
make the decision.
The current system is autocracy or something in between
autocracy and democracy with resort to tweaking of the laws and
regulations to entrench the ruling party in power forever at all
costs.
That such a pseudo-democracy has produced some results initially up
to the 1970s but from then on we have seen many Ministers and MPs
inducted on heavy pro-elite money incentives called "pay top
talents top dollar" policy without much results.
Instead the economy went down with despairs by all the talented
ministers that all the deep recessions and large-scaled
retrenchments or employment restructuring were caused not by their
lack of economic restructuring as announced but blamed on citizens'
own lack of skills or re-training.
This kind of pseudo-democracy will produced self-centredness and
hypocrisy where autocrats have to continuously contend with
problems and failures by blaming them on others. Such unaccountable
use of power will spell disasters for the future generation if not
corrected by the talents who at best are unwillingly aping the past
autocratic policies which no longer work today.
As predicted in many earlier posts, as soon as the world economy
recover under such hypocrisy our talented ministers would start
claiming they have done it and true enough recently the whole of
newspapers and media controlled by the government is claiming
success of the present system even though 80% of the citizens are
earning hardly enough due to dropping wages which still are not
recovered from last recessions to pay for their basic living
expenses.
So what has all these past mistakes at policy or system level of
government as seen in the foregoing got to do with lack of
understanding of natural human reactions to complaints or problems
or government policies or actions?
The alternative solutions to autocracy have been proposed many
times by many people.
Ngiam Tong Dow the ex-civil servant has proposed diversifying the
top-heavy decision and policy making process which he billed as
spartan for courtesy to distributive processes or people-oriented
system which incidentally were proposed by many writers.
Our system of autocracy or pseudo-democracy has been justified with
many other look-good assumptions or concepts like Confucianism,
Asian Values, Family values but at the end it is still a system as
we have seen based on one man's unproven concepts about leadership,
meritocracy or "pay top dollars will retain or attract top talents
which do not lead to greater abilities in restructuring the economy
to value-adding technology-driven model talked about for
years.
Arising from the Asian Financial Crisis, which were found to have
been largely caused by top-down leadership system among certain
Asian countries, our leaders have stopped using assumptions about
their leadership or Asian values which could not make any
management of any business more competitive in today's intensive
knowledge-based application environment.
Empowering the masses in practical knowledge applications in all
fields at every level of society holds the key to successful
government.
Without translating all the assumptions behind meritocracy or
leadership or talents no matter how plausible into a more cohesive
and integrated mplementation processes, leaders will be talking and
talking about the same things year after year and they can
back-track and deny problems created and at the end get out of
failures with excuses.
Hypocrisy is only one symptom but it is bad enough to turn off many
ordinary people irrespective of more advanced psycho-analytical
theories mentioned.
