Hi,
After years of my thourough investigation using linear regression
analysis, I condluded that the real reason why Singaporeans dont
have enough babies can be summed up as follows.
First of all, Singaporeans dont have enough time and space.
Time.
There is a specific resource where you cant get any extra. It's
time. In one day there's only 24 hrs. Most Singaporeans spend this
limited fixed resource of 24 hrs by allocating huge portion of it
either for working or studying.
Since young, Singaporeans allocate their time studying, attending
courses/ tuitions, doing schoolwork, etc. If you draw a pie chart,
a major portion of their waking hours in a day will be taken up by
these activities.
As they grow older, Singaporeans proceed to work. Same thing is
repeating, the pie chart is dominated disproportionately into
working. In most cases the skew would be even worse than when they
were young.
As a result, there is not enough time for other outlets and
channels, other activities which require the allocation of the
resource of time.
Many Singaporeans complain that their life is boring, that they
only work, that Singapore is small, nothing interesting to do,
can't find a partner, etc. The real underlying reason behind these
complains is because of disproportionate allocation of the fixed
resource of time, which curtailed other expressions of possible
utilities of this resource.
Space.
Singapore has only one small main island to live in. The government
has tried alleviating this problem by furiously reclamating the
island, in view of expanding the amount of space. It has also build
upwards instead of sideways, an optimization method for better
efficiency n effectiveness of this resource use.
However the space is still not enough. It is a scarce resource
which undersupply the demand. As a result many couples delay their
marriage, delay their child rearing time, and reduce the number of
kids. Because kids take up space.
The space taken by a kid would need to be acquired and allocated to
him from the already scarce amount of this resource, translating
into high acquisition costs.
So in summary.
The real reason why Singaporeans dont have enough babies is because
of disproportionately large allocation of time into work, and
disproportionately small allocation of space.
Now we move into part two. How to effectively and efficiently
address these two underlying fundamental causes. It is not
surprising that the financial 'baby bonus scheme' from the
government has not had a high degree of success since it does not
adequately and directly address these two root causes.
Part two. Section A.
(to be continued, I tired liao)