The problem with being in PES C is that people think you Chao Keng or that you have the tendency to do that. The problem of ‘Chao Keng’ is actually so widespread that it transcends far beyond Physical Employment Status or deliberate choice of ‘Out of Course’ Status. When people are forced into something that doesn’t seem natural enough (ie. people around the world like them are not doing similar sort of things, or that it is not essential), there’s a need to create a market system that provides incentives to justify the stuff they are forced into. Deterrence achieves similar effects as incentives sometimes but more often, deterrence eventually results in greater inefficiency.
I have seen people who wants to Chiong but don’t get into Command School and therefore decided that they shall Chao Keng for the rest of the time since there’s no way they rise in ranks enough. There are others who are not interested in Chiong-ing, but only want to build up their bodies through physical exercise, end up in Command School and decide to get out of the course (by hook or by crook). Assigning work to people is only effective when there’s room for the person in concern to negotiate and come to an agreement. And since convincing is necessary to enhance effectiveness, the ‘control method’ (ie. dictating what people should do) is very inefficient. On the other hand, if there’s a free market means where people apply to their desired place and get interviewed to see if they qualify (and with special advice on how they can qualify if they have not), things would be so much better.
There’s definitely scope in studying the creation of such market system that blends command and freedom in ways that maximizes welfare beyond command and scale chaos way below total freedom and this is exactly the system that the military needs for all their affairs. People don’t Chao Keng because they are interested in lazing around. People want to be useful in ways they deem themselves would be. If their value is to be judge by someone and this someone uses that judged value to dictate the life of the person, the person would have no choice but to choose to live up to that value judged, whether it is a matter of fact or not.
When I was at NUS Open House last Saturday and I spoke to this Year 1 Law student, I asked her whether there’s a lot of ‘smoking’ in law faculty. I was of course referring to the figurative sort of smoking but as she ‘err…’, it dawned on me that lawyers are known to be a rather smokey bunch (in the literal sense) so I clarified my question by saying, I mean the figurative type.
I was, in the most literal sense, applying to Law at NUS and there, I suddenly realised that I might have to survive with quite a big bunch of people who smoke if I really end up studying there. One thing is for sure: I hate smokers. My Grandpa used to smoke, and since the age of 3 when I could spoke pretty fluently, I urged him not to smoke. I drew ‘No Smoking’ signs that blurred the difference between a cigarette and a Pokey snack and place them all around the house in a bid to discourage my Grandpa from lighting up. It worked, especially when it came from a kid who was barely in Primary School. Soon after I enter Primary School, my Grandpa quit smoking. I am not sure how much effort it took him; today he’s 80 plus, very strong and healthy, free from any ailments that plague the old and very active still.
If perhaps, every smoking man/women have a single young kid bugging him/her everyday to get him/her to quit smoking, we can create a smoke-free nation. But of course, that’s not possible. Alternative policies are needed. And in a recent research paper that is about to be published, done by some people (I am not sure if they are students or professors, usually it’s a mixture) at MIT, it is claimed that higher cigarette taxes benefits poorer smokers because it gives them a more practical reason to quit. Where cigarettes are cheap enough for the poor to afford but expensive enough to take up a substantial part in their expenses, cigarettes have the effect of escalating poverty. They mentioned that the poor are more sensitive to price rises than the rich and thus they may have higher tendency to quit smoking in face of higher cigarette prices. Such a policy is of course, easier to implement than public education on the negative effects of smoking and more effective than erecting No Smoking signs around the place.
Yet there’s another camp, I realised, that was brought up by my lecture notes in the subject of Economics as well as myself. It is the argument that smokers are naturally price insensitive, because smoking is more or less a result of addiction. That is to say that the price elasticity between rich and poor smokers should not differ by too much. The implication of this argument is huge; the reason being that the prescribed cigarette taxes would only serve to make the lives of the poor more worst off because they end up spending more on cigarettes and this eventually widens the income gap.
I believe every country presents a different case and the position of the families/people on the scale of poverty does affect their price elasticity of demand. In case of extreme poverty where essential goods might have to be sacrificed in order to obtain cigarettes after imposition of new taxes, the policy is likely to succeed in convincing poor smokers to kick their habit. It’s no longer a choice between a short term pleasure and long term health and survival, it would become a choice between smoking now and living through the next couple of days. However, if taxes are imposed such that cigarette prices are raised to an insufficient level, the poor but not extremely poor smokers may continue to smoke and they end up being poorer because higher proportion of income is spent on cigarettes. For them, it’s a choice between the short term pleasure and improving their lives in long term. Having suffer so much, a puff to them is rewarding enough and they can only hope for the better.
Therefore there’s a need to assess the reaction of the smokers to cigarette price variations to correctly determine whether the taxation policy would actually work. My take is that it can never work perfectly; some smokers will be kicking the habit, some smokers will be worst off because of higher expenditure on cigarettes but the proportion of smokers belonging to either category needs to be carefully studied so that the tax applied can maximize the number of people who quit smoking and at the same time, not hurt those who refuse to quit (too much).
I have been inactive on my blog, very inactive. The first reason is that the past one and a half month or so of my life is devoted to Basic Military Training, where we were warned against blogging our experience (which may be critical of the military and possibly surface stuff that puts SAF in negative light). Anyways it’s over and I would say I learnt very much from the experience – my life in the military ahead may be more demanding but I must say that BMT has prepared me for military life.
Then comes the A Level Results together with all the implications it carries. I wouldn’t say I did badly though it was inferior to Kwang Guan’s grades. There’s college applications, scholarship applications and so on. All these nonsense are pretty nerve-wrecking but it’s the first hand experience of many game theory stuff at play: screening and signaling, coordination (in terms of the placement of open house dates and faculty talks) and so on. For teachers, they will have quite a hard time thinking about good things to say, or ways of saying the same old good things for their top students. Students are either spoil for choices or desperate for somewhere to go.
I am trying my best to head overseas but I realised the need to reserve places in universities at home lest my hopes of going overseas are dashed by the lack of a scholarship. At the open house of some particular local university, I came to realise that Singaporeans who stay behind in Singapore remains very much the same as the students who has been in our system for 15 years before entering tertiary education. They are happy with just doing well with whatever is thrown at them. Sure, they are intelligent kids who excel at almost anything – they have a great social life, they mix well with people, they got excellent communication skills and they may even have the best fashion sense – but alas, they don’t really have an idea what they want out of life.
After pondering about how wonderfully aimless most Singaporeans are, I became frightened by the prospects of having classmates who score exceedingly well in the subjects they do, the research paper they write and in the speeches they make; and yet when I ask them about what lies ahead in their life, they have little or almost no idea. More shockingly, they aren’t sure if they are doing something they really want. Perhaps these people merely want to excel, in anything they are doing, any field they are thrown into. This is a by-product of a dynamically engineered society, where needs of the society is quickly translated to roles to play for citizens at individual levels and government suggestions quickly heeded to prevent social catastrophes.
True enough, Singaporeans are able, receptive and adaptive, but they seem void of what I would term ‘true aspiration’, in contrast with ‘social aspiration’, which is more collective and in many sense, prescribed by a higher authority of the society. That is not to say I am not guilty of such a ‘mistake’, if foreigners choose to think this way. There’s a real need to encourage Singaporeans to think extensively about what lies ahead for themselves (not only the world, just because in the classroom, you have to discuss that). We have to help more people get out there and see the world and come in contact with overseas counterparts who actually knows where they are heading to, and immerse into a culture of greater independence, greater sense of ‘true aspiration’, less reliant on ‘prescribed aspirations’.
