Time To Go

"M" dies at the end of the movie. There I said it.  The organizers at the premier viewing of "Skyfall" last night passed out a leaflet giving specific instructions not to blog about it, but no true 007 fan could resist a challenge like that.

But it was a good way for James Bond's spymaster boss to go. Besides, the new M (Ralph Fiennes as Mallory) had already told her about the forced retirement plan, all because she lost a hard drive. In real life, Judi Dench is getting on with years. Born in 1934, it was reported her failing eyesight required her to memorise the lines as she could no longer read the script. At least she gets to go off with a bang (another spoiler - she was shot). That way we get to remember her at her best, who not too long ago was by a margin voted "the greatest actor of all time" in an exhaustive poll of the readers of The Stage magazine.

The other interesting segment involves a new Q, the official quarter master who issues Bond his weapons of mass destruction, a youthful geek who pooh-poohs the veteran of spy trade with a disarming "Age is no guarantee of efficiency". Daniel Craig is not that old, age 44, and he is signed up for another two installments of the James Bond franchise.

Still, old timers must always learn to give way to the energies of the younger generation. After all, what has an octogenarian got to teach today's youth, save hackneyed war stories about frightening communists. The same communists the world is embracing with open arms because of their new found economic clout. When asked what she thought about the Tienanmen incident, the PRC exchange scholar at our local university said she wasn't even born when it happened. It is so convenient to forget the atrocities of the past, except when a living relic is still walking around to remind one of the abuses in a bygone era.

Gaps In Public Service

Quoting a report by consulting, technology- services and outsourcing company Accenture ("Delivering Public Service For The Future: Navigating The Shifts") the mainstream media said the Singapore Government may have to spend an additional $13 billion to fund public services by 2025. The puzzle here is where the billions have been spent, if they were actually expended for public services at all. The mind boggling amount is supposed to be required due to costs associated with the country's ageing population. Ask Ah Pek when was the last time he received any handout without strings attached - as in the nefarious one-time GST voucher for a life-time hike in good and services tax.

Note the tiny gap attributed to Singapore's public service

Reading the report proper, Accenture's focus was actually about the gap between what the citizens want, and what the Government is delivering. They have identified four clear structural shifts that are needed to push public services toward becoming more outcome focused:
1. Shift from standardised services to personal services;
2. Shift from reactive to insight driven;
3. Shift from public management to public entrepreneurship;
4. Shift from piecemeal efficiency to mission productivity.

To emphasize the message, they quote the CEO of CONSIP, a public company owned by Italy's Ministry of the Economy and Finance, "The world is moving forward very rapidly, and just as production processes change and public sentiment changes, likewise the service processes of the public administration must also change." In short, it is an indictment of a failed public service that has not kept up with the pace of change.

Accenture reports that 63 percent of those surveyed agreed with this statement: "I often find it difficult to find my way through the system to access the services I need." That must be the bureaucratic red tape so familiar to all of us. If the Government is sincere about helping our senior citizens in their evening years they need to provide a clearer roadmap that is personalised, insight driven, entrepreneur and productive.

Self And Society

The doctor who owned "just a Ferrari spider convertible 430", dined at fine restaurants with Michelin Chefs and kept company with the likes of Miss Universe and Eduardo Saverin (net worth $2.6 billion) said society made him do it.

The relationship between individuals and the social environments in which they live is a topic which fascinates sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and political theorists. Interactions between Self and Society can help explain:
(1) the impact of one individual on another individual,
(2) the impact of a group on its individual members,
(3) the impact of individual members on their group and,
(4) the impact of groups on one another.

An understanding of the priorities of individuals in respect of the social systems into which they are immersed  helps to explain social problems (attributed to foreign intake or competition), social norms and values (unresolved "visceral" racial issues), moral and political change (exacerbated by institutional promotion of gambling), organizational practices (meritocracy eroded by cronyism), and interpersonal and cross-cultural conflict (conflated to xenophobia).

George Herbert Mead (Self and Society, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962) argued that the self consists of more than just a bare organisation of social attitudes, but can be divided into an "I", an unique and natural response to the attitudes of others, and "me", who knows what is socially required in a certain situation through the recognition of the attitudes of others. The point in Mead’s theory becomes evident when one ponders whether social order derives from individuals or whether individuals derive from social order.

Adding his two cents to the PSLE debate, DPM Tharman said "It's only possible to succeed in character education and encouraging students to question and think originally if we create real space for it in the educational system." Will the students be encouraged to be an "I" or a "me"? When they took History and Geography off the syllabus, they conveniently did away with the horror stories of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot,  and the perspective of what a small island we really are on the planet earth. Leaving only Math to calculate the millions to be earned from a lucrative career choice, and enough Science recognize our physical mortality. Instead of creating space, the shrinkage probably did, and continue to do so, cause misery for the future generation. Quite obviously, the one who coined "teach less, learn more" wasn't too concerned with morality plays.

Income For Retirement

About a month ago, circa 19 September, Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam told delegates at the Singapore Human Capital Summit that the Singapore median male earner who enters the workforce today will be able to achieve an Income Replacement Rate (IRR) of over 70% through his Central Provident Fund (CPF) savings. For the female median earner, the equivalent IRR is 63%. The IRR for the median OECD economies is 66%, while the World Bank recommends a range of between 53% and 78%.

Christine Benz explains that most retirees spend substantially less than 75% or 80% of their previous working income because many of the commuting expenses, outside meals, and working clothes are no longer necessary. Most likely, big ticket commitments like housing loans and the kids' university education would have been done with. And in the American context, retirees need not pay taxes for Social Security and Medicare. On that score she quotes Aon Consulting's Replacement Rate Study, which concludes that in 2008, a 78% income replacement rate would allow a 65-year-old with $60,000 pre-retirement income to retire in 2008 with the same standard of living he or she had while working. The assumption is that 15% of pre-retirees' income have been saved regularly during the working years in preparation for retirement.

Our mandatory CPF contribution rate should, theoretically, put us in good stead. Except that in our situation, retirees continue to co-pay for their Medicare through the chunk eaten up by Medisave, plus premiums for additional cover like Medishield. And then there is the Goods and Services Tax.

Tharman's premise for the IRR numbers include the overpriced housing board flat, an illiquid source of funds which can be made available only by downgrading or pursuing a refinancing exercise. Assuming the house has already been fully paid for by then. He calls this "Our strategy to help them monetise the values of their homes in retirement." Tharman also pointed that many older Singaporeans have low CPF balances and are unable to achieve the IRR that "the study" has found. These older folks bought houses at significantly lower prices, unlike the younger generation who is already seeing COV (cost over valuation) figures in excess of $200,000. We are told "details of the study will be released in the near future", but the released date was not indicated. Have you seen "the study"? Except for those still entitled to state provided pensions, one suspects the true picture of the IRRs may not be as pretty as painted.

Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions

Zachary Shore says in "Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions" they fall into inflexible mind-sets formed from faulty reasoning and cognition traps. His recipe for avoiding cognition traps and inevitable blunders is to cultivate mental flexibility, empathy, imagination, contrarianism and an open mind. That's got to be easier said than done.

Take a test: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The majority will respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

When faced with an uncertain situation, most people don’t carefully evaluate the information or have the luxury to look up relevant statistics. Instead, our decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts.  Shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. We have seen how Mitt Romney tripped on his budget numbers in the recent debates. Unlike the Singapore system, he can't simply restate the economic data to "correct" a technical recession.

While philosophers, economists, and social scientists assume that human beings are rational agents, others like Shane Frederick (who developed the above bat-and-ball question) demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe. Apparently there is a “meta-bias” that is rooted in our innate ability to spot mistakes in the decisions of others, and inability to identify those same mistakes in ourselves.

A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology led by Richard West at James Madison University and Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto suggests that, in many instances, smarter people are more vulnerable to these thinking errors. After testing students on four measures of “cognitive sophistication,” they reported in the paper, all four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” West’s paper demonstrates that it applies to every single bias under consideration, from anchoring to so-called “framing effects.” In each instance, we readily forgive our own minds but look harshly upon the minds of other people.

Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth Tuck School of Business, and the author of "Why Smart Executives Fail" says that being a successful leader is not just about intelligence, not just about being smart. It's about actually making the right moves at the right time.

Andy Ho of ST ("Sex blogger's 'crazy ' act") skips all these headache inducing theorizing, to the extent of rubbishing Socrates, by offering "akrasia" as justification - as defined by him as "intemperance, acting against one's better judgement, or lacking control over oneself". He writes, "Craziness, it turns out, may have little to do with irrationality and everything to do with one's opinion of the virtues of an act." For sure, each one of us is likely to be bonkers, driven to the nut house by the virtue of economic vibrancy (as in Grace Fu's "The economic vibrancy of the country remains an important political consideration") at the cost of stressed infrastructure, encroaching inflation and being squeezed on all fronts by the alien crowd. There's the method in the madness.