Hey Soul Sister

Hey, hey, hey

Your lipstick stains on the front lobe of my left side brains
I knew I wouldn't forget you, and so I went and let you blow my mind
Your sweet moon beam, the smell of you in every single dream I dream
I knew when we collided, you're the one I have decided who's one of my kind

Hey soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio, stereo, the way you move ain't fair, you know!
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do...tonight
Hey, hey,hey.....

Just in time, I'm so glad you have a one-track mind like me
You gave my life direction, a game show love connection we can't deny
I'm so obsessed, my heart is bound to beat right out my untrimmed chest
I believe in you, like a virgin, you're Madonna, and I'm always gonna wanna blow your mind

Hey soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio, stereo, the way you move ain't fair, you know!
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do...tonight

The way you can cut a rug, watching you's the only drug I need
You're so gangsta, I'm so thug, you're the only one I'm dreaming of
You see, I can be myself now finally, in fact there's nothing I can't be
I want the world to see you be with me

Hey soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio, stereo, the way you move ain't fair, you know!
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do tonight,
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do...tonight
Hey, hey,hey....tonight
Hey, hey,hey.....
Tonight

Project Baby Week 16: The Mad Xmas Rush

It's the week before Xmas and I have presents to buy and errands to run before our flight next week.  Not to mention things to get for the bitter cold in Germany - stockings for example, thick ones!  I have had to shop reluctantly for stuff that fits my burgeoning mid-section (jeans and pants no longer fasten without making me look like a twisty doughnut) and last week I spent 2 hours going through my closet doing an inventory of what I need to survive winter and the Alps.   

Speaking of clothes, here's stuff from H&M's new Spring/Summer 2011, perfect for me when I'm packing the extra kilos next year. But H&M is only coming to Singapore the second half of 2011 so I am hoping the one at Koblenz or Frankfurt (Daniel, take note) decides to carry the new collection. Oh, and horror or horrors, I am now officially a size 10. Both above and below!

Monday we have another visit to the doc to have a peek at JuJu. Sometimes I feel so normal that I forget he's there. But then I have to gag from the acid reflux and sigh, I remember again. I still have to regulate my liquid intake very carefully, otherwise too much liquid too fast makes me gag and vomit. Totally gross.

I now suffer acute pain in my lower back, right behind my uterus, and it shoots out like a spray of torture bullets whenever I have to get up from a lying down position. Slumping on the sofa causes it too and the only thing that alleviates it somewhat is sleeping on my side. I have to ask the doc about this cos I am now packing only an extra 3 kg, by the time I am over 10kgs I might have to roll around in a wheelchair.

All I can say is this kid better be worth it!

How To Be Happy

On Sunday, I finished reading this book by Jonathan Haidt. In it, he tells us about a lot of good research done in the fields of psychology, sociology and economics which discovered what made people feel happy or gave them a sense of well-being and purpose. He also talked about what he had discovered in his own research on morality. Since Sunday, I have been hit non-stop by many ideas, thoughts and snapshots of all the things that have happened to me, the things I have learnt and the things I've talked about with people in the last 10 years. I was so excited, I wrote an email to my brother-in-law, Tobi, but still I had so many ideas and things to SAY.

This (long) post is about how I plan to become a happier person, and why it is so important for everyone to try to do it, at some point in their lives. I will divide it into two parts: THEN and NOW.

Then:

Some years ago, in 2007, I bought The Happiness Hypothesis while browsing at Kinokuniya bookstore. I read two chapters then I never finished it, it sat on my shelf till last week. I didn't finish the book then probably because I wasn't that interested in how to be happy and what scientists have to say about it. Ironically, I was in a most unhappy time of my life: i was just recovering from a terrible breakup of a 4 year relationship; I was in distress that I would never finish my graduate thesis (I had been working on my Masters research for 3 years); a good friend had destroyed our trust and ten-year friendship and it would be another two years before I learnt that she had betrayed me in the worst, imaginable way; a combination of the above, mistrust and misunderstanding had caused my father and I to be estranged, and it would be 3 more years before we would start communicating again. 

Many studies have shown that adversity helps people become more resilient and thereby more capable of being happy even in difficult circumstances. In other words, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger (and by extension, happier).  I certainly have had my share of misery. But don't get me wrong, my project to become a better person started way before my adulthood. Being "happy" is something anyone ruminates over at some point, and I was certainly put to the test as a teenager grappling with self-esteem issues and later as a young adult struggling with constructing a "positive" identity and self-image. You see, I have a pair of the most cantankerous, negative parents anyone could have - they are cynical, risk averse and not quite open to new things and ideas that challenge their worldview. I do not blame them for bad parenting, in fact, they gave me some of my best attributes: prudence, skepticism and realism.  It's just that whatever it took to overcome my negativity and depression, I had to look for within myself.

When I was 18, I decided to become a "happy and confident person", yes, just like that! So I ditched my glassed for contact lenses, forced myself to get busy with activities in university and avoided my friend who for the past 3 years had done nothing but talk about herself and complain about other people. As soon as I did all that, I began to feel different. As I made new friends and started new plans, I became more confident of myself and that was maybe how I met my first boyfriend who, at that time, was everything I wanted in a boyfriend - goodlooking, sporty and popular.  Of course he was about as deep as a bottlecap, but at 19, you don't really concern yourself about the intellectual aspect of your relationship. I would regret this in years to come, but that's for another discussion.

I was sure I had succeeded at being happy and I had solved the equation to ending all depressiveness. I was wrong.  By 22, my relationship ended, I wanted to kill myself and every day I embarked on self-destructive behaviour (smoking, promiscuity) in order to validate the hate I had for myself and my deficiencies. Through sheer reason and self-will, I decided again to be a better person - out of spite. I would become strong again (confident and happy), successful (get a Masters degree) and special to someone worthier. And I did all that, in fact I did it so well that at 27 I almost went on to do my PhD, almost got married and almost ruined the rest of my life.

Like the Battlestar Galactica rollercoaster on Sentosa, I felt my emotional life spiralling out of control and plunge into hell yet again. I had shown potential academically: I was doing "serious" research in mental health (compared to some of my classmates, I thought condescendingly then), had the opportunity to co-write and publish papers in a psychiatric journal with notable professors at the NUS Medical School, I enjoyed being a teaching assistant and the feedback from my Sociology students reflected my capabilities and popularity every semester, and I was learning like never before, my mind was literally burst open and absorbing like a sponge those years in graduate school. I thought I could do it, that maybe intellectually, I had what it took to be a real researcher, to pursue and produce knowledge, to inspire and teach others.  Emotionally I was a complete fatality when it came to making the ultimate choice -- what do you do when you realise you do not love your fiance the way he loves you, that you cannot be faithful to him and you might find happiness with someone else?

I handled that very badly, you might say it was something like the North Korean crisis meets September 11th. So as my world fell apart at 27, I had to again figure out how to be happy, how to fix the mess, and which way to go, because so many things I had thought to be a given (like marriage and career) had been destroyed. It was nothing I could talk to my parents about, few people knew what had truly happened, and I was riddled with shame, guilt, anger, resentment, hurt and despair. As always, I had the help of one or two people who came into my life at the right moment to help me (finishing Masters and graduating) and support me (seeing the positive and moving forward). This time I was done being the victim and I decided to be happy in spite of the chaos that was my broken relationship with my father,  and the shambles of my shortlived academic life.

So I got myself a job just to be financially independent doing what I enjoyed - teaching Sociology - and ended a relationship that was going nowhere (finally I was able to recognise a dead-end when I saw it and quit). I approached relationships with a new vigor, it was like I was a new person, I didn't care about the guy anymore, what HE wanted, what HE expected of me, I did what I wanted, and who I wanted! It was liberating to be thinking about what made me happy and search for things I wanted to do.  Then I met Daniel and I made two risky choices that would change the direction of my life. First, learning from past mistakes, I decided to be with Daniel exclusively even though when I met him, I was seeing someone else and I found myself in another of those damn dilemmas (trust me, having to choose is not better than having no choice at all). Second, I moved out of my parents' and in with Daniel so that I could live the way I wanted (independently) and away from the stress at home (my father).

Little by little, I became happier as I constructed my life in the manner I had always wanted: doing the work I enjoyed, becoming responsible for my survival and loving somebody who loved me as much as he respected the person that I am. We took another risk last year and bought our first apartment together just before the economy rebounded from the recession. I decided then that it was time to fix the last thing that was wrong in my life - me and my father. I must stress it took me almost 4 years to acknowledge that if anyone was going to make the first move, it would have to be me. It isn't something you can just tell me to do (many people have, and failed), it's something I have to be prepared to do. The turning point was us getting married. And I have to thank Daniel for being the bridge between my father and me, it made it easier since my father now accepted Daniel as a bona fide part of our lives and not some ang moh bum I had shacked up with. Daniel still thinks he should get the Nobel Peace Prize, but I reminded him this is the Gaza Strip, not China after Nixon and Deng Xiaoping. There's still a long way to go.

Now:

I said so much about the past because it was a 15 year journey of searching for happiness, coping with adversity and going back again in search of happiness without committing suicide along the way.  I jest of course, my life cannot be worse than any average person's life with so many starving, diseased and wretched people out there more miserable than I've ever been. However, every person is given what he/she is given at birth and throughout life, and each of us has to make the most of it, for better or worse. I had learnt how to overcome bitterness and unhappiness but I had not quite mastered the knack of finding happiness ALL the time. Is it possible?

Many people think it is. People who deem themselves "holy" or "spiritual" think so, you've probably met people who don't seem to live a single unhappy day. I used to pooh pooh such people, I dismissed them as shallow (how else could they escape the depression that thinking brings?) or naive (see previous) or just lucky (they live "charmed" lives and just don't suffer as much adversity as others). I questioned if happiness was an illusion, as the Buddhists say, pain hides joy, joy hides pain, the palm hides the back of your hand, turn it over and it hides the palm - in the end, suffering and happiness are one and the same. The only true state of being that does not leave you dissatisfied is freedom from all states of mind -- Nirvana, ultimate peace. I really believed that there cannot be a lasting sort of happiness or contentment, because when I was "happy" I was mostly in an unthinking state of "flow", and I got a lot of this the past few years just hanging out with my friends, socialising, holidaying, dancing, singing and drinking. But when I wasn't doing all that, I found myself, from time to time, depressed about the shortness, the pointlessness and the meaninglessness of life.

Back to the book, it finally drew all the parts of my experience of life thus far (which I have just described above) into one stream of consciousness, if you will. Haidt drew much of his inspiration from one positive psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. His name is a mouthful, but what he has to say about "flow", the state of being completely immersed in the task you are doing, be it dancing, working, talking, playing sport, validates everything I have personally learnt and discovered about happiness. He said, "It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. We can be happy experiencing the passive pleasure of a rested body, warm sunshine, or the contentment of a serene relationship, but this kind of happiness is dependent on favorable external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in consciousness."  If you want a concise article of his ideas about finding flow, go to http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199707/finding-flow.

Haidt wrote that to be happy one must have love (positive, rewarding relationships) as well as to do work that one truly enjoys and finds purpose in doing. He said that in the latter one can experience Csikszentmihalyi's "flow", and the third ingredient is "spirituality" - the awareness and feeling of something greater than oneself. Some like to call it "god", some like "universe", I personally have not been awed or awestruck by a higher power or had some near-death experience (even though I wanted to be dead at times) resulting in some born-again experience. But I believe his results and research have a point to make about people being happier when they experience this, that's why mega churches that sing, sway and chant do so well, and people who meditate are so much calmer and at peace. But at moments, I do feel this sense of awe, of beauty that is pure and....good. It's when I happen to look up at the trees swaying under an azure sky, and when I look at a particular portrait or landscape (it's like the painter painted an emotion or feeling state into his canvas and pow, I saw/felt it).

So the plan to be happy as much as possible starts here. Rather than focus on the things I want to be rid of (like irritation, and annoying things at work) I am going to do these things whenever I can remember to:

1) Concentrate on whatever I am doing, whether its work (it's not boring, it's not annoying, it's something I can do properly, and properly is how I will do it!) or cooking or washing the dishes. When your mind is focused, it is clear of all nagging, distracting thoughts like how much you dislike what you're doing, and how you wish you were having a nap or at lunch. You make fewer mistakes because your mind is calm and uncluttered and in the end, you might get "flow" because you are so absorbed in it. Time passes faster and soon you're finished.

2) Build and nurture the good relationships I have now, and fix the not-so-good ones. All relationships are important, be they personal ones or social ones, my newest one would be with my kid - the ultimate rewarding relationship!

3) Find the time to do some of the things I have enjoyed in the past - playing the piano, reading (I do it plenty nowadays and it HAS made me happier) and painting (this one is harder cos I work with pastels and it's messy and I have no room in the apartment for my easel and tools). Cooking is really therapeutic when I don't see it as a tiresome chore, especially at 7pm after a long day at work.

4) Do something for others. Volunteering has been shown to boost one's health, well-being and suppress depression. It's hard to find a cause to volunteer for, what with all the things competing for our time and attention during our rare slices of spare time, but I will search for something to do just for the sake of helping someone else out or improving the life of someone else in a small way.

So that's how I think one can start being a happier person. Not by comparing yourself to people worse off than you, or by trying to change bad habits or things you don't like in your life. I've never before tried to focus on the good, positive and rewarding things life has to offer because I spent so much of my life eradicating negativity, rising above misery and failure, and avoiding things I considered "bad" for me. It's time for a new perspective, and now that I am 31, being happy is my new project.

What Babies REALLY Say About The Economy And Society

When my mother-in-law realised that I was going to go back to work as usual (on a 5-day, 8 hour work week) after my mandatory 4 months maternity leave, she was mortified.  It is a pedestrian norm for a new mother in Germany to work part-time where she used to be a full-time employee and practically taboo to chuck your infant in a day-care centre.  Daniel and I found ourselves having to justify my returning to full-time work - we needed the money, we said - but this has been bugging me since: how convinced am I that we "need" the money? I have been conscientiously keeping tabs on my finances, I just took out a new insurance plan with an investment component I barely understand and I take a highly circumspect view of spending. Yet I have not always been a squirrel where cash is concerned.  I began thinking about savings and retirement and oh-my-god-how much money I don't have only after Daniel and I took on a mortgage and got pregnant. All very typical of your stage-in-life of course. We are in our early 30s.

Singapore has the dubious honour of having the third lowest fertility rate (TFR) in the world after Hong Kong and South Korea and a population that is ageing faster than blue cheese in the open. For the past 25 or so years, Singaporeans and its Government have been gripped in national soul-searching, finger-pointing and a blame-game on every purported culprit and proposed solution to the birth dearth. One thing has remained constant -- we still ain't producing babies.

On the part of Government, I give them points for being pro-active and responsive to social changes as many policies have been tweaked and introduced to improve the societal and workplace support for people who have kids over the last few decades. I have it much better than my mother did in the 80s, where she only got 2 months' paid maternity and no child-care or domestic-helper subsidy, yet the tragic thing is, nothing has improved where it should have improved -- our TFR.

Today, I hear a new set of gripes and alleged causes of the low TFR, mostly from well-educated women. They whinge mostly about

- the high financial cost of having one or more children  (drain on their resources);

- the high personal cost to their freedom, mobility and potentially earned resources (there is a curious phenomena of middle-class women giving up their well-paid jobs to become stay-home-mums, which I will discuss under the "Helicopter Parent Problem later in this essay);

- the lack of state support (even though we have one of the best sets of maternity policies in place compared to the ones in other East Asian countries and even some EU countries, people now compare ours to those of Scandinavia, proving once again that nothing is good enough for this nation of whingers);

- the lack of workplace support, i,e, long working hours (again, relative to only certain countries in the EU, which is not representative of Europe and the U.S as a whole).

None of the above is a direct cause to get Government worried about, because these gripes belie actually more endemic and systemic root problems. The French system targets number three and to some degree, number four, and people think that is a panacea for your birth dearth. Not true, French society and their economic and taxation systems are very different from ours and these have something to do with French success with their TFR.  Let me attempt to put all of that in some sort of sociological and economic perspective because each needs to be weighed in the context of Singaporean as well as global realities. My point is: the tendency of a population as a whole to have babies (one or more or not at all) tells us a LOT about its economic and social values. Therefore, if you want to get someone to make 2.1 babies, you don't throw money at them nor do you start giving out free this and free that.

1) It's not money, stupid, it's mobility
When people lament the financial cost of having babies, they are calculating what they perceive as necessary in comparison with a default norm.  This is totally mental, but systemic, going by the billion-dollar industry that thrives on children's health, education and "intellectual" needs. Half of all Singaporeans live with a monthly household income of under S$4000, the majority of this group does not pay any income tax because they make less than S$22,000 a year, living under what most developed nations would call the poverty line. Yet they have more children than the middle class that earns between $4000 and $10,000 that make up the 50th to 80th percentile of household incomes in Singapore.

Point: poorer people do not have fewer children because it would cost them more to raise each kid. They do the exact opposite. Relatively wealthier people have fewer children (even though comparatively they have more resources) because they perceive the drain on their resources where the former group does not. Why?
 

1.1) The Keeping-Up-With-The-Joneses Problem
Robert Frank, the economist, summed it up perfectly when he told us that given a choice, people would prefer to earn $80,000 while all their neighbours and friends earned $70,000 rather than earn $100,000 while people around them earned $110,000. Honest. I'll tell you why this is important to a population officer in our yet-to-justify-its-existence National Population Secretariat: upward mobility.

Upward mobility is the desire (or the ability) to enter the class above your own, and upward generational mobility is the ability to move into the class above your parents'.  To this end, Singaporeans have literally soared upwards during our industrial boom in the 1980s. People don't want to do as well or have as much as their neighbours, they want to have MORE. Not a lot more, just slightly. Now, if your friends started trading in their Toyotas for Audis, you would look at your Toyota and start feeling a little dissatisfied. If all of them enrolled their kids in Montessori, Mindchamps or one of the thousands of private childcare and playgroup centres offering bogus programmes designed to "nurture a genius", you would have to look very far and dig very deep to be happy sending Junior to the PAP Kindergarten. Consumption can be conspicuous (car, property) or inconspicuous (education & insurance plans, holidays and tuition classes) but both forms of consumption stem from a relative desire to be equal or better off than your peers.

I'm talking about the Middle Class that has really every financial ability to pay for 2 children's food, basic education but choose instead to perceive otherwise because they are comparing themselves to an artificially constructed Middle Class Lie that their children require this extra music class and that 9 day holiday to Hokkaido and Disneyland. Throw in a hyper-consumerist culture (open any newspaper and you will find on every other page a spanking advertisement for a newly-launched designer condominium that costs an average of $1.2 million and the latest Mercedes, BMW or Audi) that pervades EVERY stratum of society, yes, this is not only a Middle Class Problem, but an entire society problem, and you understand why people count dollars where their grandparents never used to. The "needs" of today are really the luxuries of yesterday.

A word about the working class: they are not immune to keeping up with the Joneses either. Our post-industrial, consumerist culture survives on people not being happy with what they have currently. If you can't afford a car, your aspiration is to own a little Hyundai or Kia. To hell with the over-extended public transport with its inefficiencies and high costs. If you currently drive a Honda or Toyota, you aspire to drive a VW or a nice Lexus SUV. If you have been living in a 5 room HDB flat and your friends have been selling theirs and flinging their small profits into a private condominium that comes with a half-million dollar mortgage, you would be putting your flat on the market as well. If you wanted all these things, what would you have to give up in order to pay for a second child?

It's not money stupid. You don't give these people a Baby Bonus (of $4000) for doing what their natural instincts are urging them to do anyway. You take away the pressures that stymie and repress these natural urges to have a baby.You do something about a mass media that celebrates millionaires and glorifies consumerist lifestyles. Aha....but you don't want to compromise consumption or GDP growth. So you throw a few grand at each family and pretend to be perplexed by why they still aren't biting. Gimme a break.

1.2) The Helicopter Parent Problem

In America, there is a curious yet real trend of middle class parents (especially mothers) of being pathologically involved in every aspect of their children's existence -- school, hobbies, friends, diet. Sociologists have named them Helicopter Parents. Helicopter parenting is not novel to Singaporeans, it afflicts the middle class working mother more than anyone because she is educated and aspires for her children to be upwardly mobile (see 1.1). Therefore, she views parenting as not a mere role (like working or supporting your parents) but an entire career. Every minuscule development of the child becomes her obsession and she is devoted to every single aspect of the child's life, sometimes stiflingly so. The child's perceived successes  or failures are frighteningly attributed to her own abilities to control and "nurture" them.

What this means for our Population Officer friend is an increasing proportion of parents tallying up a hefty personal cost to their time and energies on top of an already bloated account deficit owed to conspicuous consumption. So when women weigh the costs and benefits of having a child, they now factor in the cost of giving up their jobs to be a stay-at-home helicopter mum. Of course not everyone subscribes to the helicopter way, I must be exaggerating, you scoff. Granted, I have no data to elucidate how many women give up their jobs or think they have to in order to be a "good mother", but going by the pervasiveness of substitutes for good parenting -- I'm referring to tuition centers, enrichment courses, full-time maids, sales of computers,  iPads and other "enriching" toys for kids -- you cannot doubt that the modern parent makes parenting out to be more costly than it ever was in the 20th century.

1.3) The Every-Man-For-Himself Problem

The third argument I make for social mobility being the cause of a low TFR (and not financial cost) is ironically enough our antagonistic relationship with welfarism. Just about every Singaporean from inception is taught that there is no free meal, no handout without strings and absolutely nobody out there who owes us a living no matter come hell, damnation, war or disease. Full stop. There is no unemployment benefit, no minimum wage, no universal health coverage or affordable comprehensive health insurance (state-health insurance is paid for by your own income and is not comprehensive), no pensions or retirement benefit (you pay for your own retirement with your own income into a state-run fund called the CPF)at 4% interest).  Since the Great Brief Recession of 2007-08, Government has grudgingly designed a welfare system with more brakes in it than a Universal Studios rollercoaster. People depend mostly on voluntary welfare organisations and civil charities for assistance, particularly for health-related needs like dialysis and hospice care. State medical facilities are subsidised but not free and neither is education. If you are impressed by our almost universal home-ownership rate, I'll tell you that public housing is subsidised but costs more than private housing in many of the world's most developed cities. How do we pay for all this? How do we live on a median monthly household income of S$4000 before tax and still consume conspicuously, you ask?

By having a pretty healthy savings rate. In a recent survey by HSBC, 31% polled said they are saving for early retirement (early retirement is another curious Singaporean aspiration that puts more pressure on resource accruance and hence cost of raising a child); 67% say their savings plans are a top source of retirement funds; and the top 3 financial products people own are medical insurance, life insurance and cash in decreasing order. Singaporeans are a pretty anxious lot. 

We cannot live like the Europeans, taking annual 6 week holidays and working part time, or spend 120% of our incomes like the Americans because NOBODY IS GOING TO PAY FOR OUR RETIREMENT.  Am I indicting our social safety net or rather lack thereof? Not really. Europe and America are going bankrupt partly because what they are currently producing can no longer sustain what they have promised to provide  people when they age or fall sick. The system we have here is more robust and sustainable, but the consequence for the TFR is an entrenched social value of non-dependency on the state (laughable since Singaporeans have been called the saddest bunch of spoiled brats mollycoddled by their nanny-state) in terms of what people expect to get from the Government. 

Again, let us view this value as a gradation relative to the lower to upper social classes. Insecurity plagues everyone, but I would bet that the higher you go, up to a certain point where financial insecurity tapers off once you hit a certain income level, the more insecure you become of maintaining a certain lifestyle you have attained (again, see 1.1). If there is something that must go hand-in-hand with upward mobility, it's the fear of status degradation -- falling below the class you are currently in. I would hate to have to move into a smaller place in a less wealthy neighbourhood, drive a Korean car where I used to drive a European one or worse, take only one vacationn a year.  In a population of insecure individuals, ever worried about losing their status and acquired lifestyles once they hit retirement, every birth to their family has to be weighed against the cost of their savings and retirement fund.

Aha, but you do not want to foster a "Crutch Mentality" by giving handouts to the unemployed, god forbid we have lazy people who don't want to work squandering away taxpayers' money like the bums in the US and Europe. We don't want to increase taxes either, otherwise all the Americans and Europeans would not want to bring their businesses here and nobody would want to come to Singapore to work - we are, after all, the next tax-haven after Switzerland. An insecure population that doesn't breed is preferred to a lazy one with a  national current account deficit.

2) It's not money, stupid, it's housework

My second thesis against the assumption that financial cost hinders people giving birth is the gender problem. You got it, unequal pay, unequal expectations and all that. Wait, I am no feminist even though I have been lambasting society and the establishment forever on this issue of inequality. Women are expected to do the housework and raising of children despite being an equal contributer to household income. Men do not get paternity leave, which does nothing to change the idea that men's main responsibility is to be the breadwinner. In a toss-up between who should give up their job to be the helicopter stay-at-home parent, it is invariably the woman (there are exceptions but because they are exceptions, they are not worth talking about).

Given this, does anyone realistically expect a highly educated woman whose income enables her and her husband to live the hyperconsumerist, upwardly-mobile (see 1.1 and 1.3) lifestyle to have babies that will exert a perceived cost to overall well-being (see 1.1, 1.2, 1.3)? People don't fight over money, they fight over whom is going to do the housework so that nobody has to stop making money in order to do it, and whom is going to look after Junior so that nobody has to stop making money in order to do it.

2.1) The Division of Labour Problem (gender, maids, nuclear fams)

The Government is not stupid on this one.  That's why we have one of the highest rates of dependency on domestic foreign labour in the world. Poor Indonesian, Filipina and Burmese women clean our houses, bathe our elderly and raise our children while husband and wife work 8 to 12 hour days making an income that isn't even on par with the average American household. Hell, Americans make more money than we do without having to pay for third world domestic help. That is because a) families perceive they can live on one income and b) women there do everything and I mean everything themselves. And c) putting your elderly parent in a nursing home is not a crime punishable by ostracism and shame.

If half of all Singaporeans require dual incomes to meet their survival needs (remember our median household income) then the other half of dual income families believe they need two incomes to meet their consumption needs (see 1.1). If everybody up to the 70th percentile were content to live in a $150,000 public-funded apartment, we would not have a booming property market with steady 10% annual growth. On the other hand, we would also have nobody complaining they cannot live on a single income of S$3500 to S$5000. So half of the problem is economic in nature - people want their nice houses and cars and holidays and designer kitchens - and the other half is societal. Who is going to do the work at home? 

Middle class Singaporean women are not happy having foreign domestic helpers raising their children, yet they can't bring themselves to live in a 4-room, 10 year old flat either. Singaporean women would rather do the child caring themselves than leave it to an unprofessional "professional" child-minder, yet they can't bring themselves to give up one of their two cars and spend less on one income. Singaporean women would love to have that second or third child, but they can't bring themselves to snub their next promotion to a senior management position by taking a year off to raise the kids. Why should they, their husbands are not more qualified or more capable than they are! 

Again, Population Officer, you don't throw in an additional month of maternity leave and pretend that men are not part of the equation when it comes to raising a family. 6 months of paid maternity leave, more"tax rebates" or childcare subsidies will not change people's minds about having one or two more kids. The only thing you accomplish is to reinforce the idea that women still have to do the domestic work, you continue to keep mothers in an intolerable work system that demands long hours and you do nothing to change women's minds about accepting this system. 

If women believe that they can work fewer hours - flexible and part time work - this solves problem 1.2. If men started taking paid paternity leave (say, 3 months while their wives took the other 3), women would not feel like they are targets of gender discrimination or the glass ceiling, which in turn helps them make choices at work to support having another child. If families believed they could be happy on one income - this means Government has to do something about problem 1.1 and 1.3 through policy - they would consider having more children.

3) It's not money, stupid, it's quality time

Finally, no amount of money can pay for the time lost with your child while you are out there in some office crunching numbers or shuffling papers. People don't want to subcontract their parenting duties to third-world labour, as I said in point 2, they do it because they THINK they HAVE TO, as I showed in point 1. It's a dismal, laughable reality, and it's because we like our economic growth and buying new, shiny things so that we can keep up with our friends and colleagues.

3.1) The Productivity-Productive Problem

Singaporeans are not the most productive people around.  Yet we obsess over it. We have long work hours that don't amount to much real value add. Work can be done in half the time, if you look at the way people behave in offices and around the water cooler and pantry. So if you paid someone the same wages, and you let her say, leave 2 hours early or come 2 hours later as long as her work is done and she does not cause inconvenience to her teammates or project, why don't you do it? If a person left work at 6pm on the dot while all his colleagues left at 8pm because they wanted to show their boss (who leaves at 7.45pm) they worked long hours, pretty soon he is going to start staying at work till 8pm. It's wasteful and stupid. 

But Singaporeans do it. Out of social pressure, insecurity, personal ambitions, you name it. While the employer is to some extent responsible for much of the wastefulness and unproductive use of time and resources, the individual Singaporean is too caught up with his own personal needs (see 1.1 and 1.3) to think collectively as a group of workers. You don't have to strike or protest for better working hours and pay, all you need to do is pick an organisation and employer who is reasonable enough about productivity and working hours. If everyone boycotted companies with poor work-life balance, you wouldn't have many companies who can succeed with their existing poor conditions. But people will always aspire to more earnings, higher status and therefore, employers have no incentive to design more productive work systems.

So there you go. It's not really the real net cost of raising a child that has depressed our national birth rate the last 20 years. It isn't even the cost of living or the cost of working (long hours, no quality time), It is the way people behave in relation to other people, what they see as necessary to living a good life, having a secure retirement and being a Good Parent - and all this is flexible and changeble because these needs are as artificially created as the colouring on your ice-cream. 

But changing some of these fundamentals like economic growth and the paternalistic society comes at a cost that people do not want to bear. What then?

How should I know? Do I look like the Prime Minister or his bunch of overpaid millionaire ministers who claim they are the best people to lead this country?

Vacation

Snow, snow, snow.

There will be an abundance of it, and even more when we are in the mountains for wintersport. This is where we will be for Xmas. How do people with no body fat survive? With thick socks and a lot of vodka apparantly.

Except the only things I will be drinking will be devoid of alcohol. Oh snap.

Still, on the scale of all things, there is much to rejoice about in spite of the sub-zero temperature:

• Seeing the family again
• Eating
• Friends
• Looking more pregnant than chubby?
• Cheese
• No housework for 3 weeks
• No aircon for 3 weeks (I think being in 19 degree air-conditioning is 10x worse than being in 0 degree weather)
• Cheese

Lights

The Marina Bay Sands

The Singapore Flyer in the distance

Marina Barrage

Project Baby: Week 15 - Hallo Julien

So finally I am starting to chronicle my - our - latest project: Baby. I am 15 weeks pregnant this week and it has taken me this long to write about it because I have been in the toilet bowl and the darkest, most miserable recesses of my mind since week 7. Coming out of the worst phases of my first trimester, I am pleased to announce that Baby is doing alright, meaning all tests and scans so far are normal, much to my and Daniel's relief. The other thing is - you guessed it - Baby looks like a boy. The doc would not committ 100%, but he was as surprised as we were during our 13th week scan to see a little dangly bit between Baby's legs. So Julien, he will be, until he or she proves otherwise.

Week 4 - September
I was deliriously happy to see two lines on the test stick! In fact, it was only the 4th month we had "tried" to get pregnant, and rather half-heartedly too, because I had to go to India for work (3 weeks) in October and we had purposely chosen a "safe" window to have our Quality Time....but oh my, looks like the reason we had not gotten lucky the past 3 months was because the online ovulation calculator had timed my ovulation a week early and we had been doing it the wrong time all the while! But we were in the club now, and India was out. So off we went to our first Ob/gyn appointment, had a scan and then got married! (this one we planned since June.)

Week 5 to 6 - Spotting
Being pregnant was just fine, I didn't feel any different and I wondered if I was gonna be one of the lucky few who could get away with no morning sickness. My Mum disabused me of that soon enough, she said hers came at week 6 and lasted till week 12. In week 6 I started getting some spotting and the doc checked me over - all seemed okay. He put me on progesterone to boost the development of the fetus. The bleeding went away in a few days.

Week 7 - All day sickness
It finally came. Like a recurrent nightmare happening ALL THE TIME. I was crawling around in bed, scrunched up on the floor in my cubicle, running to the toilet bowl every 2 hours and swearing I would NEVER again have a baby. It's not just the nausea, vomiting and all-day bloatedness that is bad, your whole mental state becomes that of a depressive patient. When I was not shouting at people on the phone, I was thinking of ending it all, period.

Week 8 to 10 - Still all day sickness
Eating too little made me sick, eating too much made me puke. I could not drink any water as it was too bland and tepid and would make me puke. I lived on Yakult, canned green tea, 100 Plus, yoghurt and whatever was on offer at the cafeteria in the mornings. Surprisingly, breakfast was the only meal that didn't kill me after ingesting it. I didn't want to go to work because I didn't feel like getting dressed, doing my face and being in the bloody sickening air-conditioning from 8am to 6pm. Pimples were breaking out all over and in the unthinkable places - like my chest! I looked like shit, felt like shit and did not want to go out, see anyone or be anywhere.

Week 11 - Getting better
I didn't have to take the progesterone anymore and the vomiting was easing up to once or twice a day, usually after a big dinner. My food intake was by no means large, in fact eating the same amount as I would normally eat would be too much for me. I didn't snack, just had two small breakfasts most days, and then normal lunch and dinner after that. My pants and skirts were getting tighter but I had only gained 1 kg. Still looked like shit and didn't feel like putting on makeup.

Week 12 to 13 - Stabilised
I finally stopped vomiting, the taste of chewed and semi-processed food was no more! The NT scan went well and all my blood tests came back normal. I gained another 1 kg and started using a safety pin with my pants. I consented to going out and meeting people again (much to Daniel's relief) but the newest adjustment was alcohol abstinence. That really sucks. I still sip Daniel's wine from time to time though.

Week 14 - It's a boy?
The doc said it's likely to be one, but we shall have to look again next time since Baby is still developing his sex organs. Everyone asked me if I was disappointed - I'm not really, I wanted a girl badly, but I am just thankful it's healthy. Besides, Daniel is pleased as punch. At least I can say all the shit on my face is cos of his testosterone runnign around inside me! I burp a lot after ingesting anything, and gagging is now a regular part of my day, it's preferable to puking of course, but still annoying. I live in fear of a urinary tract infection cos of the reduced amount of water I am drinking. It's really frustrating when I can't drink normally and this puts me at UTI risk. My bladder is starting to feel compressed and my belly is sticking out more, even though I don't look at all preggie, said Daniel. All in, I have only gained 3 kg.

Satire: European Debt Crisis

German + Chinese = 100% Hapa?

I came across Kip Fulbeck's project on Hapa people, also known as those of mixed heritage, part Asian and part something else.  It's a book of 250 portraits where each Hapa person answers the question "What Are You?"

Hapa comes from the Hawaiian word for "mixed descent", a derogatory term not unfamiliar to other cultures who have their own labels for those who do not fit in with the majority. In Singapore, we have the Hokkien word "Zup Jing" which literally translates to "mixed genes" and isn't exactly a very neutral, politically-correct name.  Incidentally, I wanted to use http://www.zupjing.blogspot.com/ for our gestating baby but Daniel refused.

Whether we (or other people) are going to label our kid Zup Jing or Hapa or mixed or whatever, one thing is for certain: he or she is going to look and be special.  50% German and 50% Chinese really doesn't mean anything since "German" does not come prepacked in a jar of genes on the western end of the chromosome-market shelf. So what will our baby be?

I have always wondered about how children of two or more cultural heritages construct their identity. How would they answer the questions "Who am I?" and "What am I?"  If they lived in the same society most of their lives, would they identify with that culture and not that of their other parent? If they looked more like one parent, would they identify themselves with the ethnic/cultural group of that parent?

Race and ethnic labels (like German and Chinese) are pretty simple signposts for the more complex concept of identity -- who you are.  If both my parents are Chinese and I grew up in Shanghai I would not think very much about who I am. For those of us in Singapore, few lose sleep over this question since we've been told since the day we could read and activate the remote control that we have a "Chinese" (or Malay or Indian) race and a Singaporean nationality. The rest of us who do not agree with these signposts have to work a little harder to convince ourselves we are "Eurasian" or "Arab" or "Cockapoo".

Whatever scratches your identity itch. 

In fact, more and more people are joining the ranks of those who do not fit neatly into a "race" category.  Even people who fit neatly in on paper do not identify themselves with that group. If you were a Chinese Singaporean who grew up in America, spent your youth in Europe and then worked in Hong Kong, what about those experiences make you a Chinese, and even Singaporean? Maybe you speak some Chinese but that is not going to get you invited to a Chinese person's mahjong session. Your American-accented English is going to get you ridiculed amongst your Singaporean coworkers and your once-yearly trips to see Grandma and Grandpa back home are not going to make you au fait with the ways and wonders of Singaporean slang and the local love-affair for the best street food.

The new world of global movement and global economies has begun to dramatically alter the landscape of traditional identities long tied to homeland, nationality and race/ethnic groups. It's not even so new anyway, but the evolution of the way people work and live and move has sped up in the last decades and will spiral even faster in the decades to come.  There will be less space for identity politics like (single) national allegiance in a burgeoning population of Hapas and Zup Jings who hail from two or more nationalities and cultures. Already, people are becoming less anchored to one home, one place as they travel the world in search of jobs and experiences. Will there be any more relevance to national identity or cultural identity once people no longer spend enough time in one place to engender IDENTIFICATION with that place and that society?

In 7 months, our baby will have two nationalities - German and Singaporean.  S/he will live in Singapore until which time my job or Daniel's job takes us to another city.  We will visit Germany at least once a year. In several years, maybe more, we will rethink where we want to live. Decisions such as ours will have a profound impact on any child growing up in a family with strong blood ties to two cultures on different sides of the planet.  Family and employment would be the biggest factors that either push or pull us this way and that.  Our kid will have to figure out who s/he is and where s/he fits in while juggling three languages, two sets of culturally-distinct relatives, two or more societies that s/he will live and socialise in before s/he turns 21 and has to decide what and who s/he wants to be. A German or Singaporean.

I feel sorry for the kid already.  S/he is going to have to pick her/his way around all kinds of labels that people are going to try to shove at her; s/he will look in the mirror and see a question mark; I long to tell him/her that the only important label one should give oneself is "Adaptable". 

So kid, no matter how stupid government policies that force you to pick one identity are, no matter how incompletely you feel trying to fit in to one group, and no matter how few friends you have that look like you do, life is not about belonging to one or two groups of people who talk the same junk and behave the same way. Life is about making the most of what you've been given and doing the most good with it for yourself and the people around you - no matter which group they belong to - in the short, short time you have alive.

Francois' Opinion Of Marriage

The Offspring

This epitomises, in my mind, the perfect pop/rock song. From the opening bars of the accoustic guitar, you know it's promising a lot more than a generic bubble-gum production line jingle. The vocals are clear and he tells a real story you can relate to - a girl he used to know got raped a long time ago and he still remembers her. He's wracked with guilt that he did nothing because they were young, and he wonders if she's alright. The chorus is earnest, strong and the line "Don't waste your whole life trying to get back what was taken away" just punches you in the face - it was the focal point of the song and completely resonated with me. He beseeches her to move on, and not live in the dark abyss of her past trauma. It's so poignant that your imagination is captured by this enigmatic girl Kristy, and without knowing the whole story, you feel like you already know them both. This is a good song.

Old clouds of time seem to rain on innocence left behind

It never goes away.

Eine Moment Bitte

How nice to be able to stay frozen in this moment, staring out blankly at a sea of waves and nothing else, for all of time. Of course our minds would have to stop moving, otherwise Daniel would either get bored or fall asleep.

Hence, the moment never lasts. I find one split-second of stillness (the state of tranquility people like to call "peace") and the next second I am awash again with the neverending cacophony of thoughts about my today, tomorrow, yesterday and what-next. No wonder it takes a few thousand life-times or more to get to nirvana - if I'll ever make it there.

In my 20s, I was gripped by periodic states of anxiety and anticipation, it was like I was dangling over a small cliff, trying to get up to safety, where there would be another cliff on which I would perch precariously for a while.

I learnt how to push out the noise and became much calmer and happier when I hit 29. I felt like I had reached my first plateau and I now wanted to be something more than just the blind and pointless "happy" that arrives like a big wave and recedes just as swiftly. That meant fixing a lot of stuff that had gone awry in the past few years of scrambling and battling. There are broken relationships that cost too much emotion to mend. But it is never too costly to mend a relationship with your parent, no matter how long it would take. I have been trying over the last 4 years to overcome the blame I put on certain people whom I believe had contributed to the breakdown of this relationship. I tried to focus on how I could mend the rift and take responsibility for my actions even though my indignation and pride protest against taking all of the blame.

It hasn't been easy. A human's sense of injustice and anger at events long past, and people long gone manifest in dreams of rage and recrimination. I believe it was the philosophy of the transience of all life that my mind was able to focus and not fall into a low-grade depression.

Meanwhile, the part of my mind that wasn't passively engaged in emotional damage-control worked overtime to achieve Balance. I call it Balance and not Happiness because I do not feel Happy. I feel better than that. I wake in the morning and Daniel is beside me, a reassurance that I am loved (for who I am and not what I have or what I can provide). The work I do and the satisfaction I feel at the end of the day attests to my competency as a member of society and the fact that I belong somewhere. The roof over our heads attests to our mutual committment to each other and a future of joint venture and parenthood. The options to move overseas and opportunities that come with this assures me that there is much more to learn and experience beyond our current existence.

I did not set out to achieve things to become "Happy". Don't get me wrong, I have many moments of happiness but I notice each one of them as they come along and ebb away again. Like when I am laughing with my colleagues at something, when I'm lazing in the pool with my friends, when I'm talking to my mother over dinner and when Daniel proposed.

I've learnt to respect the moments of calm nothing-states I experience nowadays as balance. It's no longer like the ennui of my youth and the resentment in my 20s. The unbearable lightness and heaviness are now in equal measure and sometimes, the stillness cancels each one out. Achievements, big and small, are thrilling, but equally transient. They make my day, but I want to work on this Balance thing now that the 30s are upon me and feel the pleasant state of stillness for more than a few moments each day.

Poolspiel

Caitlin: My boat is better than yours, Uncle Daniel.

Caitlin und Daniel

Daniel: "Do you like me Caitlin?"

Caitlin: "Yes. But you're only getting one cookie."

Marriage

Me: So, are you going to be with me in sickness and health,
in poverty or wealth; through thick and thin; no matter
which country we're in?

Daniel: Yes.

Me: Aren't you gonna think it through?

Daniel: If I do, I'm gonna fall asleep.

And so we begin our odyssey at 31 in relatively good health (notwithstanding some hamstring and shoulder pain for him; and some joint muscle strains for me), relatively sound financials (albeit shouldering a big-ass mortgage), no children or other time and emotion-consuming burdens and relative personal stability in our respective careers in Singapore.

As with most good headstarts, we should take our daily dose of reality check, we all saw what happened to Argentina. One day, we will be forced to make decisions because someone is sick, we have to move to another country, the kid conspires to deprive us of sleep, our parents need us. Things that money alone cannot fix.

That is the real test of a marriage. Not solving the problem of who does the laundry.

It's The World Cup - Be Back Soon

Starbucks Goes Under

First Time Seen In Singapore

The last time a foreigner (read: white person from a developed nation) was charged for vandalism and sentenced to several excruciating whallops on his ass was back in the 90s when American teenaged punk Michael Fay went on a car-smashing rampage. President Bill Clinton actually stuck his head in our part of the boondocks and requested for leniency on the ratbastard. Well, in our part of the world, we take our ass-kickings seriously, but we take our diplomatic pow-wows even more seriously. So the Fay boy got his 6 whacks reduced to 4. Nobody went home happy (not least Fay himself), but you can't say we gave good ol' Bill the snub.
Earlier this month, two white dudes decided to test the limits of Singaporeans' immense complacency and spray-painted a subway car while it sat pretty in the depot. This flagrant act of artistic up-yours not only revealed that SMRT staff either lack sleep or interest in their own trains (the train was seen plying its usual route, see video, for several hours before a member of public decided to check if this was really a prank or some publicity stunt a-la Singpost), it exposed SMRT's security to ridicule -- the pranksters snipped a hole in the fence with a pair of garden variety shears.
The culprits are one Briton who has since fled our legalistic shores and a Swiss consultant (age 35) who was apprehended, charged, and since released on bail of $100,000. While the rest of the world ponders the fate of the Swiss-roll about to be creamed by the iron-fist of our Penal Code, Singaporeans are left to wonder which sucker is about to take the fall for this latest screw-up of idiotic proportions.
Of course they should also ponder the farcical lack of interest the public displayed in a normally drab MRT train rolling through the station wearing a spanking coat of grafitti.

Finally, something worth reading in the Straits Times

May 12, 2010THE ST INTERVIEW

Want more babies? Fathers, please step up
Fairer policies and greater gender equity will boost S'pore's birth rate, says professor
By Tan Hui Yee, Correspondent
SINGAPORE fathers are the real losers when they abdicate child-rearing responsibilities to mothers. And the state, too, becomes much poorer for it, says noted Swedish international health professor and public statistics advocate Hans Rosling.
Singapore, he notes, vexes over its baby shortage because the situation threatens its economic survival. But it should be more concerned that its falling total fertility rate (TFR) shows poor gender equity, which is an indicator of social progress.
The 62-year-old academic from Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet, which awards the Nobel Prize for medicine, was in town recently to speak at the UBS Philanthropy Forum.
'A fertility rate of 1.23 children per woman indicates that life is not that optimal for young women in Singapore. You can gather from that that Singapore women have to make a choice, either to have children or to have an active professional career,' he says. Their inordinate sacrifice stems from the fact that would-be fathers here are not rising to the task of child-rearing, and state support for equal parenting roles is not adequate. In response, women are saying 'no' to babies.
Singapore, he notes, is a close cousin to Sweden in income and infant mortality rate. Yet both countries are moving in opposite directions when it comes to fertility rates, with the Swedish figure climbing to a 16-year high of 1.94 children per woman last year, while Singapore's dipped to a nadir of 1.23.
In fact, he says, Sweden is seeing more families with three children, and 'young couples would rather have a third child than a costly car'. The most likely reason for this contrast is the 'not very advanced' state of Singapore's gender relations, which lags behind its economic and social development, he says.
The fact that tens of thousands of live-in foreign domestic workers plug the gap here by doing housekeeping and looking after the children and elderly does not help, he charges. Their presence further stunts the development of gender relations.
It 'delays modernisation because the one who would have to deal with the domestic worker is the wife'. Married women still end up overseeing domestic work, which could have been equitably shared between husband and wife if such workers were not hired. Worse, men were also denied the transformative experience of bringing up their children. In the end, 'you will get fewer children', he says.
The other downside to relying on foreign domestic help is it swells the population of guest workers and deepens reliance on foreign labour. 'That makes Singapore more of a Gulf country than a West European country,' he says. One in three people in Singapore are now foreigners, while locals are outnumbered 10 to one in Dubai.
The Swedish way of boosting birth rate marries generous child-care facilities with a parental leave system designed to nudge fathers and mothers to take up equal parenting roles. Parents are entitled to 480 days of tax-funded parental leave between them, and couples who share the leave equally get a bonus payment.
Prof Rosling himself was among the first generation of fathers in Sweden who stayed home to look after his children more than 30 years ago. He took six months of leave each time to look after his three children because his wife Agneta, a hospital manager, threatened to throw him out of the house otherwise.
He recalls the pain of trying to convince his superiors to give him time off. 'It was very embarrassing having to ask the senior doctors if I could take half a year off. They said, 'Oh you can't do that, you will lose out in your career, you will be a failure and you will not get a job'. But I give better lectures now because of that experience. 'I am extremely happy for that.'
Times have changed so much in Sweden that his colleagues now send fathers reluctant to consume their parental leave to him for counselling. He says: 'Someone would come to me and say so and so is so career-oriented he won't stay home with his children. He would be taken into a room. We will tell him, 'You are stupid. Don't miss this'.' (**Daniel take note, I expect the same from you or you're OUT!)
It used to be said that advanced economies and a high TFR were mutually exclusive. Not any more. He notes a global trend of many high-income countries showing it is possible to reverse the decline in fertility rates. Australia, for example, which ranked seventh out of 109 countries in gender empowerment in the United Nations' human development report last year, achieved a fertility rate of 1.97 in 2008, the highest since 1977.
But this reversal is not happening in Japan, South Korea and Singapore, and he suggests this is because they lag behind in gender equity. Fair gender policies, he states, are probaby policies. Sweden does not give tax concessions to husbands if their wives are housewives. This reduces the financial incentive - some say pressure - for women to drop out of the workforce to look after their children.

Low-income divorcees with children in tow are also entitled to housing subsidies in Sweden. This makes it easier for women who leave unhappy marriages. 'You then remarry someone you love, that you are willing to have more kids with, instead of with that bas***d you happened to marry the first time,' he says.
So what is his advice on Singapore's bid to achieve the demographer prescribed replacement rate of a TFR of 2.1? Stop being fixated with numbers and keep your eyes on the real end-goal, which is the well-being of people. 'Who would like to live at replacement level?' he asks. 'We like to live good lives. The aim of development is not a certain replacement level or carbon dioxide emission or GDP (gross domestic product) growth rates. These are just tools to achieve a good life that is also sustainable.'
Benchmarks of progress should change according to a country's stage of development, he says. They should also be broadened beyond economic indicators like GDP to capture a clearer picture of a country's progress and what it needs to do next.
'For countries already with high incomes, the indicators used to track their progress out of poverty are no longer that useful,' he says. Take life expectancy, for example. 'It's nice to live longer, but when you get old, it's more important how you are cared for and how you live. Life expectancy becomes irrelevant when you try to measure how well old people live. 'When you have a car, you have a decent house or apartment, you have the chance to travel - further economic growth is not as important as the atmosphere you have at the workplace, your family relations and whether the economic growth is sustainable in the long term. 'What was a good measure of progress two generations ago is no longer a good measure now.'
He turns back to his home country. 'In Sweden, child mortality is almost zero. Now, parents ask, what about the environment during childbirth? Can my husband be with me? Why are the walls of the delivery room so boring? Can't they be nicer?
'Sometimes, I think these people are terrible. Now that we have made deliveries so safe for them and allowed their husbands to be there, they start to complain about the colour of the walls.
'But the thing is, that's what people want. They say it's the most important day of their lives. So we have to look into not only mortality rates and waiting times, but also other dimensions of the health service.'
Such is the nature of development that each stage of progress throws up new forks in the road, and some of these paths are not measurable with existing tools. For most people though, it still boils down to the same thing - figuring out how to 'create a society that is truly sustainable - socially, demographically and environmentally', he says.
And that future, he notes, can always include more babies.

The European superiority complex

Interview with Hans Rosling (part II)

Q You often talk about how the North Americans and Europeans like to set themselves apart from the 'developing' nations of the world. Why so?
This is transformed racism. The previous dominance of Western Europe yielded an arrogance that started the myths that Europeans were genetically superior to the rest of the world. After some time, they said, it's a 'civilisation' difference - Christianity is better than Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam.

Then they said it's about institutions - that Asia is too authoritarian. When that started to change, they began to say: 'Oh, they can't live like us, they will destroy the planet.' When one explanation lost credibility, they jumped to another to show why they were superior and should continue to be so.

I was lecturing in Vancouver and a young student who runs a Web journal interviewed me. Her first question was: 'Should we in the West allow the poor in the developing world to achieve the same living standard as we have?' This was an intelligent 21-year-old student.
I asked her: 'How can you ask that question? How do you plan to stop them?' She actually started to cry after a while because she realised what she had said.

Q How do you explain that Japan is sometimes referred to as a 'Western' country?
I think it's like the aristocratic system - it classified people into either aristocrats or commoners. Either you were an aristocrat by birth, or you belonged to the commons. When someone was really good but not aristocrat - and it became too embarrassing - then they made him an aristocrat. And it is like this with the countries of the world - you are either 'Western' or 'uncivilised'. When countries like Japan become too successful, then they say: 'Oh, it's a Western country.'

Q How valid is this idea that China is the world's biggest source of pollution?
It is intellectually at this level. (He bends down and points to his socks). I call the people with these ideas Post-Industrial Morons. Saying that China is the biggest polluter is as clever as putting all Chinese citizens on a scale and saying: 'Oh, they weigh more than Americans, so they have an obesity problem.'

It would be more intelligent to break down the carbon dioxide emissions in China according to province. And if we did that, we would find some provinces that would match West Europe and North America in carbon dioxide emissions.

The arrogant people in West Europe and North America have this idea that women in India shouldn't have washing machines, that they should continue to hand wash their clothes. I always ask in my lectures: 'How many of you hand wash your sheets and your trousers?' Sometimes there is one Rastafarian with dreadlocks who will raise his hand, so I will ask him: 'Do you have any children?' And he will say no. And so I will tell him: 'Come back to me when you have children and tell me if you will continue to hand wash your sheets.'

I agree that we need environmentally friendly washing machines, and we should have chemicals that are kind to the environment. But I am astonished at the attitudes I find in West Europe and North America. It's not driven by a joint concern about the environment. It builds on the idea they must be more privileged than the rest of the world.

Who Is Hungry?

"Polytechnic 'reject' wins Harvard scholarship"

This is the headline in the Straits Times page A8 with a full colour photo of a young man named Kuriakin Zeng, an Indonesian from the island of Bintan who won a full Harvard scholarship on his own merit.

This is someone MM would call a "hungry" person - someone who came from a family that could not afford to send him to school in Singapore, who had to work several jobs for money to come to Singapore to do his O Levels in order to get into Singapore Polytechnic, and who went on to prove through his grades and his contributions to society how he DESERVED a scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in the world.

Prestigious scholarships funded by taxpayers' money are not difficult to come by to the middle class Singaporean kid who has the good fortune of being raised by middle class parents and the support of schools that can devote any amount of resource to help him get those scholarships. You don't have to be that hungry, because you honestly don't have to overcome the kind of odds that Kuriakin Zeng had to overcome.

Who will "break" their bond? Who will place higher value on their Singapore PR-ship or citizenship? Who will demonstrate integrity of spirit and principle if the going ever gets rough?

Hungry or well-fed, both kids are in theory equally meritorious. But only one had to pay the full price for the scholarship ticket.

My money is on the hungry Indonesian kid.

The Mandarin Muddle Part II

"He then looked away, but looked back again when I told him I was at Mr Loh's wake. Many of your mutual friends were there, I told him."

-- The New Paper, page 3, April 22, 2010.


What's wrong with the sentence in italics?
It's an elementary school mistake in grammar, with the missing past perfect tense. The reporter who wrote this and his/her editor who was supposed to vet it likely do not know what past perfect tenses are or how to use them.

I'll tell you what's wrong. The reporter basically wrote that he "was" at Mr Loh's wake, i.e. at that very moment he was speaking to the guy, he was also at the wake.

This threw me off for 8 seconds, which I had to take to figure out where the reporter was -- in Singapore at the dead boy's wake? So was he speaking on the phone to this other boy? I had to re-read the sentence to double check that he was indeed interviewing the boy in Phuket. Of course reading the New Paper is like drinking coffee ground from Robusta beans, pretty tasteless but you get what you need on the go. But we have to aim a lot higher, this is print media circulated islandwide. School kids read this.

Yesterday Minister Ng Eng Hen announced that the MOE would be reviewing the weightage of Mother Tongue in Singapore's school exams. This has been welcomed by the portion of the population who suck at Mandarin.

It's anybody's guess what the outcome of this will be. One thing's for sure, if we are heading towards a nation of monolingualism like Britain or the United States, I weep for tomorrow's generation, because it will be a nation of dysfunctional monolinguists who cannot string a simple English sentence together.

What's more horrifying? A nation of half-fuck bilinguals who cannot speak proper Mandarin & English or a nation of half fuck monolinguists who cannot speak proper English?

Borobudur in the sun