Annotations
The times have changed, yet the core relationship between a Singaporean and his work has stayed the same. We are still fundamentally the comprador-par-excellence of the world. We are a service economy, in that we train our young to serve the banks, funds, labs, and factories.
And when that hollow feeling of being a nation with no bastion of private enterprise to be proud of creeps in, we write polemics, and create well-produced CNA documentaries of why we can’t innovate. We can then excuse ourselves of doing anything about it at all, feeling slightly better for having at least so expertly diagnosed our own problems.
The opportunity cost of an extra exam paper done or an hour spent in a tuition class is a side-project not pursued, a skill not learnt, another door closed in a long and unknown future.
Notice the little irony that in Singapore, even the creation of entrepreneurs appears to be a state-run affair. It’s not the grassroots encouragement of weird kids that like to dream big, but a well-rehearsed choreograph where Type-A kids learn to tick boxes according to a script written across the ocean.
Perspectives
This post has some comments that challenge the author’s viewpoints, and it’s interesting to note them here as well for additional context:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-172555058/comment/152393889
We don’t have the concentration of the most ambitious and smartest people from a country of 300 million, where the poor are priced out to less functional regions. We are a nation-state, and that means certain concentrations of talent that can exist elsewhere are simply closed off to us.
Frankly, a system that funnels the best and brightest into the civil service — where they are responsible for maintaining “the only nation in this world with a sane government and a competent bureaucracy” — seems far preferable to one that funnels them into building ChatGPT wrappers or shaving nanoseconds off trade execution times.
To castigate Singapore for lacking flashy tech companies feels unfair. You seem to have ignored a whole suite of traditional industry success stories — PSA, which operates ports worldwide; Singapore Airlines, which hardly needs introduction; and a range of government-linked companies (GLCs) that have achieved genuine global success.