A New Start

Today: Half of survey respondents had thought of divorce

Half of survey respondents had thought of divorce

by Desiree Tay

Updated 12:47 PM Dec 12, 2012

SINGAPORE - About half the respondents in a survey of married individuals here have considered divorce at some point. 

While the finding appears startling, amid rising divorce rates over the past decade, counsellors and observers noted that it reflected reality as people become more open to acknowledging and talking about marriage problems. At the same time, it underlined the resilience of marriages here given that the respondents did not eventually go down that path, they said.

The survey, which involved 408 married individuals in total, was commissioned by Marriage Central - a work group under the National Family Council - and conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

It was part of a study that aimed to find out "resilience factors that can mitigate marriage crises, as well as acceptance towards the use of social service interventions for marital problems", according to Marriage Central. 

IPS research fellow Mathew Mathews, who led the study, noted the survey's small sample size and said it was not meant to be representative of the state of marriages here. 

Between February and May, in-depth interviews were conducted on 85 couples and 15 spouses. The researchers found from these that a "good proportion" of this group had contemplated divorce at some point during marriage. This prompted them to conduct a self-administered survey with 108 of the initial respondents, as well as another 300 married persons - from various ages, racial and religious backgrounds - via door-to-door visits. 

The result: Almost 52 per cent of the total number of married persons surveyed had considered divorce at some point. 

According to the study, common marital stressors were interference by in-laws, sexual impropriety and infidelity, communication and personality difficulties as well as misaligned priorities and different aspirations. 

Marriage Central Chairperson Anita Fam said: "The findings from this study, especially the stories of couples who went through very challenging periods but persisted in working on their marriages, show that there is hope for troubled marriages."

Ms Celine Edmund, a marriage counsellor at Singapore Counselling Centre, said she was not surprised at the findings. 

"All these marriage problems have been ongoing for a long time - only (the subject) has always been a taboo," she said. "It is coming to the surface because people are more willing to talk about it now." 

Nevertheless, she said that "more people still need to know that there is nothing wrong with seeking marriage counselling". 

Jalan Besar GRC Member of Parliament Lily Neo, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Social and Family Development, said she was initially surprised by the survey findings but pointed out that, "despite considerations of divorce, these marriages stayed committed and resilient".

Among other things, the study found that family, friends and religious advisors are often primary informal sources of help that couples reach out to when faced with marital issues. It also found that couples opt for counselling too late into their conflict "which makes progress through counselling difficult". 

It recommended that training opportunities be made available for family and friends of couples whose marriages are on the rocks. One complimentary post-marriage counselling session should also be included in marriage preparatory packages, the study suggested. 

Ms Edmund felt that the cost of counselling - which can go up to more than S$100 per hour at private counselling centres - could deter couples from seeking help. 

But Ms Chong Cheh Hoon, who heads Marriage Central's Family Education and Promotion Division, pointed out that voluntary welfare organisations (VWOs) offer counselling services at affordable rates. 

The fees are even waived at some VWOs, depending on the couples' monthly household income, she said. 

Ms Chong noted that the imposition of a fee helps to ensure that the couples are committed to undergo counselling. 

Compared to a decade ago, the general divorce rates last year were significantly higher. 

The rate for males rose from 6.3 in 2001 to 7.6 last year, while that for females climbed from 6.4 in 2001 to 7.2 last year.

NY Times: Steven Pinker - Violence

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-steven-pinker-book-review.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&

 

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October 6, 2011

Is Violence History?

By PETER SINGER

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE

Why Violence Has Declined

By Steven Pinker

Illustrated. 802 pp. Viking. $40.

It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of“The Language Instinct,” addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad? Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? Do we have grounds for being optimistic about the future?

If that sounds like a book you would want to read, wait, there’s more. In 800 information-packed pages, Pinker also discusses a host of more specific issues. Here is a sample: What do we owe to the Enlightenment? Is there a link between the human rights movement and the campaign for animal rights? Why are homicide rates higher in the southerly states of this country than in northern ones? Are aggressive tendencies heritable? Could declines in violence in particular societies be attributed to genetic change among its members? How does a president’s I.Q. correlate with the number of battle deaths in wars in which the United States is involved? Are we getting smarter? Is a smarter world a better world?

In seeking answers to these questions Pinker draws on recent research in history, psychology, cognitive science, economics and sociology. Nor is he afraid to venture into deep philosophical waters, like the role of reason in ethics and whether, without appealing to religion, some ethical views can be grounded in reason and others cannot be.

The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.

Pinker assumes that many of his readers will be skeptical of this claim, so he spends six substantial chapters documenting it. That may sound like a hard slog, but for anyone interested in understanding human nature, the material is engrossing, and when the going gets heavy, Pinker knows how to lighten it with ironic comments and a touch of humor.

Pinker begins with studies of the causes of death in different eras and peoples. Some studies are based on skeletons found at archaeological sites; averaging their results suggests that 15 percent of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. Research into contemporary or recent hunter-gatherer societies yields a remarkably similarly average, while another cluster of studies of pre-state societies that include some horticulture has an even higher rate of violent death. In contrast, among state societies, the most violent appears to have been Aztec Mexico, in which 5 percent of people were killed by others. In Europe, even during the bloodiest periods — the 17th century and the first half of the 20th —­ deaths in war were around 3 percent. The data vindicates Hobbes’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. Pinker calls this the “pacification process.”

It’s not only deaths in war, but murder, too, that is declining over the long term. Even those tribal peoples extolled by anthropologists as especially “gentle,” like the Semai of Malaysia, the Kung of the Kalahari and the Central Arctic Inuit, turn out to have murder rates that are, relative to population, comparable to those of Detroit. In Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than one-tenth, and in some countries only one-fiftieth, of what it would have been if you had lived 500 years ago. American rates, too, have fallen steeply over the past two or three centuries. Pinker sees this decline as part of the “civilizing process,” a term he borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributes it to the consolidation of the power of the state above feudal loyalties, and to the effect of the spread of commerce. (Consistent with this view, Pinker argues that at least part of the reason for the regional differences in American homicide rates is that people in the South are less likely to accept the state’s monopoly on force. Instead, a tradition of self-help justice and a “culture of honor” sanctions retaliation when one is insulted or mistreated. Statistics bear this out — the higher homicide rate in the South is due to quarrels that turn lethal, not to more killings during armed robberies — and experiments show that even today Southerners respond more strongly to insults than Northerners.)

During the Enlightenment, in 17th-and 18th-century Europe and countries under European influence, another important change occurred. People began to look askance at forms of violence that had previously been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, dueling and extreme forms of cruel punishment. Voices even began to be raised against cruelty to animals. Pinker refers to this as the “humanitarian revolution.”

Against the background of Europe’s relatively peaceful period after 1815, the first half of the 20th century seems like a sharp drop into an unprecedented moral abyss. But in the 13th century, the brutal Mongol conquests caused the deaths of an estimated 40 million people — not so far from the 55 million who died in the Second World War — in a world with only one-seventh the population of the mid-20th century. The Mongols rounded up and massacred their victims in cold blood, just as the Nazis did, though they had only battle-axes instead of guns and gas chambers. A longer perspective enables us to see that the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, sadly, less novel than we thought.

Since 1945, we have seen a new phenomenon known as the “long peace”: for 66 years now, the great powers, and developed nations in general, have not fought wars against one another. More recently, since the end of the cold war, a broader “new peace” appears to have taken hold. It is not, of course, an absolute peace, but there has been a decline in all kinds of organized conflicts, including civil wars, genocides, repression and terrorism. Pinker admits that followers of our news media will have particular difficulty in believing this, but as always, he produces statistics to back up his assertions.

The final trend Pinker discusses is the “rights revolution,” the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this “the worst thing I have ever done.” In 1975 it wasn’t uncommon.)

What caused these beneficial trends? That question poses a special challenge to an author who has consistently argued against the view that humans are blank slates on which culture and education draws our character, good or evil. There has hardly been time for the changes to have a basis in genetic evolution. (Pinker considers this possibility, and dismisses it.) So don’t the trends that Pinker chronicles prove that our nature is more the product of our culture than our biology? That way of putting it assumes a simplistic nature-nurture dichotomy. In books like “How the Mind Works,” “The Blank Slate” and “The Stuff of Thought,” Pinker has argued that evolution shaped the basic design of our brain, and hence our cognitive and emotional faculties. This process has given us propensities to violence — our “inner demons” as well as “the better angels of our nature” (Abraham Lincoln’s words) — that incline us to be peaceful and cooperative. Our material circumstances, along with cultural inputs, determine whether the demons or the angels have the upper hand.

Other large-scale trends have paralleled the decline in violence and cruelty, but it is not easy to sort out cause and effect here. Are factors like better government, greater prosperity, health, education, trade and improvements in the status of women the cause or the effect of the decline in violence and cruelty? If we can find out, we may be able to preserve and extend the peaceful and better world in which we live. So in two chapters on human psychology, Pinker does his best to discover what has restrained our inner demons and unleashed our better angels, and then in a final chapter, draws his conclusions.

Those conclusions are not always what one might expect. Yes, as already noted, the state monopoly on force is important, and the spread of commerce creates incentives for cooperation and against violent conflict. The empowerment of women does, Pinker argues, exercise a pacifying influence, and the world would be more peaceful if women were in charge. But he also thinks that the invention of printing, and the development of a cosmopolitan “Republic of Letters” in the 17th and 18th centuries helped to spread ideas that led to the humanitarian revolution. That was pushed further in the 19th century by popular novels like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Oliver Twist” that, by encouraging readers to put themselves in the position of someone very different from themselves, expanded the sphere of our moral concern.

To readers familiar with the literature in evolutionary psychology and its tendency to denigrate the role reason plays in human behavior, the most striking aspect of Pinker’s account is that the last of his “better angels” is reason. Here he draws on a metaphor I used in my 1981 book “The Expanding Circle.” To indicate that reason can take us to places that we might not expect to reach, I wrote of an “escalator of reason” that can take us to a vantage point from which we see that our own interests are similar to, and from the point of view of the universe do not matter more than, the interests of others. Pinker quotes this passage, and then goes on to develop the argument much more thoroughly than I ever did. (Disclosure: Pinker wrote an endorsement for a recent reissue of “The Expanding Circle.”)

Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. One theory is that we have gotten better at I.Q. tests because we live in a more symbol-rich environment. Flynn himself thinks that the spread of the scientific mode of reasoning has played a role.

Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States.

Reason also, Pinker suggests, moves us away from forms of morality more likely to lead to violence, and toward moral advances that, while not eschewing the use of force altogether, restrict it to the uses necessary to improve social welfare, like utilitarian reforms of the savage punishments given to criminals in earlier times. For reason does, Pinker holds, point to a particular kind of morality. We prefer life to death, and happiness to suffering, and we understand that we live in a world in which others can make a difference to whether we live well or die miserably. Therefore we will want to tell others that they should not hurt us, and in doing so we commit ourselves to the idea that we should not hurt them. (Pinker quotes a famous sentence from the 18th-century philosopher William Godwin: “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”) That morality can be grounded in some commitment to treating others as we would like them to treat us is an ancient idea, expressed in the golden rule and in similar thoughts in the moral traditions of many other civilizations, but Pinker is surely right to say that the escalator of reason leads us to it. It is this kind of moral thinking, Pinker points out, that helps us escape traps like the Cuban missile crisis, which, if the fate of the world had been in the hands of leaders under the sway of a different kind of morality — one dominated by ideas of honor and the importance of not backing down — might have been the end of the human story. Fortunately Kennedy and Khrushchev understood the trap they were in and did what was necessary to avoid disaster.

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” is a supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline. But what of the future? Our improved understanding of violence, of which Pinker’s book is an example, can be a valuable tool to maintain peace and reduce crime, but other factors are in play. Pinker is an optimist, but he knows that there is no guarantee that the trends he has documented will continue. Faced with suggestions that the present relatively peaceful period is going to be blown apart by a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, by nuclear terrorism, by war with Iran or wars resulting from climate change, he gives reasons for thinking that we have a good chance of avoiding such conflicts, but no more than a good chance. If he had been able to see, before his book went to press, a study published in Nature as recently as August of this year, he might have been less sanguine about maintaining peace despite widespread climate change. Solomon Hsiang and colleagues at Columbia University used data from the past half-century to show that in tropical regions, the risk of a new civil conflict doubles during El Niño years (when temperatures are hotter than usual and there is less rainfall). If that finding is correct, then a warming world could mean the end of the relatively peaceful era in which we are now living.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His books include “Animal Liberation,” “Practical Ethics,” “The Expanding Circle” and “The Life You Can Save.”

Today: Half of survey respondents had thought of divorce

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Half of survey respondents had thought of divorce

Updated 12:47 PM Dec 12, 2012

by Desiree Tay

 

SINGAPORE - About half the respondents in a survey of married individuals here have considered divorce at some point.

While the finding appears startling, amid rising divorce rates over the past decade, counsellors and observers noted that it reflected reality as people become more open to acknowledging and talking about marriage problems. At the same time, it underlined the resilience of marriages here given that the respondents did not eventually go down that path, they said.

The survey, which involved 408 married individuals in total, was commissioned by Marriage Central - a work group under the National Family Council - and conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

It was part of a study that aimed to find out "resilience factors that can mitigate marriage crises, as well as acceptance towards the use of social service interventions for marital problems", according to Marriage Central.

IPS research fellow Mathew Mathews, who led the study, noted the survey's small sample size and said it was not meant to be representative of the state of marriages here.

Between February and May, in-depth interviews were conducted on 85 couples and 15 spouses. The researchers found from these that a "good proportion" of this group had contemplated divorce at some point during marriage. This prompted them to conduct a self-administered survey with 108 of the initial respondents, as well as another 300 married persons - from various ages, racial and religious backgrounds - via door-to-door visits.

The result: Almost 52 per cent of the total number of married persons surveyed had considered divorce at some point.

According to the study, common marital stressors were interference by in-laws, sexual impropriety and infidelity, communication and personality difficulties as well as misaligned priorities and different aspirations.

Marriage Central Chairperson Anita Fam said: "The findings from this study, especially the stories of couples who went through very challenging periods but persisted in working on their marriages, show that there is hope for troubled marriages."

Ms Celine Edmund, a marriage counsellor at Singapore Counselling Centre, said she was not surprised at the findings.

"All these marriage problems have been ongoing for a long time - only (the subject) has always been a taboo," she said. "It is coming to the surface because people are more willing to talk about it now."

Nevertheless, she said that "more people still need to know that there is nothing wrong with seeking marriage counselling".

Jalan Besar GRC Member of Parliament Lily Neo, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Social and Family Development, said she was initially surprised by the survey findings but pointed out that, "despite considerations of divorce, these marriages stayed committed and resilient".

Among other things, the study found that family, friends and religious advisors are often primary informal sources of help that couples reach out to when faced with marital issues. It also found that couples opt for counselling too late into their conflict "which makes progress through counselling difficult".

It recommended that training opportunities be made available for family and friends of couples whose marriages are on the rocks. One complimentary post-marriage counselling session should also be included in marriage preparatory packages, the study suggested.

Ms Edmund felt that the cost of counselling - which can go up to more than S$100 per hour at private counselling centres - could deter couples from seeking help.

But Ms Chong Cheh Hoon, who heads Marriage Central's Family Education and Promotion Division, pointed out that voluntary welfare organisations (VWOs) offer counselling services at affordable rates.

The fees are even waived at some VWOs, depending on the couples' monthly household income, she said.

Ms Chong noted that the imposition of a fee helps to ensure that the couples are committed to undergo counselling.

Compared to a decade ago, the general divorce rates last year were significantly higher.

The rate for males rose from 6.3 in 2001 to 7.6 last year, while that for females climbed from 6.4 in 2001 to 7.2 last year.

URL http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC121212-0000045/Half-of-survey-respondents-had-thought-of-divorce

Copyright 2013 MediaCorp Pte Ltd | All Rights Reserved

Economist: A falling birth rate and much slower immigration presage long-term trouble ahead

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America’s demographic squeeze

Double bind

A falling birth rate and much slower immigration presage long-term trouble ahead

Dec 15th 2012 | WASHINGTON, DC | from the print edition

 

 

ALTHOUGH America’s fiscal problems are among the worst in the rich world, its policymakers long took comfort that, when it came to demography, its outlook was one of the best. Because Americans have so many babies and welcome so many immigrants, they had more room to deal with the coming burden of pensions and health care for the elderly.

But the savage recession of 2007-09 and its aftermath have not just deepened America’s fiscal hole; they have weakened those demographic advantages. America’s fertility rate has been falling since 2007, as has net immigration. Compounding this, the share of the population that is active in the labour force has slipped, both because of ageing and because of the recession’s lingering effects.

On December 12th the Census Bureau said America’s projected population would rise 27% to 400m by 2050. That is 9% less than it projected for that year back in 2008. Those 65 and over will grow to 22% of the population by 2060 from 14% now, while the working-age population slips to 57% from 63%.

 

 

The new projections, based on the 2010 census, are based on recent trends in fertility and immigration. The number of babies born per 1,000 women of childbearing age (also called the “general” fertility rate) fell to 63 in the 12 months that ended in June of this year, the lowest since at least 1920, and well below the recent high of 69 recorded in 2007. That is partly because the average age of women of childbearing age has increased. The “total” fertility rate adjusts for the age of the population and extrapolates how many children each woman will have over her lifetime. This, too, has fallen, and at 1.9 it is below the replacement rate of 2.1. America’s fertility rate is still higher than the average for the OECD, but has fallen sharply since 2007.

Immigration has been an important component of America’s population growth, thanks both to the influx of new people and to their tendency to have more babies. Those advantages, too, have started to dwindle. A report by the Pew Research Centre notes that the birth rate has fallen especially sharply for immigrant women, to 88 per 1,000 women of reproductive age in 2010 from the recent peak of 102, though it remains well above that of American-born women. The Census Bureau reckons that net migration in 2011 was only 700,000, down 28% from 2006 and the lowest for at least a decade.

The main reason for the fall in both fertility and immigration is the economy. There are fewer opportunities on construction sites and elsewhere for immigrants. Children are expensive, so couples delay having them when their prospects dim. Gretchen Livingston, a demographer at Pew, notes that the only state in which births rose in 2009 was North Dakota, largely bypassed by recession, whereas they fell especially sharply in devastated Arizona, Nevada and Florida. This means that when the economy recovers, so should fertility. Policymakers have yet to panic; the Social Security Commission, which manages America’s public pension system, reckons fertility and immigration will bounce back in the next few years.

This may be too sanguine. Structural as well as cyclical factors are at work. Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau, a research outfit, notes that couples have been getting married ever later in life; in 2011 the median age at first marriage was 28.7 and 26.5 for men and women respectively, the highest on record. A rising share of women in their early 40s are childless. In this respect America may be following the experience of Europe.

Though it will be two decades before today’s lower fertility affects the ranks of workers, America can ill afford it. Growth in its labour force has slowed dramatically since the recession; in November it was only 1% larger than at the end of 2007, a period in which the working-age population grew by 5%. This is partly because of the weak economy, which has driven many people into early retirement, others on to disability payments, and some out of the job hunt altogether. Nevertheless, the Congressional Budget Office sees the potential labour force (that is, after excluding purely cyclical influences) as growing by only 0.5% a year in the coming decade, largely because the population is ageing. That puts ever more of the burden of supporting old-age benefits on a stagnant population of workers.

For politicians struggling over the deficit, these trends point to some remedies. One would be gradually to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare over coming decades, encouraging Americans to work longer. Another would be to allow more immigration. Neither would solve America’s immediate deficit problem; but they would make the long-term challenge more manageable.

from the print edition | United States

ST: The real fear: Being pushed out of home

The real fear: Being pushed out of home

By Han Fook Kwang, The Straits Times, 9 Sep 2012

One of the most divisive issues today which gets many Singaporeans worked up has to do with the number of foreign workers here.

It's an evergreen topic not just in online forums, but also in the equally noisy world of coffee shops and dinner parties.

Foreigners take the rap for many things that people are unhappy with - overcrowded buses and trains, sky-high property prices, litter in public places, crime and, yes, even fatal road accidents.

This public unhappiness over immigration isn't by itself surprising - it's a hot topic in many places worldwide, especially in Australia, Europe and the United States, and many governments have had to deal with the political fallout from too liberal an immigration policy. Singapore is thus not unique in this respect.

What's unusual here is the extent of the angst even among seemingly unaffected Singaporeans.

This point though is often missed by those who support the policy and who believe that the dissenters are just a small group who are anti-government to begin with and who are responsible for fanning the anti-foreigner sentiment, especially online.

This is a grave mistake and gets in the way of Singapore arriving at a healthy consensus on what the right approach is to this issue.

Yes, the hatred and vitriol of the anti-foreign camp found in cyberspace should be rightly condemned. But this group isn't the one that needs the most attention.

In fact, it isn't just the anti-establishment camp that is concerned about the problems posed by an overly large number of immigrants.

Want to know when it was first raised as a national issue?

Here is an excerpt from a speech made - but I won't tell you in which year until after you've read it: "But, mind you, there still has to be the road sweeper - the chap has got to collect your garbage.

"We have to mechanise because our young men, having been to school, they don't want to do that.

"So, we now have work-permit holders to do it. And after a while, there is a limit.

"You see the worksite - 60 to 70 per cent are non-Singapore workers. They work harder, they take greater risks.

"What they earn here is two to three times what they earn in their own country. But we carry a social load.

"They dirty the place, they were not brought up in our schools, they litter. It's a problem.

"And if you take too many, then instead of our values being superimposed on them, they will bring us down to their values because it's easier to be untidy, scruffy, dirty, anti-social than to be disciplined, well-behaved and a good citizen."

The year was 1971, more than 40 years ago, and it was in a speech by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew at the National Day Rally. It could have been said just last month by the present PM and still sounded as relevant.

And the point about too many foreigners affecting the values of this place wasn't just a one-off passing mention of a peripheral issue which was soon forgotten.

Mr Lee was to raise it again eight years later in 1979 on the same National Day Rally stage.

This was what he said:

"Let me tell you the risks involved in carrying on as before. Last year, we had a record influx of work-permit holders, over 20,000.

"At this rate, we can safely and accurately forecast further input of 20,000, perhaps, 25,000 work-permit holders for 1980. In five years, you will have 120,000, in 10 years, a quarter million.

"Is it bearable? Maybe if they were from our traditional sources: with Malaysians there are minimal cultural and language problems. Last year, however, because there were not enough Malaysians, we started to move further afield and took work-permit holders from Thailand, from Sri Lanka, from India, from Bangladesh.

"They are good workers. They are hungry, they are lean, they are keen... But I have a responsibility to you. In 10 years, can we digest so many? There will be cultural, linguistic, social and political problems."

Well, those cultural, linguistic, social and political problems have now come to roost, 40 years on.

I have to say when I first came across those two passages I held my breath. I knew Mr Lee had the ability to look beyond the horizon and spot potential problems, but I think even he would be surprised by the accuracy of his prediction.

At the root of the public disquiet is a very basic human fear of being displaced, outrun, undone, outsmarted, and many other things that fellow human beings sometimes do to one another, especially if the strangers are from another tribe who have suddenly appeared at your door.

This anxiety about being displaced in one's own home is a deep-seated one that goes far beyond the occasional gripes about loud-mouthed or anti-social foreigners, and it has to be recognised and acknowledged before any meaningful conversation and resolution of the issue can take place.

The problem is compounded because the experience so far has not been a pleasant one, especially over the last five years when the country's infrastructure - the public transport system, housing, hospitals, etc - was found wanting in the face of the large influx of foreigners. Singaporeans were literally displaced and crowded out as a result.

This lack of proper planning was most unfortunate and was the worst possible outcome for the successful implementation of the policy. It made public acceptance much more difficult.

But infrastructure can be expanded and improved - new MRT lines built and housing stock increased - and in time, it should become less of an issue.

Not so easy to resolve is the issue of values and identity which Mr Lee raised, and the cultural and social problems that he mentioned.

It has to do with valuing the Singapore we call home and which we want to make in our own image and not have it shaped by outsiders who have had nothing to do with our past and our heritage.

This then is at the heart of the complaints Singaporeans have whenever they cite the loud ways of some foreigners, or that they only want to speak their own language and keep to themselves.

The problem is especially acute today because of the large numbers of first-generation immigrants with their very different ways. Over time, when their children grow up here and become assimilated in the local culture, it may become less of an issue.

But now, when many Singaporeans feel the texture of their home is changing too quickly, their anxieties need to be managed and soothed.

There is one reality though which needs to be recognised, and this is that how one feels about this issue partly depends on one's own circumstances.

Successful Singaporeans who have made it and are secure about their future will not feel as threatened by foreigners in their midst. This group includes political leaders and people in business, even more so if they are employers of foreign workers.

The large majority of Singaporeans in the heartlands, who worry about their job security and the future prospects of their children, will have a completely different perspective, and will be much less sympathetic to the argument that Singapore needs these foreigners to grow and prosper.

Policymakers and political leaders have to bear this in mind and try harder to understand the mindset of this large group of Singaporeans who feel threatened. It is a real and deep-seated fear that has to be addressed.

In fact, today's immigrants are far more threatening to this group of Singaporeans than when Mr Lee spoke about it in 1971. Then, they were mainly low-skilled foreign labour being imported into Singapore - the road sweepers, shipyard and construction workers.

Today, there are large numbers of high-end immigrants entering the country, many from China and India. They are no longer the "untidy, scruffy, dirty" lot Mr Lee referred to.

Instead, they are better educated, more hard-working and driven, and better able to compete against professional Singaporeans in many areas of work. And they compete not just for jobs but also for scarce resources such as private property and certificates of entitlement to buy cars.

High-end immigration is infinitely more threatening to the local population than low-end labour, and explains a great deal of the angst and anxiety felt by Singaporeans, including those in the professional class.

Recognising this is a critical part of the exercise to get Singaporeans to accept them in larger numbers.

There is no doubt that continuing to attract immigrants to supplement the local workforce will be important for Singapore to become a vibrant city able to create better jobs and provide greater opportunities to its citizens to do well.

The right mix of immigrants with the requisite skills and attitudes will add to our diversity and make Singapore society stronger and better able to meet the challenges of a globalised world.

But the Government needs to understand the concerns of citizens much better, and at a deeper level than it has.

Failure to do so will make the problem much harder to resolve.

NPR: How The Poor, The Middle Class And The Rich Spend Their Money

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/08/01/157664524/how-the-poor-the-middle-class-and-the-rich-spend-their-money

 

How The Poor, The Middle Class And The Rich Spend Their Money

 

by JACOB GOLDSTEIN and LAM VO

For a historic look at spending in America, see our post What America Buys. For more, see our Graphing America series.

How do Americans spend their money? And how do budgets change across the income spectrum?

The graph below answers these questions. It shows average household spending patterns for U.S. households in three income categories — one just below the poverty line, one at the middle of the income distribution and one at the top of the distribution.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

Both the similarities and the differences are striking.

Everyone devotes a huge chunk of their budget to housing, for example. Poor, middle class and rich families spend similar shares of their budgets on clothing and shoes, and on food outside the home.

But poor families spend a much larger share of their budget on basic necessities such as food at home, utilities and health care. Rich families are able to devote a much bigger chunk of their spending to education, and a much, much bigger share to saving for retirement. (The retirement line includes contributions to Social Security and to private retirement plans, by the way.)

The figures in the graph come from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which has tons of data on spending patterns in the U.S.

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrect numbers for spending on housing.

Tags: Graphing America

 

 

China Daily (HK) - Allergies

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WANG XIN MIN

KEEPING WATCH
The MAS has taken measures to raise the standard for financial advice - BLOOMBERG

 

ST: When money gets in the way

When money gets in the way

Rich-poor gap is a source of simmering social tension

 

Published on Jun 23, 2012

 

 

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People eating while queueing at the launch of a condominium project. Some were merely keeping a place for prospective buyers who had paid them to wait on their behalf. And in another example of how money creates separate worlds for the rich and the poor, a soon-to-be-opened private hospital in Singapore provides this suite (above), which is larger than a five-room HDB flat. -- ST PHOTOS: DESMOND WEE

 

2 of 2

 

 

By Jeremy Au Yong, Political Correspondent

IT IS perhaps a sign of the times that a government minister has to address the traffic offence of a single individual.

 

The scrutiny plastic surgeon Woffles Wu received this week would have been unimaginable just 10 years ago. But now, it comes as no surprise that many are calling on the authorities to hit him hard.

 

A large part of this backlash lies in a perceived sense of injustice. In many cases, a country's laws are designed to deter, rehabilitate and incapacitate criminals for retribution as well as to lay down a moral marker for behaviour that a society frowns on.

 

However, Wu's $1,000 fine, for abetting an employee to give false information over a speeding offence, is seen as too small a part of his income to fulfil any of these functions. Instead, it becomes a mere fee that a rich man can pay for the right to do what he wants.

 

The backlash also reflects simmering antipathy between the haves and the have-nots.

 

If a delivery man were fined a measly $10 for a similar offence, perhaps few would bat an eyelid. Here, Wu's status as a member of Singapore's rich and famous set is working against him. And it is not just a case of 'tall poppy syndrome', though that surely plays a part; this seems symptomatic of a larger strain on social cohesion.

 

This is, of course, not a uniquely Singaporean problem. Societies all over the world are grappling with the heightened social tension arising from growing income inequality.

 

Some have concluded that inequality is an inescapable part of a globalised world and therefore a new reality that everyone needs to come to terms with.

 

However, political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in a new book that even if the wall between rich and poor cannot be completely torn down, society can at the very least stop adding more bricks.

 

In his book What Money Can't Buy, Professor Sandel argues that macro-trends like globalisation are not the only forces pushing people apart. At fault are also national and perhaps even local-level decisions on how to run schools, hospitals and even highways.

 

He says that economic principles have increasingly crept into all aspects of everyday life. And when people can pay for the privilege to flout social norms that others abide by - such as to cut queues or pollute the environment - then they go ahead and do so without regard for right and wrong.

 

And he worries that when everything can be bought with money, the rich can more easily differentiate and separate themselves from the poor. The less the classes mix, the more foreign each side becomes to the other.

 

Sandel calls it the Skyboxification of American Life, named after the luxury suites now in almost every US sports venue. Where sports used to bring people together regardless of class to support a common cause, these suites mean the rich can now do so at a healthy distance from the working class.

 

Thankfully, Singapore still has some common spaces where rich and poor can mix, but these are becoming increasingly rare.

 

The country does seem to be headed down the same slippery slope the US is on.

 

Like in the US, there are theme parks in Singapore that allow visitors to skip the normal queues for a fee. Less formally, there is also a growing market for queue-sitters. People are paying hundreds of dollars to students to hold a place in queue for them for anything from a new iPad to a condominium.

 

Similarly, our economic growth has included a multitude of premium services like private banking, private hospitals and private schools that provide avenues for the rich to set themselves apart from the poor.

 

Indeed, this has not been an overnight process but the end result of years of everyone trying to maximise economic value through price differentiation, which in turn has led to an increased social gap.

 

The increasing demand for places in local international schools provides a particularly relevant example.

 

A Straits Times report in February found that three local international schools - Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) International, Hwa Chong International and St Joseph's Institution (SJI) International - were expanding facilities to take in more students.

 

Singaporeans and permanent residents make up half the students in ACS and Hwa Chong international schools, and 60 per cent of those at SJI. Officials from the schools attributed the demand from Singaporean students to the brand names, alternative curricula and smaller class sizes.

 

The Government has always maintained that it prefers Singaporean children to attend local schools for the purpose of building national identity and social cohesion.

 

That meant local students could not enrol in an international school except under special circumstances, such as having grown up abroad.

 

That works well from a social cohesion point of view but is value-destroying from an economic point of view. Value-destroying because there clearly was demand for these schools from wealthy parents.

 

In 2004, brand name schools were given the green light to start international schools that were open to locals. This was to attract foreign students and to give Singaporeans more secondary school choices.

 

That seems to have met some pent-up demand and increased the size of the economic pie but it also undermined the role of a local school as a melting pot.

 

None of this is to say that the economic way is inherently bad or to suggest that all policies should be totally egalitarian. There will be times - even possibly in the examples above - when it makes sense to put a price on a social good.

 

It is difficult to just lay down a firm law on how we decide what to keep sacred. In a country with limited resources, trade-offs will always need to be made.

 

Perhaps we can start with the non-negotiables, draw up a list of areas where money cannot be allowed to differentiate.

 

On this list already are National Service and the National Day Parade. The Government has rightly decided that such emblems of nationhood should not be up for sale. Voluntary conscription might lead to only the poor defending the nation and the sale of NDP tickets might mean only the rich make it to the floating platform.

 

In other areas, there is a need to make sure that the impact on social cohesion, and not just economic value, is factored into decision-making. We cannot preserve every hawker centre or every public park. But when we decide that one should make way, let us do it having taken into account that we may be destroying something money cannot buy.

 

jeremyau@sph.com.sg

 

FT - Malaysia, Friendster

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