1.1 billion dollars more of buses will not help

I've waited a few weeks to post my opinion on the government's move to purchase buses to improve the public transportation system for a number of reasons, mostly because I wanted to wait to read the opinions of other bloggers.

As it turns out, the few people who blogged about this expressed opinions that differed little from the general sentiment of "It's a step in the right direction, but it comes a little late, and honestly, more should have been done earlier. But let's wait and see how well this turns out."

As always, I write only when I believe I have something fresh to offer, and this is my clear and unequivocal opinion:

I do not think adding more buses in the way that the government has envisioned will improve the public transportation system appreciably. And the train situation as it stands now will NOT improve because of this new addition of buses.

I take buses much more often than I do trains to get around, so I think I'm qualified to comment. And my reasons for being so unequivocally negative on this extra-budgetary measure are as follows:

1. If you read the puff piece that the Straits Times published a few weeks ago (follow the link in the first sentence of this post), the reporters wrote on how taking service 128 was in fact slightly faster and much more comfortable than going the feeder bus-MRT mode. The piece spoke specifically about how the bus was less crowded than MRT trains at peak hour.

A word to the wise: As anyone who builds or manages systems will tell you, adding more capacity to a mode of transportation that already has spare capacity (i.e. is less crowded) is not a strategy for improving operational outcomes.


It was this single fact alone that revealed the Straits Times piece for the cheerleading article that it was. Editors at a national propaganda machine should know better than this. Chances are, service number 128 was cherry-picked to "demonstrate" the merits of bus versus train travel.

2. Anyone who takes buses will know that journey times by bus are generally longer than journey times by MRT.

There are 4 basic components to journey time:
a) Walking times to and from bus stop / MRT station
b) Waiting times for arrival of public conveyance
c) Stopping times at bus stops / MRT stations
d) Actual travel time enroute to destination

MRT wins hands down over buses due to shorter (b), (c) and (d). It's no surprise that most people prefer trains for their speedier transit. Ergo, trains are crowded while buses less so.

There are groups of people for whom buses make sense over trains. These are people who can't stand crowds (yours truly), do not live sufficiently near to an MRT station to take advantage of its speed (and hence have to take feeder bus services or walk relatively long distances, yours truly again), or have to endure the hassle of making multiple transfers across rail lines even on MRT.

But by and large, for most people, the speed of the MRT wins out over buses.

Which brings me to this point: adding more buses on the roads generally only reduces (b). It does very little for the other three components that make up journey time by bus. MRT will still be faster for most journeys.

In addition, we have to consider the fact that even if the buses succeed in attracting passengers off the trains, they will only attract the marginal travellers who value space and comfort just that much more over shorter journey times. That's going to have limited impact on improving the train situation.

3. But wait, there's more.

Adding more buses on the roads will reduce waiting times, making journey times by bus shorter and hence a viable alternative to trains that more passengers will consider. That's what our public transportation planners would like to think.

As it turns out, there is already a way to reduce waiting times for buses to a minimum, as savvy bus travelers like myself know. Two things: schedules and bus transfers.

Going to work in the morning, buses travelling from the suburbs to the CBD area tend to arrive on time and on schedule because traffic is relatively light on the roads around the suburbs. After all, people live distributed all over the island. It's a different story in the evening when the roads out of the CBD are filled with vehicles all trying to get out at the same time, and arrival times for buses tend to become unpredictable.

When I head to work every day in the morning, I make it a point to reach the bus stop only 2-3 minutes before my bus arrives, a trunk service that brings me to within a 5 minute walk from my office building. No transfers, minimal waiting time. Granted, the bus takes a circuitous route and it's still slower than the feeder bus-MRT mode, but there's no jostling with the crowds and much less walking.

Going home in the evenings, I can take the same direct trunk service again to get home, but because of the aforementioned unpredictability in waiting times, I choose a different strategy instead.

I walk to a bus stop that has not one, but two bus services that take a very direct route toward home, but can only drop me off 4 bus stops short of my destination.

From there, I have two buses that can take me straight home, and another four that can take me 2 bus stops closer to my destination.

And finally, at this third bus stop, I have 4 buses that can take me the final 2 bus stops back to my home.

I call this extreme bus transferring. And it makes total sense after the transition to a distance-based fare system last year. At every stage of my journey, I maximize the number of buses I can take and minimize the waiting time. It's not uncommon for me to drop off a bus and take the next one that's either right behind it or in front of it at the bus stop. Total waiting time for my journey ranges from 2 minutes to perhaps 7 minutes, comparable to the MRT.

But even with all these stratagems, I have to say: the MRT is still faster. Getting from my office desk to across the doorstep of my apartment, or the converse, takes about 45 to 50 minutes by the walking-MRT mode. The same journey by bus takes perhaps 55 minutes to 1 hour 5 minutes. For reference, I work in the CBD and my home is in the Dover area.

So, despite the best intentions of our transport planners, the point I'm trying to make is that even with reductions in waiting time brought about by more buses, MRT still wins out.

Even with bus lanes and the newer concept of "bus hubs", it's unlikely stopping times and travel times will appreciably improve for buses and make them competitive with trains. Which is why I seriously doubt that more buses are going to alleviate the train situation.

The real kicker in this long post of mine discussing our woeful public transportation situation?

I run home from office twice a week, and I take just 1 hour 15 minutes to do so. Now that's fast.

The remarkable Singaporean work ethic

In a space of 2 weeks, I had 3 different friends, in separate conversations, relate how hard it was to find Singaporeans to work with at work, and what a shame it was, because oftentimes, the foreigner colleagues they had to deal with had a poor ethic, were more concerned with political machinations in the office than getting things done, or were simply incompetent at what they had been hired to do.

And in many cases, they felt that they had to pick up the slack in order for any headway to be made at work. One friend was a manager at an IT firm who still had to do coding himself on occasion for lack of available expertise. Another was an IT recruiter who could see the consequences of his boss relying too heavily on a Filipino colleague, a colleague who was extremely political, clannish, and who would, he surmised, eventually leave the company for a better offer, taking all his Filipino cohorts and accounts en masse with them. Yet another friend was a doctor who frequently picked up after her less meticulous foreigner colleagues because, "otherwise, it's the patient who suffers".

Now, I have to stress that these 3 friends of mine all stated that not all foreigners that they worked with are thus so, and that they knew on a personal level examples of great people from various nationalities that they would be happy to work with. So, these 3 friends of mine were neither the xenophobic nor the ultra-nationalistic type.

The interesting thing was that despite their misgivings of some of their...less professional colleagues (and just as a sidenote: Indians from India and Pinoys tended to the most frequent targets of their venting, perhaps because of these nationalities' propensity to talk up a good show but not actually delivering), my friends all seemed much more focused on getting their jobs done, and done properly, than suing for some fairness at work, or for their less professional colleagues to be forced to live up to higher standards.

I could understand the logic behind such thinking, since as my doctor friend did put it, if she didn't pick up the slack, the direct result might well be a poor patient outcome, which nobody wants to see. Still, I couldn't help but marvel that Singaporeans, on the whole (and exceptions of course do exist everywhere), are quite hardworking and responsible, and perhaps to our own detriment, generally respectful of authority and non-confrontational.

No wonder those friends of mine who were in a position to hire lamented that they could find relatively few qualified Singaporeans to hire! And those that were not hiring managers did state that they would prefer to work with more Singaporeans.

I used to think that more foreigners meant more competition for locals at work, that Singaporeans would have to up their game, and perhaps end up working longer and harder. Now, I guess, the picture can be much more complex than that.

Having more foreigners may also mean lowered productivity, as not all foreigner hires are quality hires, and the resulting burden of greater work stress may fall disproportionately onto the responsible Singaporean shoulders.

It's interesting to speculate how much our diminished productivity growth in recent years has been due to our insourcing of cheap, unskilled labor, and how much of it has been due to the lack of quality people that we bring into the country that nonetheless take up middle class and middle income jobs.

If Singaporeans were once lauded as the world's most hardworking and productive workforce, it should hardly come as a surprise that as the proportion of Singaporeans that comprise it reduces, the quality of the workforce correspondingly diminishes

When keying in PIN, cover the keypad, 'nuff said.

By now, everyone and their mother should have heard about the theft of funds from DBS bank accounts through card skimming.

This is such an old scam that there are forum posts on it dating back to the early 2000s. Just do a Google search on it.

And just like in previous years, it was done in almost exactly the same manner: a card skimming device attached to the card reader and a spy camera to capture the PIN as it is punched in by the cardholder.

[Obviously, the ATM card you carry doesn't hold the PIN information. That is stored centrally at the bank itself.]

Which is why, for years and years since the first skimming incident, I have always covered the keypad with my left hand as I enter my PIN at the ATM with my right hand. In fact, I don't even look at the keypad when I enter my PIN. I use all five fingers to punch in my PIN with my right hand on the keypad, just like on a keyboard when I am at a desktop computer.

So, for those who haven't adopted such a habit yet, and the statistics indicate at least 400 / 2700 = 15% of users haven't, please do yourself a favor and cover the keypad when you are entering your PIN at an ATM.

Book List Refreshed

I have removed:

Aftershock by David Wiedemer et al
Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook
Red Capitalism by Carl E. Walter and Fraser J. T. Howie
The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson

I have added:

Extreme Money by Satyajit Das
Factions and Finance in China by Victor C. Shih
The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar (recommended)
Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare

The nascent crisis of affinity

The Saturday edition of the Straits Times had a long series on heritage in Singapore. It was one of the better articles that they have published.

Why is it fashionable to talk about heritage now? Because with the progress and changes in the last decade, more and more Singaporeans are feeling that the parts of the Singapore Identity are being lost irrevocably. And as a result of this ineffable sense of loss, more Singaporeans are stepping forward to claim a piece of their rightful heritage.

I would wager most of us have never heard of Bukit Brown cemetery before part of it was put at risk by the LTA. Just like many of us had not stepped into the old National Library Building in years, or even decades, when plans were afoot to have it torn down.

And yet, like something long taken for granted, we are suddenly shocked when we are told of what we are to lose.

The Power of Place and the Power of the Narrative

It has been several years since the old Changi Prison was demolished. And while some parts of it were saved and a museum was built to commemorate the site, I still recall then how I marveled that Australian POWs and their descendants, literally thousands of miles away, actually made a formal effort to save the prison from being demolished. They stepped forward to claim what they felt was a part of their heritage, as far removed as they were on a foreign continent. Read more here.

I was naive then about the power of place and the power of the narrative. Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, no longer.

For Singaporean males who have served NS, the following should sound very familiar:

You don't see your NS friends on any kind of regular basis in your "real" life, but when the time for ICT rolls around, you pack up your stuff and grudgingly make your way back to camp. While doing ICT is a real drag, at least there is the bright spot of meeting old friends, friends you instantly connect with because of where you are and the situation you are in again.

That is the power of place. It provides an environment which allows you to pick up the conversations where you left off. There is no sense of awkwardness, unlike say, a high school reunion held in a hotel ballroom (which can be remarkably fraught with angst).

A lot of NS guys will find familiar the ICT routine of exchanging and retelling old stories from the days of full-time NS, of the pranks and practical jokes that people pulled, of the tics and mannerisms of various characters encountered, of the universally disliked officer or encik getting his comeuppance. They're all stories we've heard before and are familiar with, and yet retelling them is a comforting routine. You would think that we had all turned into doddering old men with no teeth in our gums, reminiscing over the glory days of our youth.

And that is the power of the narrative. Retelling a story keeps it alive and preserves the memory of it and how it binds the various participants and actors together. It reinforces a shared sense of history and the closeness of the collective.

In many ways, the power of place reinforces the power of the narrative. That is why some Australian and British POWs visited Changi Prison every year before it was demolished. In all likelihood, every time they visited the prison, they cracked the same old jokes, retold the same old stories and lingered over the same old corners of the Prison that they were imprisoned in so many years ago.

A place becomes a cultural and historical touchstone, and a metaphysical repository of memories. I use the word metaphysical because the memories are embedded not just in the artifacts or in the structure, but in the very space that is enclosed and defined by the structure itself.

In truth, the government should be glad that many Singaporeans are expressing disquietude over the destruction of Bukit Brown or the demolition of Rochor.

The unthinking civil servant believes that these Singaporeans are being difficult, obdurate and overly sentimental. The savvier civil servant believes that "engagement" with the public should have been done earlier, with consultation exercises carried out to assuage the disgruntled (but with the same end result as the government-crafted plan called for).

In contrast, the most enlightened civil servant would, I submit, rejoice that Singaporeans still care enough about their heritage to lock horns with the authorities over part of its demise. The enlightened civil servant would also recognize that the loss of any part of our shared heritage, however necessary, is lamentable, even if it is preserved with museums or commemorative plaques.

Because eventually, when there is little left to be lost, all that will remain will be the sound of silence. No one will care enough to speak up about what is Singapore. That is, if there are any who care who remain in the first place.

The crisis of affinity

This brings me to my topic for today, what I call the crisis of affinity, the erosion of Singapore's collective sense of belonging and a shared destiny and vision for the future.

As meteoric as our economic growth has been in the last decade, I think something valuable has been lost along the way. What is vexing is that it is so difficult to put a finger on what exactly has been lost. And yet, I sense the loss, as I wrote about it in the Two-Tier Society. And it is not merely a sense of misplaced nostalgia.

The last 10 years have seen great changes in Singapore, not all for the better. The pace of demolition and construction, and the loss of shared urban spaces and the memories they represent is bad enough. But to compound matters, we have had a huge foreigner influx and a widening gulf in income inequality.

Some would argue that having more foreigners doesn't dilute our store of memories, but only adds to it. A greater foreigner presence enlivens Singapore and makes it more interesting, diverse and cosmopolitan.

I would agree, but up to a point. That point ends where foreigners are privileged over citizens in work and school, when it is painfully clear that Singapore is a stepping stone for them to better places, or when by their sheer numbers, assertiveness, competitiveness and sense of entitlement, transform the very character of the place.

I never thought I would say this, being very much invested in my identity as a city person: To the Indonesian, Filipino, Mainland Chinese, Indian, Myanmarese, Vietnamese and Malaysian immigrant here in search of a better life, I appreciate that Singapore is your land of opportunity and your New York. But I don't much like the New Yorker that you're collectively turning me into (with all the attendant stereotypes).

What happens to Singapore if we all become a nation of narcissistic New Yorkers?

As for income inequality, what is there left to be said that I have not said already? Income inequality is inherently divisive and corrosive to affinity. People from different socio-economic strata lead different lives, have different narratives on what is important, what is to be valued, and what groups, ideas or philosophies they individually identify with. The Wee Shu Min incident years ago should have made this abundantly clear. You can trust me on this when I say income inequality is not conducive to building a strong society with a sense of the collective. I know.

A strong economy can cover up a lot of cracks. But who's to know what will happen when the shining facade is peeled away? I have called this a nascent crisis of affinity. But how nascent it is remains to be seen.

Goh Chok Tong drew a lot of flak/comments for his stayers and quitters remark years ago in a time of adversity. The government should not fear criticism the next time it decides to level such an question at Singaporeans. It should fear the possibility of a deafening silence instead.

Observations on the Foreigner Dominated Office at Work

I took on a temp position in a financial services company several weeks ago as a preliminary step towards a permanent career change; I formerly worked as a research engineer in the public sector.

[As to why I decided to change careers, well, that's a little personal, and perhaps I'll blog about it some other day when I am more settled in a permanent job.]

My current workplace is strikingly different from my previous workplace. For one thing, my previous employer, for reasons peculiar to the nature of the work, generally hired only Singapore citizens and a handful of permanent residents (don't ask why). In contrast, in the department of my current employer where I work, the office is filled with foreigners on work visas. I estimate Singaporeans comprise something between 20 and 30 percent of the employees. The rest include Malaysians, Indonesians, Hong Kongers, Indians and Westerners from various countries (the UK, Australia, etc.).

It is one thing to be intellectually aware of how Singaporeans compete with the many foreigners that have arrived in our country in recent years, it is quite another to be thrust into the thick of it after being formerly ensconced in the public sector.

I'm not bitter or resentful about it, even with my current employment challenges. One might as well complain about why it rains or why it's so damnably hot here all the time. I'm not the optimistic or "think positive" sort, but I much prefer practical thoughts on how to move past (or around) obstacles in order to get what I want, rather than caviling about how unfair life is.

As a former researcher who used to professionally observe and interview people at work (I trained formally as an engineer, but I worked frequently with psychologists and the occasional sociologist), I took the opportunity of working in the modern Singapore office to observe the dynamics of foreigners working here,  and to think about the impact it has on Singaporeans.

A lot of people have complained commented on foreign competition for jobs, but beyond the obvious, I haven't really read anything substantive with the details articulated well. And even though I do have foreigner friends in Singapore, working in an office full of foreigners allows certain insights to come through that would not have otherwise occurred to me within the more personal confines of friendship.

This post is a collection of my own observations and reflections after several weeks of working in a foreigner dominated office.

Demographics

First, the caveat: the sample size I have is small, and arguably biased. This caveat applies equally to all the subsections that come after this one.

Most of the foreigners in my workplace are, as mentioned previously, of the nationalities I listed above. They are generally youngish, ranging from the mid-20s to the early and mid-30s, which squares with the data I reconstructed in a previous post. The gender split in my office, however, is relatively even.

The single to married ratio runs at about 2:1. A few of the singles date. Those that are married have one, or no kids, and where they have kids, the kids are generally infants or toddlers, meaning the kids came relatively recently, when they were in their early thirties.

In general, most of my coworkers do not have extended family here. Immediate family is a bit more common, either in the form of spouses or sometimes siblings (with whom they frequently share a rental apartment with, especially the Malaysians and Indonesians).


Living Arrangements

Married folks tend to buy, singles tend to rent. It's as simple, and as expected, as that. Ergo, as most of my coworkers are single, rentals predominate. My office is along Shenton Way, so most of my coworkers live in relatively central locations.

Driving is uncommon.


Languages

The dominant language is, of course, English. However, Mandarin and Cantonese are frequently spoken in my office. This isn't at all surprising given the presence of Malaysians and Hong Kongers.

Working hours

Perhaps it is mostly a function of the private sector in general and the financial services industry in particular, but my coworkers work longer hours than I am used to. Where at my previous employer I used to knock off on the dot at 6 pm, people in my current office routinely leave at between 7:30 pm and 8:30 pm. FYI, the day starts at about 9 am.

And yes, I am fully aware that many people in Singapore work longer hours than these, and that these are not particularly onerous hours.

Is it because foreigners are likelier to be single with no families to return home to that they work longer hours? Or is it because the same ambitions and aspirations that drive people to find work in a foreign city also motivates them to put in more hours at the office? Does this up the bar for the Singaporean worker, with resulting effects on the later age of marriage and the number of kids raised?

These are interesting questions, but I am also all too aware of confirmation bias to unhesitatingly state these as conclusions. Let's just leave them as intriguing questions to think about.

Socializing After Work

Perhaps because of the longer hours as well as the single status of many of my coworkers, going for dinner together after work is a common occurrence. My coworkers also sometimes meet up on Saturdays for lunch (usually at some place with good food). It could also be due to the more constricted social circles faced by workers in a foreign city.

The vibe in my current office is similar to the vibe I felt as a university student, and the vibe I felt when I used to visit friends working on Wall Street in New York (although because I am a career changer, many of my colleagues are much younger than I am). It was more of a single's lifestyle (as a single myself, I'm certainly not complaining about or judging it). Nor am I so myopic to not know that many people eventually grow out of this kind of lifestyle.

While I did have many single (Singaporean) colleagues in my previous job that I occasionally had dinner with after work, meeting on weekends was almost nonexistent. And the shorter working hours at my previous job meant that most people knocked off from work and met their other friends for dinner. Relationships at work are somewhat chummier in my current office than before.

It's interesting to think about what the social implications are for a government-sanctioned policy of mass immigration of foreigners of working age, and the potential impact it has on the local population: the rate of interracial and inter-nationality marriage (one of my female Singaporean coworkers is married...to a Malaysian in the same office), the delay in the rate of local family formation and lowering of birthrates, since the office culture encourages long hours, even on the viability of national service in the future.

With regard to NS, quite aside from the already low birthrates Singapore is experiencing, immigration has historically been driven by the young, and restless young men in particular. Will the children of expatriate men and local Singaporean women be lost to the SAF in the future should they choose to eschew citizenship? Was this one reason why nationality law was amended in 2004 to permit female citizens residing abroad to transmit their citizenship by descent? Are there other potential effects on dilution of national identity as a result of mass immigration?

Recruitment

I am just a temp, hence I fully intend to resume my job search in a couple of months (my position is a very short term one, more like an internship formalized into a temp position). So, it's hard to ignore the conversations in the office when candidates are being considered for fresh positions, or when resumes get sent in and scrutinized.

[I have to state here first that I am not being seriously considered for a permanent position in my current company mainly because of my lack of relevant industry experience, among other things, rather than my nationality.]

While I wouldn't go so far as to call it discrimination, the fact of the matter is that job searches, as in much of life, depend on referrals. The impression that I get is that it is common for someone to be hired in my company based on a personal referral from someone already working in the company. And since the department is staffed mainly with foreigners...well, you get the idea.

I have no idea how widespread this phenomenon is, but I would hardly be surprised if it was common across many companies and industrial sectors in Singapore.

It's not so much the fact that new hires get made on the basis of referrals as the fact that being a foreigner is no bar to getting hired in the first place that is so disturbing. Most industrialized and developed countries impose some barrier of entry to immigrants so that they have to meet a higher standard of credentialing, talent or performance than a citizen in order to obtain a job here.

The ease of foreigners in getting jobs here could be interpreted in a number of ways. One interpretation is that jobs are plentiful. Another is that foreigners have it easier than Singaporeans, with fewer obligations, such as NS, and fewer financial commitments, such as HDB mortgages. That allows them to be more competitive than local hires. Yet another interpretation is that foreigners are "hungrier", whatever that means, and are willing to work harder and to settle for less.

Here is one other interpretation: perhaps it is not how easy it is for immigrants to find jobs here that is salient, but what an indictment it is of how bereft of value Singapore citizenship really is.

Maybe the government is so confident that foreigners can't freeload off the system here (beyond the initial inducements made to attract them) that they feel free to throw the doors wide open to all comers without reservation. After all, if you can't earn your keep here each day every day, you certainly won't survive long here. Even citizens here do not enjoy much in the way of state-sponsored benefits (aka "free lunches").

Citizens, PRs or foreigners on work visas, we are all just fungible labor inputs into Singapore's economic machine, which is why I do not mince words when I say that Singapore citizenship is bereft of value.

Future Plans

It's interesting to speculate what plans foreigners have when they arrive and work in Singapore. Do they plan to stay on and make Singapore their permanent home, take up citizenship, perhaps start a family? Are we attracting the "right" people to come to Singapore, so to speak?

The short answer to this question is there is no answer. The general feeling that I get from many of my foreign-born colleagues is that they have no concrete plans. Nobody really knows what the future holds, and certainly nobody has made concrete plans that concern making their move to Singapore permanent.  To many of colleagues, being in their mid-20s to mid-30s, these are highly abstract concerns for another day, another age, literally.

Oh, some hold permanent resident status, and a few have even bought property here. But given the ease and cost-benefit trade-off of permanent residency here, taking up PR status is a no-brainer. It's all carrots and no sticks. And a continually rising property market here in the last decade makes buying property a relatively easy commitment for the married folks to make, whether they eventually decide to stay or go elsewhere. For those who got in early in the cycle, it even made good financial sense. PR status and property ownership are not reliable indicators to base an assessment of how likely a foreigner is going to make Singapore their home for good.

As I have indicated in two previous posts, there is reason to believe that outflow rates may pick up years in the future, particularly if economic growth stalls, and population volatility will likely rise markedly as well. I wonder if the smart guys in our civil service take these factors into account in their rosy population projections.

On the New Civics and Moral Education Imperative

"Pity the student who does not surpass the master."

The new Education Minister announced a new focus on Civics and Moral Education a few days ago.

Let's leave aside the issue of how ineffective classroom teaching generally is on imparting a values system. If you need comic relief on a related topic (the so-called MBA Oath), look here. 

Mr Heng Swee Keat spoke on the importance of inculcating "social responsibility, personal and citizenship values in students".

What I find remarkable is how anyone can take seriously this pledge to uphold the importance of personal and citizenship values in Singapore. 

Oh, I do not doubt the intent to place high importance on this initiative (although I have much darker things to say about the nature of that intent), but I question how much anyone can really expect to reap in terms of results, when so much in our environment demands a survivor's mentality.

The harsh environment begins as early as childhood, when students have to claw their way to the top of the heap in our highly competitive education system, one that allows no room for failure, since streaming starts so early. This is an education system that gave birth to acronyms such as ITE ("It's the end"). In addition, the fact that so many parents feel the need to resort to extra measures outside the state educational system, such as tuition, reveals the ineffectiveness of the educational system to act as a social leveler, and to improve social mobility here on this island.

Once kids reach adulthood and join the workplace, they have to compete with the numerous foreigners here for employment, and it certainly doesn't help that government imposed handicaps like National Service disadvantage citizens in their own country. Then there are the tax-payer sponsored inducements that are used to attract foreigners to come here that our own citizens aren't entitled to (such as university scholarships).

All the while, we are repeatedly told that there is "no free lunch", that we need to be "hungry" and have "spurs stuck in our hide". All this amid the highest levels of income inequality just about anywhere on Planet Earth.

We are also admonished frequently by the government that we have to avoid the dangers of a welfare state, that we need to take personal responsibility for our employment / health / retirement / elderly years etc. 

It is sometimes ironic how Singapore can be thought of as a nanny state when in reality, many of our policies are designed for mandatory inclusion precisely so that the state can unburden itself of responsibilities onto the individual (e.g. CPF, Medisave and CPF Life), responsibilities that I might add, have traditionally been borne by the state in many developed countries.

The evidence of daily living in Singapore for the average citizen points to an existence marked by individual struggle. 

And the flip side of meritocracy, as it is so avidly pursued here it is almost a state religion, is that individuals that 'make it' often feel they deserve their success, and can blithely ascribe their success solely to their own talents and abilities, and that those that fail deserve every iota of misery they endure.

Here in Singapore, it's every man for himself. If you want lunch, you had better go out there and get it yourself. There is a reason why every NSman knows and understands the acronym of SAF, "Serve and F*** Off".

Daily living in Singapore will inculcate values in students stronger than anything that can be taught in a classroom setting, government-sanctioned, civics, moral or otherwise. What those values are, you need only look around you in everyday Singapore to see. 

And since the experience of daily living is shaped by government policies, it is only natural that students, upon growing to adulthood, will apply those same strictures that they have learnt in life to evaluating their own country and their government, with the same or greater degree of exactitude. 

Pity the student who does not surpass the master.

The government shouldn't expect a free lunch themselves; the ever more pragmatic and survivalist Singaporean of the future will not pledge anything, much less his loyalty, to a place and its people simply because he was born and raised there. This breed of Singaporean includes, perhaps more so than any other group, those who are fervently pro-PAP and supportive of the material benefits that the PAP promises to deliver year after year. 

Here's an interesting chart showing the negative correlation between income inequality and levels of social trust. And let us not forget that we have official confirmation that the income gap is not important. Old fogies like me who are just barely 30 may argue this point with the PM, but the PM need not worry. 

The kids younger than me will be much more obliging towards taking the PM's words at face value. They will simply internalize this truth, adapt to reality, and concentrate on making more money for themselves. Just like the foreigners who come here because this is a great place to make money, enjoy the rich living (if you can afford it), and move on to someplace else if and when the weather changes. Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Just as the system encourages survivalist and individualistic leanings in its own citizens by design, it attracts foreigners with the same values system.

As for the personal and citizenship values Heng Swee Keat wants so badly, well, let me put it this way. 

The government has long wanted its citizen proletariats to put in their all for the economy, which isn't exactly a positive for family life. Belatedly, the government decided it wanted the fertility rate to be higher, which it is failing miserably at raising.

The government wants "hungry" citizens as well, which students are today internalizing the importance of. Now, the government wants social responsibility, personal and citizenship values to be emphasized in addition. 

I think that's going to work out about as well as the fertility rate.