Quora Answer: What are Some Major Recent Policy Failures of the Singapore Government?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What are some major recent policy failures of the Singapore government?”

Perhaps the single greatest population oversight was the Stop at Two policy.  Implemented in stages from the 1960s, it became increasingly draconian.  The worry for the Singapore government then was a population boom that would overburden the economy.  The problem is that the policy worked too well.  Coming into the 1990s, the next generation was disincentivised from having more than two.  Most were having one.  This lowered the TFI to below the replenishment threshold.

The current worry is that if Singaporeans are not producing enough, when this generation, my generation gets old and retire, the population will not be enough to pay the cost of nursing, health, and loss productivity.  It is one thing to promote automation, which is already done due to lower labour costs, but machines do not pay the taxes needed to bear the costs of an ageing population.

This almost lead to the next policy misstep, the Population White Paper of 2013, calling for a drastic increase in immigration to bring the population to 7 million citizens by 2030.  It is obviously a paper written by idiots who do not understand the people, or the problem.  Simply throwing another 3 million or so people into the mix, most of them from China, was always going to be a recipe for disaster.

The population of Singapore is not growing as fast due to several factors, economic, social, and sociological.  Singapore is expensive, and the government recognises that.  However, simply giving tax incentives, and programmes to encourage childbirth with 1960s communist style propaganda does not work with a generation that has different priorities.  One of those priorities is work life balance, and having many children upsets it.

Another issue is that the government’s initial notions of eugenics, borrowed from Lee Kuan Yew’s mistaken idea that the children of graduates were more likely to have graduate children discounted the fact that the career-minded were not likely to put their career on hold simply to have children because the government desired it.  Their ham-fisted public campaign actually turned people off.

Later studies on population growth showed that the overly interventionist policy of the government in the four decades since the 1960s was unnecessary.  As nations developed, their population growth slowed anyway.  Like many wealthy countries with an affluent, educated population, young people have entertainment options, and career choices.  Procreation is no longer the only form of recreation.  People understand how to use birth control.

Due to the political backlash, the Population White Paper was quietly dropped, although there has been a quiet increase in immigration.  However, Singapore is no longer actively trying to import the population of a small town in China every year, particularly when it lead to xenophobia against these new immigrants due to their difficulty integrating.

At some level, it is quite apparent that the government has given up on actively increasing the population, and have been focusing on building up the reserves so that we can pay for the cost of an ageing population.  Populations grow and decline in cycles.  By gradually implementing measures that promote work life balance, and the integration of immigrants, the population issue will be addressed in several decade’s time, but at a natural timetable that involves the nation taking an economic hit to address it.