Self-Defeating Economics

Note: the opinions expressed here do not necessarily make sense.

Are we killing ourselves with the drive to attain a “First World” economy?  For years now, it’s seemed that the one outstanding feature of “First World”-ism is prices that climb, climb, climb and never seem to come down to earth.

Just yesterday the Sunday Times featured the closure of Sembawang Music, once the biggest music retailer here with a history dating back to 1986.  One of our local success stories has collapsed, and why?  Not due to poor management – the founder did an incredible job of growing his company, and according to the article, his debts were negligible.  Not due to music piracy – that aspect of the argument against illegal downloading is spurious, specious and smacks more of pig-headed refusal to change and innovate than of any sound economic reasoning.  Not even due entirely to the recession, as hard as that has hit retail.

No – the single largest contributing factor to the death of another entrepreneurial dream was rent.  $12,000 a month for a space in Raffles City, huh?  That ought to pay the salaries of the outlet’s entire staff and then some, and anyone who thinks it low is either completely out of touch with day to day expenditure, or is so rich that they should just get the hell out of here and leave working people to get on with making a living.  Granted, it’s in an upscale, well-furbished area where people are actually more likely to make purchases.  But I shudder to think how large a percentage of operating costs that $12,000 takes up.

At almost the same time, I read another article mentioning the rental costs of a hawker stall: up to $4,500.  Once again the rent is enough to pay the salaries of everyone working there, and then cover the utilities.  It becomes even more ridiculous when compared to rents as they were in the 1960s – between $100-$300.  Within half a century, rents and other operating costs have inflated more than ten times, but have earnings gone up correspondingly?  The stories told by retailers suggest that the answer is no.

Is this really the best policy?  Logic points out that if tenants cannot pay the rent, they will move out or just fold, and the higher the rents go, the lower the likelihood that they will be replaced even for the short term.  The problem is tremendously exacerbated for retail businesses, whose income is restricted by that very space they are renting.  Landlords ought to recognize this and do more than pay lip service to the concept of aiding their tenants – especially the small and medium-sized businesses.  (Remember, if you will, that SMEs provide jobs for over 40 percent of our workforce.)

A lot has been said about encouraging entrepreneurship here and assistance has certainly been dished out.  But assistance can only go so far before we turn into a welfare state.  There is a point where larger corporations, such as the mall owners whose policy is apparently to squeeze their small tenants dry, need to realize that they are slowly bleeding themselves dry as well.  The supply of tenants is not inexhaustible, particularly in recession times.  Worse, the supply of entrepreneurs is not inexhaustible.  It wasn’t so long ago that Guy Kawasaki said: “Singapore has 5 million people, six entrepreneurs and one opinion.”

One opinion, to me, is not as alarming as six entrepreneurs.  And six entrepreneurs is not as alarming as the reason why there are not more entrepreneurs.

When our successful home-grown businesses, that we are so proud of, fail and fall because of policy holes that let them be literally choked to death by costs that rise unchecked regardless of the global recession, we are in trouble.  There is something seriously wrong with a “First World” economy that kills off the very markers of its own achievement.

First Visit To KL

“Are you mentally prepared for KL?”

That was what my father asked me when he heard that I was travelling to Kuala Lumpur on the 27th and 28th to attend the launch of Royal Selangor’s Autumn ‘09 collection.

I couldn’t understand the question.  Granted, it’s been quite a few years since I last left Singapore for work or leisure, but there is nothing so shocking about KL that a first-time visitor would require “mental preparation” of the sort my father appeared to be hinting at.  In general, people don’t travel with their jaws clenched and their minds braced to ward off the impact of the difference between the destination country and their own.  (If they do, they shouldn’t be travelling in the first place.  They should be sitting comfortably at home, reading Lonely Planet or National Geographic to open their minds.)

(Speaking of National Geographic, I happened to read an article in a recent issue which described the pollination techniques of orchids.  It seems that one particular species of orchid looks exactly like the rear view of a female bee, and pollinates itself by attracting male bees to do the wild thing with it.  Prompted by the orchids decorating the little serving trays at the club where the launch was held, I narrated this story to the gentleman sitting beside me, and “completely ruined orchids for him”, or so he claimed.)

Regarding KL, at any rate – mental preparedness probably had nothing whatsoever to do with it, since the only views of KL I had were through car windows.  Other than that, it was a whirlwind of airport-visitor centre-hotel-country club-hotel-airport, and two mornings in a row that I had to get up before six to catch a flight.

In an earlier entry, I mentioned that journalists who wish to blog may face a conflict of interest if they blog about their work, for fairly obvious reasons.  (The observations I made in that post are also partly responsible for why I’ve decided to write about my little trip now.)  And for those same reasons, I shouldn’t go into detail about Royal Selangor here, but I must mention that I find the company fascinating because I’ve never covered anything even marginally similar in Singapore.  And I’ll post pictures of my favourite range from the collection at the bottom of this entry!

Back to the topic at hand: a first-time visitor’s impressions of Kuala Lumpur, with as few references to work as I can get away with.

The Airport

Changi Airport breathes luxury, the hushed sophistication of a five-star hotel; KLIA is modern and stylish, the casual contemporary cheerfulness of a trendy mall.  But beware of unannounced patdowns in both.  I almost jumped out of my shoes at the KLIA gate when one of the security personnel suddenly did a pat check on me without warning.  Apparently my shirt hangs so loosely on me that it gives rise to suspicions of concealed…assets.

Aircraft Seating

I travelled by Jetstar, and  I have absolutely nothing against budget airlines.  It was fine except for one thing, my eternal bugbear when it comes to seating: headrests that protrude too far forward and collide with the back of my head, forcing me to crane my neck forward at an angle guaranteed to ensure slow cramp.  I always suspect seats like this of having being designed for either (a) people with abnormally long torsos, or (b) people with hunched shoulders.

Urban Sprawl

In Singapore the houses go straight up in the air; in Malaysia they spread out to the sides.  Ah, the beauty of having all that wide open space.  Then again, people living in high-rises have space too, it’s just too far above their heads to see.

Skylines

The Singapore skyline by night is lit up like the F1 track, but the only bright things I saw on the KL skyline were the Petronas Twin Towers, which the PRC journalist sitting opposite me compared to glittering diamonds.  I approve of energy saving on principle, but I’m rather glad I didn’t have to go out on the streets at night.

Airport Food

Some things never change the world round, such as the inflated prices of airport amenities.  I had to leave the hotel without breakfast in order to check in for an early morning flight, and subsequently spent some time wandering around KLIA’s retail area looking for – what else – FOOD.  The prices at the two cafes I discovered were deterrent, a favourable SGD-MYR exchange rate notwithstanding.  I wound up in McDonald’s, where prices are fixed by a central authority and can’t be raised or lowered regardless of location.  Oh well.  Food is food in a pinch. 

Flight

Sitting in the plane just before it reached the runway, I looked out the window and thought, let the karma be good because I’m too young to die.  Then I quietly enumerated to myself all the reasons why I’d like to keep on living.  And I did that twice or three times on each flight.  I may have read too much about accidents, in-flight incidents and other aviation terrors.

When I wasn’t making my peace with the universe, I was thinking about the phrase “the miracle of flight” and considering human ingenuity, which found ways for metal to float on the air.  And I was trying to figure out why people consider flight to be a miracle, yet think nothing of cars on the expressway.  It may be something to do with familiarity, and brings to mind an Arthur Yap poem titled In Passing (and a derivative of it I wrote as an exercise, titled here to there).

What else?  Those are the things that spring to mind; further impressions will take untangling before any single thread, let alone a web, can be formed from the colours filling my head.  (Unlike the Lady of Shalott, I have no curse waiting to drop on me like killer litter.)

In the meantime, here are two lovely pictures of the Five Elements range collection whose launch I attended.  Created by the incomparable Freeman Lau, whom I had the great luck to interview, it draws heavily on Chinese cultural elements (and the designer’s own preferences with regards to drinking Chinese tea!) and is my favourite range from the whole collection.  I have a lot more to say about it, but the rest of my opinion is due to Pulses Magazine, so in lieu of text, here are the images, extracted from the media kit kindly provided by Royal Selangor: a tea set and five different pendants each representing one of the five elements.

               

Say Something About Nothing

Remember Dr Cai Mingjie, the molecular biology researcher who became a taxi driver?  I spent some time reading his blog at http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/, and what struck me was not so much the quality of his writing as the fact that he was sufficiently interested in and inspired by his job, to set down in detail the daily events he encountered.  Compare the working lives of most other people out there – how many people are stimulated enough to record their workplace events?

I can think of three reasons, right off the top of my head, why people are generally not inclined to write about the things that happen at work, and that’s not including the inability to do so.

One: they simply don’t encounter anything interesting to write about.  This particularly goes for office workers.  While I was working full time as an editor, I occasionally tried to keep a record of things that happened in the office.  Ninety percent of my days were spent sitting at my desk, either reading through proofs, doing research for articles or sending/answering routine emails.  The few times I was not at the desk, I was on leave pursuing my freelance work.  Without the freelance work, I had no external interaction beyond a small circle of colleagues and friends I occasionally caught up to online.  I never learned anything new, because even the publications I was doing “research” for covered their topics so shallowly, from such a narrow viewpoint, that I had no opportunity to look or think any deeper than the surface.  I never went anywhere or saw anything.  What was there to write about?

Two: even when there are interesting things to write about, they are too mentally flatlined to put events in words.  People do get jaded after a while spent sitting in a cubicle, and when shallow thought is the norm for one’s work – which it often is – it becomes a habit.  The average workplace simply does not encourage the kind of deep thought and incisive observation required to turn everyday incidents into an article of any interest.  Research has concluded that the best way to stimulate the intellect is to allow the brain some downtime, but how much downtime do people get at work?  (This can lead to an indictment of office practices, which I won’t go into.)  I can state from experience that my best and deepest ideas came when I was staring out of the bus window during a long journey, or just peering vacantly at something random with no task at hand.  Even my best work-related ideas came not while I was at work, but when I was doing something else entirely (usually something mindless).  Granted that there was something to write about, would I have had anything to write about it?

And three: given that there is something to write about and people have something to write about it, would they get in trouble for doing so?  This is a consideration that will probably hit many people where it hurts.  One can get in serious trouble, including and not limited to lawsuits and summary termination, for disclosing company information, even if it’s on a personal blog and chronicles nothing more than office politics.  Nothing more?  People have gotten fired for less.  This consideration looms doubly large for those whose work involves confidential information and triply large for those whose work involves writing.  I recall a friend whose contract with a publisher here stated that the copyright of everything she wrote while in that publisher’s employ belonged to the company – up to blog posts.  Or those who are paid to write – there is a smell of conflict of interest if a journalist decides to independently start a blog which will be available to the public for free.  (The use of blogs as a marketing tool will not be covered here.)  Yes – if I write about something at my workplace, am I going to get sued for it?

It never struck me as odd that in all my writing, I hardly ever blogged about my workplace except to bitch about this and that condition.  Until I came across Dr Cai’s blog and saw how involved and keenly observational he was of his daily encounters.  Then I noticed that since quitting my job, my written productivity has gone up by about three hundred percent and the concepts I’ve touched on have also deepened (which may or may not say a lot).  And that got me thinking.  Can it be that a steady job, whether one enjoys it or not, is actually detrimental to personal development and creativity?  My personal experience seems to concur.  But not all jobs can be bad.  Is it a matter of self-management and attitude adjustment?  Very likely.  Or is it a matter of comfort zones, the familiar and the unfamiliar and how we deal with either by ignoring it or trying to fit our perceptions around it through rephrasing it in our own terms?

I’ll leave the answer to the psychologists and the researchers.  What I do know is that it takes intellectual stimulation to be able to say anything about anything else, and intellectual stimulation does not necessarily come from outside.  Much of the time it comes from within, when the brain’s processing power doesn’t need to deal with the immediate exigencies of working life and can start doodling pictures in the clouds.  I bet da Vinci was daydreaming when he thought of drawing the Vitruvian Man.