Singapore’s baby blues – what LKY could learn from gaming

Today is big cycling day – so we will just have to do a hello, bang-bang and good bye – coming to think, wasn’t that how our parents use to make babies? What’s happened recently? Why is LKY smacking his head!
 
Why is it so difficult to just get down to the whole business of making babies? It should be the most natural thing in the world. What’s the fuss all about? Why does it have to be something like the Da Vinci code?
 
My pet theory is; it may have something to do with the sworn enemies of the brotherhood – yes, those erudite spinsters who reside in that self styled monastery known as SPH (the Sisters of Perpetual Hesitation); who often write toe curling accounts on the seven habits of highly effective wife beaters – to why I rather sleep with my dog than a man – in their cloistered enclave when their mother superior Sumiko exclaims: “I’ve missed the boat.” Her underlings cheer on, “Well done, our aim must be improving.”
 
Leaving that all aside our baby blues remains a pithy summary of the sign of our times – it’s serious when you consider even Sengkang Sally these days seems to be hanging up her eggs.
 
In the early 80’s when the trend of forestalling the stork first surfaced it affected mainly the ranks of professional women – that was alright – besides all of them were batty and their abstinence probably saved most men from perpetual bitching.
 
But of late the trend of forestalling the stork seems to have reached pandemic levels and it’s even scissoring right through the length and breadth of our society! So out comes the same unsavory characters making a bee line in rogue’s gallery: high cost of living, not enough time, an uncertain future and the impossible demands of juggling jobs and kids etc. Now it seems the govt of the day is using this as a tagline to justify the immigration policy.
 
Are they the only suspects? Could there be another reason why our birth rates are so low?

One clue that may explain why the baby figures are so shambolic may be found in the computer game called SimCity  – I happen to love the game. For one it’s a great way to take a holiday from my inferiority complex; as SimCity is really like playing god (though I don’t think he eats pot noodle or has to live in a room where clothes go to die) – now the thing that I learnt most about SimCity is:
Build a lousy system and you are likely to get lousy results; there’s no mystery there, it’s cut and dried; where the cost and penalty calculation become screwy is when you build a perfect system that’s so good that it even has reserves to gather momentum and when you pull on the brakes nothing happens!
 
It’s a bit like the Titanic 30 seconds before it struck the iceberg – instead of you playing the game; the game plays you – the levers of power are connected to nothing!
 
That dystopian nightmarish landscape bears out only too clearly in the game SimCity  – even the most benign and innocuous actions can be amplified and have far reaching implications – build a multi storey car park and the next thing you know you’ve created the mother of all traffic jams and that leads to probably an eight lane highway followed by deppreciation of real estate prices – next thing you know your neighborhood has turned into down town Baghdad; if you really want to understand why our baby birth rates is so low –here it is! –  the answer believe it or not can be found in a computer game and just in case you think – I am kidding.
 
I am not, I worked it all out mathematically one evening on a napkin in McDonalds.
 
The whole idea of playing the extinction game isn’t really so different from one those environmental horror stories; we so often hear about; When someone thought it would just be a dainty idea to bring a pot of flowers from the old country to brighten up the porch and dress up their bonnet for Sunday church.
 
But what happens when that species of alien flower finds its way into the local ecology and proliferates only to overreach its territory very much like a super invader to wipe up the rest?
 
The analogy isn’t so different from what really accounts for our baby blues. The historical accounts are sketchy; but the story goes something like this; during the late 70’s a great social engineering experiment was launched; the ‘2 is enough and 3 is company’ population control program.
 
It made perfect sense then to mitigate the high birth rates and leveraging on the apparatus of assimilation to broadcast the message it worked admirably, the problem was everyone from the policymakers to the social scientist who conceived this idea became so fixated on the drive train and breaking the land speed record; none of them bothered with the emergency brakes. In short, they forgot about the reverse gear – fast forward today; when we talk about our lamentable birth rates, it’s nothing more than a social Chernobyl experiment gone awry.
 
Yes, some one fucked up. And they fucked it up big time.
 
The lessons here are sobering – never ever mess around with something you don’t completely understand – that’s the problem when government decides to play a round of I am-God-almighty.
 
My point is simply this; the phenomenon of low birth rates in Singapore can only be effectively reversed, if we take the trouble to understand the root causes for why couples seem to be deferring the decision to have more kids – the high cost of living. I don’t doubt may be one of ONLY a host of other reason. But attempting to reverse this trend by resorting to immigration instead of addressing the real causes is akin to fixing a leaky roof by building another new roof above the defective one – that’s stupid. What should be done instead is to interrogate the valence between the low birth rates and other drivers such as i.e income inequality, the difficulties of balancing parenthood and work life etc – all these add up to exacerbate the situation that translates to create the baby blues in Singapore – but if we remain bovine about drilling deeper to determine those underlying causes. And instead just accept low birth rates as a fact with that all too familiar Singaporean melancholic air of finality (what to do lah!) not only will it not spur the govt formulate a prescriptive cure to reverse the rot. At at best it will simply encourage ennui or worst perpetuate a failure of imagination to craft effective incentives to encourage more couples to see value in parenting – neither does the argument, just because every developed country (Singapore is no exception….it is our Karma) seems to be suffering from the same trend of abysmal baby birth rates cut any ice either. As that line of logic presupposes all developed and high density countries share the same social, cultural and economic conditions, hence they too must suffer from the same corrosive forces that militate higher birth rates – they don’t and even if they did, how would one explain how so many Scandinavian countries and even France have been able to reverse the seemingly finality of the case of diminishing birth rates. In summary, we should never see abysmal birthrates as an natural part and parcel of modern city life. It is not!

If there is any redeeming hope in this essay, the custodians of power would do well to consider seriously whether those intrusive ill conceived policies which may have made pragmatic sense once upon a time to muck around with the lives of people contributed to our lamentable birth rates today. I don’t doubt these planners may have done so with the best of intentions; but no one can deny today, when we scale the cost, it was not only misplaced, but foolish. This I have little doubt!

Thus it profits us naught to chase the air and clouds by suggesting this could in any way be resolved with immigration – as within a span of one generation, if we do not pin down the root causes and kill it, those same malevolent forces that continues to militate against couples having more kids will once again replay again thus necessitating yet another wave of immigration. To paraphrase we are going around in circles! fact remains where the equation applies to people; the whole calculation may not even hold true as what we are dealing with here isn’t nuts and bolts – it’s not really a quantitative method as it remains a qualitative process; its more an art than a science; because you dealing with people and people don’t always behave rationally.
 
Yes, small things can have big consequences. They can even come back and bite you like a multi headed hydra. Worst of all, some of the mistakes we make can’t be reversed – once they go into the mind; they just stay there forever.
 
It would be good; if government just kept that in the back of their minds when they next decide to muck around with the internet.
 
Don’t say, I didn’t tell you; it’s doesn’t pay to play God.
 
Pls do correct for grammar along with spelling.
 
Got to go cycling now.
 
Darkness 2011

(This post has been reposted in Ekunaba – brotherhood press 2011)

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“I learn many things from gaming, one of them is small things can lead to big things. And once that happens it is not how well you can play the game. But rather how well, the game plays you. Remember, there is always a God somewhere in the small. But if you believe in the idea of a higher being, you must also entertain the theoretical possibility, the devil always resides in the details of the small.”
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