Dr Chee Soon Juan Predicts “Imminent Disaster” In Yet Another Article On Huffington

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Article originally posted at http://mustsharenews.com/34151/csj-a...rian-disaster/



Chee Soon Juan Predicts “Imminent Disaster” In Yet Another Article On Huffington Post


Leader of SDP posts radical ideas (yet again) about Singapore facing an impending crisis

Get out your crystal balls, because the Singapore prophet Dr Chee Soon Juan is forecasting the future.

On 15 Jan, Dr Chee wrote a piece connecting Singapore’s “authoritarian” political system to the nation’s eventual downfall.

And he did so in yet another piece from Chee Soon Juan to the Huffington Post. *sigh*



This, after getting into a brief melee with Chan Chun Sing over his last article on the American news aggregator.

Dr Chee’s analogy of South Korea and his theory of Singapore’s development

The SDP leader makes a link between democracy and innovation through the example of South Korea, saying that the country began as an authoritarian state and transformed into a democracy under former president Kim Dae Jung.

According to Dr Chee, Korea’s become more innovative after democratising with huge brands such as Samsung, Hyundai and LG.

Reasons Dr Chee gave

In a nutshell, Dr Chee argues that the “openness, diversity” and “dissent” in democracy would lead to innovation and economic progress for the country.

Thus, he makes the assumption that a liberal society and government is required for innovation to occur.

Innovation does not take place in the halls of government buildings and it cannot be kindled from ministerial pronouncements. Innovation thrives in a culture that not just tolerates but celebrates openness, diversity and, yes, dissent; it flourishes in an environment where people have free and full access to information.

Why efficiency is not growing

Dr Chee referred to Paul Krugman — an economist and Nobel Laureate — who believed that Singapore’s top down, input driven approach was unsustainable.

Without increasing efficiency, the little red dot would be unlikely to have economic growth comparable to the path.

Dr Chee believes that the government took the easy way out by giving tax reductions to attract “super rich”, and instead of retaining talent, the ruling party chose to import foreign talent.

He claims governmental schemes and programmes to increase productivity has not been successful, saying:

And yet, for nearly two decades, productivity gains continue to elude us, and we have produced few innovative enterprises that are able to compete internationally. Such a scenario does not paint a bright future of our economy.

Is he right about productivity?

From the data obtained from Singstat.com, from 2012 onwards we can see that most sectors are in the negative or hovering close to 0. We were still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis in 2010 and 2011, so numbers were disregarded.

2012, 2013 and 2014 had a nett productivity increase of 2.0%, 10.6% and -10.6% respectively.

In 2013, the financial sector did exceptionally well — so well that overall productivity increased by 0.3%.

Thus, Dr Chee is indeed correct to say that efforts to increase productivity have been futile.



But…what about economic crisis?

Unless he is really Singapore’s prophet, and can predict the economy that well, truth is, nobody knows whether (and when) Singapore will face an economic disaster.

Dr Chee’s link between political freedom and economic efficiency appears to be as weak as barely brewed tea, because there is no strong link between democratization and economic growth.

And, using just the example of South Korea is not sufficient to generalize another country’s situation to Singapore.



Take the United States — the epitome of democracy — for example. The country’s economy struggled to recover after being hit by the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and had an average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 2.125% from 2011 to 2014.

Now compare that to China, an authoritarian country with GDP growth of an average of 8.075% from 2011 to 2014.

Thus, political freedom and political system does not seem to be an absolute factor in economic growth.

But here’s what Dr Chee missed out on

Dr Chee did elaborate on his Korea analogy, however, he fails to address the democratization process of South Korea.

Democratization was not only the work of former president Kim, but also the people — including students — who stood up to a ruthless dictator during the Gwangju uprising. These violent protests involved a quarter of a million people and resulted in 170 fatalities.

In order words, the price of democracy was paid using the blood of these people.

However, Singapore is not known for large scale protests, and student uprising doesn’t seem likely at the moment.

He has a point though

Although he might be wrong in saying Singapore faces impending crisis due to our system, he does make a valid point that productivity is not increasing as it should be.

This is a problem that should be addressed.


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