Materialistic Rewards
By Kevin
Having failed to secure a seat in Alain de Botton's public lecture in the LSE led me to check out his talks on TED.com which turned out to be wonderful. His insights into life and philosophy is extremely powerful and can indeed be applied to living well.
99 Percent?
By Kevin
With the influx of information in our everyday life, 99 Percent is quite a gem with great insights on modern life and 'modern living' in general. It speaks of ideas for personal motivation and lots about making your life better.
It features articles that really touches me, like this short great read.
Morality & Incentives
By Kevin
Yellowing soon?
The Economist points out another flaw in the 'morality' argument with regards to the salary. The implication of justifying high salary for the ministers with the point about attracting top talents and preventing corruption is that it seem to suggest that anything less would mean less able and virtuous state leaders, which obviously isn't the case.
My take on the whole issue has little to say about whether the adjustments are fair or if prevailing salaries are acceptable. And the point of bringing up the article from the Economist is to demonstrate the problem of the argument used.
So if white shirts turns yellow when you buy the cheaper ones, why don't we get other colours instead? Perhaps some day, people would find out that they can do fine with inexpensive light blue tee and just abandon the white ones.
The Question of Pay
By Kevin
The report by the Ministerial Salary Review Committee is out, and there is actually quite a substantial bit of adjustments proposed. Balancing the principles and objectives of ministerial salary is not easy. The salary have to perform multiple roles that often may not necessarily be reconcilable. It first have to be high enough to attract the necessary talent; it should have a fixed component to satisfy basic needs and variable component to incentivize efforts that would translate into effective policies that improves the lives of the people; finally, it has to satisfy the scrutiny of the voters (ie. it must not be obscenely high by the judgment of the public).
Well, looking at the data on growth of GDP in Singapore, it is unlikely that the introduction of pegging ministerial pay to the private sector had any impact on performance of the economy though one could employ counterfactuals and suggest that we could have done worst without it. There comes a layer of complexity when we ask ourselves whether the motivation of these politicians/technocrats lies in serving the nation or earning a fat paycheck. There is no hard and fast rule about salary guidelines to prevent corruption of those in power though we do have management theorist who suggests that as long as we pay enough to get the issue of money off the table, workers would be able to concentrate on doing their job well. Perhaps the fact that people are in politics is supposed to shed light on alternative motivations?
A potential solution we should explore is for the ministers to bid their positions by making a wage offer to the public and providing their full personal histories and work experience details for the public to screen. The public could vote for the ministers; the top 5 voted candidates will be considered but the minister will be selected based on their salary bids. The lowest bidding candidate will be the minister, but his actual pay will be the higher of, either a 10% discount on the second lowest bid in the top 5, or his own bid. Given the intelligence of the candidates politics should draw forth, such a complex system should be able to attract only the brightest and best while allowing them to take a salary that they (and the public have 'agreed').
That is, of course, a joke. But the spirit of the mechanism is that we want the candidates to bare their motivations to the public and force them to give us a picture of what drives them. Then we'll decide if it's worth it to pay them that offer rate, based on their qualifications and the position in question. This also allows ministers taking on more difficult portfolios to receive a higher pay. Cabinet reshufflings will also be implicitly 'approved' by the public in this way. Best of all, opposition MPs are allowed to put themselves up for ministerial positions and the result would have taken into account public scrutiny of their qualifications, the salary they are going to be paid and also their personal incentives to take on the job - they gave the salary bid themselves so no reason they are going to say, now that's not enough for me.
Knowing the incentives of our political leaders are important. Soon after the news about the salary review recommendations were out, Grace Fu's facebook page status was:
"When I made the decision to join politics in 2006, pay was not a key factor. Loss of privacy, public scrutiny on myself and my family and loss of personal time were. The disruption to my career was also an important consideration. I had some ground to believe that my family would not suffer a drastic change in the standard of living even though I experienced a drop in my income. So it is with this recent pay cut. If the balance is tilted further in the future, it will make it harder for any one considering political office."
It drew forth loads of comments. It reflects how little we know about the true motivations and incentives of our politicians or how unconcerned we are. I think Grace is being really frank and objective here; we should empathize with her position. It is something very human to say and we really shouldn't think of our leaders as heroes who can make all the sacrifices in the world to lead our country. The whole pay issue is a tricky one, but we need to work towards making it less thorny.
Perhaps in a Singapore where our expectations for the future prospects of the country is not so dependent on the government; and that all the institutions are merely support and guiding structures for the private sector to take the lead, then we could relieve our leaders' workload while simultaneously relieving the taxpayers' burden of financing our leaders' salary. And perhaps we should work towards that; and for our government to prevent a crisis where we fail to balance between the 3 principles of the minister pay I've defined earlier, we probably have to transit our political system to one that takes more of a backseat in determining the future of our nation.
Eurozone Crisis
By Kevin
BBC has a pretty interesting take on the Eurozone crisis and it explains how past information is often irrelevant in the market's considerations of matters; and of course, the short-sightedness of the market.
Bauhaus Archives
By Kevin
Tubular Steel Chair
I was in Germany for a while this winter break and I spent half a day at Bauhaus Archives. It was a really interesting museum that traced the history of the Bauhaus school and it's 'radicalism' in arts and design. The conception of Bauhaus as a school that would marry arts with craftsmanship was a really powerful idea to me personally. In essence it seek to put together fine arts and applied arts as well as the socio-economic value of them.
I looked at how some of the course components of Bauhaus focused on perfecting the skills and crafts of students while getting them to think about the appropriate materials and techniques involved in the production of things they designed. In many sense, I see a lot of Bauhaus sort of ideas in IKEA - design oriented towards functionality and serving the needs of people (including low costs). Perhaps there's always a business element in the whole Bauhaus movement - in any case, we want to believe that business exists to serve the greater interests of the society.
Equally important in the Bauhaus movement was the idea of 'total arts and design', where all different forms of arts and design were explored, architecture, photography, metal works, pottery, weaving - including the combination of these different products. The potential of such a school combined with industry haven't seemed to be explored again after the closure of Bauhaus - at least not in my knowledge. I'd love to see the movement spring to life again and not just be a relic of the past where we can only reminiscent on the impact it has brought to design in the modern world.
Giving Thanks to Siteground
By Kevin
Love hating it.
If you've been a long-time user of the resources on ERPZ or been reading the pile of this articles written every now and then, you'd know the guy behind most of the stuff here. It's Kevin, yea that's me. But perhaps it's also time to know that this website is hosting on Siteground and ERPZ have been with them since 2007, the year I finished A Levels. I only properly got started with supplying academic resources subsequently.
Anyways this post is part of the little contest that Siteground has organized for Thanksgiving to share our experience/impression of Siteground with the world. For me, I guess it's also to give thanks to this company for making it possible for me to share these stuff to the students out there who are motivated, driven and interested to make good of their studies and future lives.
Siteground and I share a really love-hate relationship. When I first started it, I switched from a host that used H-Sphere and I thought C-Panel was a really difficult control system to use. But I loved their prices and the fact that there was no restrictions on space, FTPs, databases and such (during those days it wasn't that common). Geeks out there will know that and Siteground was probably one of the more competitive companies that started slashing these restrictions and others followed suit.
I hate the way Siteground locks me in and then starts raising the full year hosting prices bit by bit (at least every time I need to renew my contract), and I hate the way they hold my Credit Card information hostage and I can't delete them from my account so unless I explicitly make them terminate the hosting, they'll debit sums from my Credit Card month by month to pay for further hosting. But I loved the fact that when I run into trouble and send a ticket to the support team, I get replies that shows that they care, though more often than not, it takes quite some effort to find a means of getting to the ticket submission. Quite a few times, Chinese characters stopped showing up on some of my pages though there was no issue with my character encoding and scripting. I managed to get them to check it up and after a thorough look through they fixed the problem for me.
Siteground do care for their customers even though they use extremely competitive pricing techniques (US$9.95/yr hosting for your friends who join us! But service renewal for yourself? US$108/yr). Once I got pretty frustrated and decided to cancel my hosting because I've been forking out these payments on my own and generating zero income from the website and yet the host is always driving up the prices. I asked to cancel my hosting but thankfully for the readers of ERPZ, Siteground negotiated a special price with me upon discovering that I want to cancel the hosting. I'll need your continuous support in terms of referring friends to your site and making my costs worth it. Everyone I reach out to makes me feel that my expenses on this site is worth it.
That's my story with Siteground. They are an aggressive, very competitive company offering web-hosting and an array of other web solutions. They do a good job for me thus far and I must say that for all my complains about their pricing and deals for existing customers, they're fine. So do approach them (through me, it's like a super awesome deal) if you want to start a website. You might be elated to enjoy a good deal, often taking for granted when their service is smooth and running well, and sometimes secretly believing you're smart because you're with them. Some other times, you cope with difficulties with the hosting, you get disappointed by them or angry with them for trying to rip you off. This is life with Siteground, it's like living in the rest of reality - you wrestle, fight, laugh and then, you both become good friends in the end.
The Great Crash
By Kevin
Galbraithian Wisdom
I've got some great quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith in his mid 20th Century book that bears great lessons for us even today.
Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
And after watching 'Inside Job'; you can't help but wonder if Galbraith's forecast turned out to be true for the SEC:
...regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age - after a matter of ten or fifteen years - they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.
In any case, the documentary got me reading about some of the economist interviewed in the film. In particular, Glenn Hubbard and Frederic Mishkin were both caught a little off-guard in the film's interview by the director's questions. I thought that they handled the aftermath pretty okay (Mishkin here and Hubbard here). Obviously, the director had something he wanted the two professors to show to the audience and did portray them a little negatively but he did so to demonstrate a wider phenomenon as he justified.
From a human point of view, it is definitely easy to empathize with the director and it is what sells the movie. The policy difficulties and the way the crisis arose make it more difficult for the people in charge to agree with the director. There’s both a lack of certain (vs uncertain) information and cognitive bandwidth to process clues at the time before the crisis and during it. With the benefit of hindsight, the director is empowered to challenge the pre-crisis regime. Dommage pour le financiers!
Einstein’s 1%
By Kevin
Gliding on the waters
Best-selling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami talks about talent, motivation and most importantly, hardwork in his memoir 'What I talk about when I talk about running'. This point was well highlighted by 99%'s article on the book. That idea that talent is a pre-requisite is compelling, and that belief puts you at a higher level than most other 'smart' people who have given up on the way and become 'mediocre' or just 'ordinary'.
I sometimes believe that majority of people in life sail through life this way. We are all born with gifts that takes time to discover and develop. As we go through life, we discard these gifts as we found them to be either overly taxing (too much time and effort required to bring us to the next level), or uninteresting. An environment that encourage and fosters these talents are necessary not so much to 'discover' these talents but to develop them appropriately. And inspirations are, without doubt, important too.
Scott Barry Kaufman discusses the importance of inspiration in the blog entry and suggests ways in which inspirations can be made to come by more often. I'm not sure how incredible this appear to our readers but we must acknowledge that no idea comes independently and originally from the guy who mentions it despite the attribution. The mind works in curious ways and we might have simply picked up cues from those around us to eventually arrive at whatever we've got.
One Reality
By Kevin
Feeding Others or yourself?
The chapter on 'Efficiency' in my text begin with the following anecdote:
In my dream I came to a room where men sat in a large circle around a pot of soup. Each man held a long spoon, which he could dip into the pot. But the spoons were longer than the men's arms so they could not bring the soup to their mouths. The men were hungry, and cried out in their misery. "This is hell," said my guide.
Then he took me to another room, similar to the first. Once again men sat in a large circle around a pot of soup, once again each man's spoon was so long that he could not bring it to his mouth. But in this room the men were not hungry, because they were feeding each other. "This," said my guide, "is heaven."
There's only one reality. You and those around it makes it heaven or hell.