What to expect when you wait to have kids

Jul 14, 2012

They will have old parents whom they'll be taking care of earlier

By Nona Willis Aronowitz

WHEN my 79-year-old father had two back surgical operations a couple of years ago, I saw him in a hospital gown for the first time. As his closest family member - my mother died of cancer in 2006 - I gave my dad rides to the doctor and the grocery store. I helped him clean out his house and move into a smaller, stairless apartment. I watched him struggle at physical therapy.

He has fully recovered, but the process aged him. Now I move a little slower when we walk down the street together. When he runs 20 minutes late, my imagination runs wild: Has he fallen or got into a car accident? Has he forgotten about our appointment? Oh, God, does he have Alzheimer's?

Environmental Alarmism, Then and Now

The Club of Rome’s Problem -- and Ours

Bjørn Lomborg

Bjørn Lomborg is an Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It.


Forty years ago, humanity was warned: by chasing ever-greater economic growth, it was sentencing itself to catastrophe. The Club of Rome, a blue-ribbon multinational collection of business leaders, scholars, and government officials brought together by the Italian tycoon Aurelio Peccei, made the case in a slim 1972 volume called The Limits to Growth. Based on forecasts from an intricate series of computer models developed by professors at MIT, the book caused a sensation and captured the zeitgeist of the era: the belief that mankind's escalating wants were on a collision course with the world's finite resources and that the crash would be coming soon.

Outgoing Singapore Envoy to US - Professor Chan Heng Chee

Jul 1, 2012

When US noticed the 'little country that could'
Outgoing envoy to the US Chan Heng Chee recounts her 16 years in Washington

By Tracy Quek

In a town where politics and policy are the raison d'etre for many of its residents and networking is an art form, Singapore's outgoing Ambassador to the United States Chan Heng Chee is a diplomat who appears to be very much in her element.

In her 16 years in Washington, Professor Chan, 70, has come to be noted for her 'salon dinners' at the Singapore Embassy, gatherings that bring together Washington's strategic thinkers, media personalities and policymakers to discuss hot- button issues of the day over a good - often Singaporean - meal.

Frequently sought for her views on Asian affairs, she is also known for her rapport with high-level US officials and diplomats, her support of charitable and cultural causes, as well as the elegant qipao she dons to the many formal events she hosts and is invited to.

Her reputation today as a distinguished figure in Washington's diplomatic circles, however, belies a difficult start to her job when she arrived in 1996 against the backdrop of tense Singapore-US ties following the caning of American teenager Michael Fay in 1994 for vandalism.

In love with the little red dot

Jun 29, 2012

THE LONG INTERVIEW | CHANGE-MAKERS

Ten years after giving up Belgian citizenship to become a Singaporean, Singapore Diamond Exchange chairman and Singapore FreePort co-founder Alain Vandenborre tells Susan Long why he is more smitten than ever with Singapore.


AS THE euro crisis deepens, Mr Alain Vandenborre's European friends, who once asked why in the world he would renounce his Belgian citizenship to become a Singaporean, are now seeking his help to relocate here too.

At least half a dozen have called him this past year and these include top-brass finance professionals who sit on global boards.

'Nobody questions any more, 'Why are you doing this?' Instead, they are all asking, 'How can I become a citizen?'' says the 51-year-old venture capitalist and entrepreneur, who has lived and worked in six countries, including Germany, Holland, France and China.

Each time, he hangs up the phone and 'smiles a little smile' to himself.

Growth for Singapore - Concerns and Considerations

Jun 16, 2012

Growth Potion No. 4?
The Prime Minister's defence of the pursuit of growth has stirred fresh debate on the right mix of economic gain and social welfare. In the first of a two-part series on economic growth, Political Correspondent Robin Chan delves into the issue.


SINGAPORE'S seeming ability to grow against the odds has been a hallmark of its economic development.

To spur growth, the Government has consciously driven change, in the 1960s through industrialisation, in 1985 - post recession - by making wages more flexible and cutting direct taxes, and then again in 2003, when it launched its third economic 'paradigm shift'.

From 1997 to 2003, the economy suffered a series of setbacks that included a debilitating Asian financial crisis, the post-Sept 11 gloom, a dot.com bust and the Sars public health crisis.

By 2003, the city state's economy was at a turning point, triggering a third paradigm shift centred on innovation and entrepreneurship as well as deregulation and liberalisation.

In a speech at the Economic Society in 2003, then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong asked for support for the latest round of restructuring, saying 'no system works forever'.

As National Development Minister Khaw Boon Wan explained recently, post-Sars, Singapore's economy was down in the doldrums. Unemployment hit 5.5 per cent in September 2003, which meant close to 100,000 people out of work, many of them for more than six months.

Architect of tomorrow's homes

Jun 16, 2012

HDB chief wants to improve living standards in sustainable ways
 

ON ANY given weekend, all along the river park that runs through the youngest Housing Board town of Punggol, runners train for marathons, shutterbugs snap away at flora and fauna, and families live it up at carnivals and picnics.

They have Dr Cheong Koon Hean to thank for the idyllic 4.2km waterway that is their hot spot. Government engineers had initially wanted to run a giant pipe between the Punggol and Serangoon reservoirs that make up the waterway, but Dr Cheong recalls: 'I said, 'Why a pipe? Why not make a river out of it so we can build a river park that everyone can enjoy?''

Now, she exults, there is a thriving community of young and old there, buoyed by their own special corner of Singapore.

Dr Cheong, 55, who has been HDB's chief executive since 2010 after six years as chief of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, is bent on building HDB towns for the future where residents can truly call their houses 'homes'.

She shared all this with The Straits Times last Friday, ahead of this year's World Cities Summit, which will run from July 1 to July 4.

'In the end,' she says, 'what really makes a town is how its residents respond to it. I can design a green town but if no one in it switches off the lights, we can't do anything.'

In a world where people are increasingly harried and distant from one another, she knows only too well how tall an order it is for HDB dwellers to think and act in ways that are considerate of others and the environment.

Certainly, she notes, HDB can help shape better behaviour by designing towns that are calming and chock-full of conveniences, but it is really up to those who live in them to reach out to their neighbours to foster a greater sense of community.

Likening the relationship between a city and its dwellers to a love story, she says: 'The city needs to love its people by giving us spaces to build up memories, and build homes for us and places for work. And the people need to love it back - even with all its imperfections - because a city is about its people too.'

It does not even take that much to give back to one's community, she adds. 'It's simple things like 'Do we litter?' and 'Can we smile when we meet our neighbours in the corridor?''

Says Dr Cheong, who has a PhD in architecture from Australia's University of Newcastle: 'It's not about building buildings; it's about creating homes - and environmentally friendly ones at that.'

To do this, she now has HDB focusing on designing towns with distinctive identities so that their residents can have pride of place, harnessing the latest innovations so that residents find it almost effortless to recycle and reduce their use of water and electricity, and carving out more pavilions, plazas and promenades to encourage everyone to mingle more meaningfully.

She and her team are trying to do all this over the next five to 10 years, even as HDB is on its biggest building drive in the past 20 years, churning out 25,000 public flats a year to satisfy snaking queues of aspiring home owners at a pace that is rattling the labour-strapped construction industry here to its foundations.

'The exciting thing about HDB,' she says, 'is that it is not only a master planner, but also a master developer. This means we can make what we plan happen.'

So she is pushing ahead with the hardware needed to improve the quality of life for HDB dwellers in a sustainable way.

Noting that the 52-year-old HDB has expanded well beyond its original brief to provide affordable housing for all Singaporeans, she says it is now working even more closely with private developers and innovators to match the accelerating aspirations of largely middle-class Singaporeans.

In all this, she is firm on the need for the HDB to continue partnering the private sector for even higher quality designs and construction, but she is equally firm that the HDB must have the last word on suitable design. 'We still have to set and drive the vision because developers will build only what you ask them to build for you.'

Amid all this, she is trying to 'weave the green' into the concrete jungle by incorporating hanging gardens, eco-decks and rooftop terraces a la the skyparks of HDB's signal development, Pinnacle@Duxton. She hopes these will encourage the return of birds and plants to HDB neighbourhoods.

Suggest to her that many urban dwellers today consider living close to nature a nuisance and she says: 'It's true. A gentleman once said to me, 'Can you make sure there are no snakes, squirrels or monkeys around here?' And my point to him was, 'They were here first.''

All this is in keeping with her dreams since her days as a planner in the early 1980s that Singapore should capitalise on its chief assets or, as she puts it, make the most of 'the blue of the sea and the green of the tropics'.

That milieu is certainly palpable in Punggol - where the first waterfront HDB flats have been built, keeping alive the memory of the former fishing village. Indeed, HDB has designated this budding north-eastern precinct as Singapore's first eco-town.

Besides installing solar panels on the rooftops of HDB blocks to absorb the sun's energy to light their corridors, there are also ongoing experiments there to store kinetic energy from the up-down motion of lifts - also to light corridors - and save the water used in hand-washing to flush toilets.

Come September, 10 families at Block 109C, Edgedale Plains, will use a smartphone app developed by Panasonic to monitor in real time how much energy their air-conditioners are guzzling.

If all these innovations are a hit with residents, Dr Cheong says the HDB will roll them out to future towns, including Bidadari and Tengah.

The HDB has not forgotten its older estates; indeed, the first HDB estate, Dawson in Queenstown, is undergoing a swish makeover (see box). By 2015, it will have two 40-storey blocks called Skyville@Dawson and SkyTerrace @Dawson, which will have a total of 1,718 flats.

And over at Jurong East, the HDB is now trying out a pneumatic waste management system to suck all household waste to a single collection point to rid the estate of smelly mornings. If it is a hit there, the board will roll the system out to other estates too.

Then, for the second time during the interview, Dr Cheong says with relish: 'It's all very exciting. It's just that I can't do it tomorrow. But we're beginning to see all of it shape up and I'm a lot more positive and encouraged because I'm seeing people responding to some of our plans.'

suk@sph.com.sg

Leaders who pander

May 19, 2012
 
By David Brooks

THE people who pioneered democracy in Europe and the United States had a low but pretty accurate view of human nature. They knew that if we get the chance, most of us will try to get something for nothing. They knew that people generally prize short-term goodies over long-term prosperity. So, in centuries past, the democratic pioneers built a series of checks to make sure their nations wouldn't be ruined by their own frailties.

The American founders did this by decentralising power. They built checks and balances to frustrate and detain the popular will. They also dispersed power to encourage active citizenship, hoping that as people became more involved in local government, they would develop a sense of restraint and responsibility.

In Europe, by contrast, authority was centralised. Power was held by small coteries of administrators and statesmen, many of whom had attended the same elite academies where they were supposed to learn the art and responsibilities of stewardship.

Under the parliamentary system, voters didn't even get to elect their leaders directly. They voted for parties, and party elders selected the ones who would actually form the government, often through secret means.

Although the forms were different, the democracies in Europe and the US were based on a similar carefully balanced view of human nature: People are naturally selfish and need watching. But democratic self-government is possible because we're smart enough to design structures to police that selfishness.

James Madison put it well: 'As there is a degree of depravity in mankind, which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.'

But, over the years, this balanced wisdom was lost. Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will. Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims. Democratic politicians adopt the mindset of marketing executives. Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right.

Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs. Like any normal set of human beings, they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay.

The consequences of this shift are now obvious. In Europe and America, governments have made promises they can't afford to fulfil. At the same time, the decision-making machinery is breaking down. US and European capitals still have the structures inherited from the past but without the self-restraining ethos that made them function.

The US decentralised system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks when it tries to impose self- restraint.

The Obama campaign issues its famous 'Julia' ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle. The Citizens United case gives well-financed interests tremendous power to preserve or acquire tax breaks and regulatory deals. US senior citizens receive health benefits that cost many times more than the contributions they put into the system.

In Europe, workers want great lifestyles without long work hours. They want dynamic capitalism but also personal security. European welfare states go broke trying to deliver these impossibilities. The European ruling classes once had their power checked through daily contact with the tumble of national politics.

But now those ruling classes have built a technocratic apparatus, the European Union, operating far above popular scrutiny. Decisions that reshape the destinies of families and nations are being made at some mysterious, transnational level. Few Europeans can tell who is making decisions or who is to blame if they go wrong, so, of course, they feel powerless and distrustful.

Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves. Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder would not be restraining theirs.

This is one of the reasons why Europe and the US are facing debt crises and political dysfunction at the same time. People used to believe that human depravity was self-evident and democratic self-government was fragile. Now they think depravity is nonexistent and they take self-government for granted.

Neither the US nor the European model will work again until we rediscover and acknowledge our own natural weaknesses and learn to police rather than lionise our impulses.

NEW YORK TIMES