When is enough Enough?

Apparently, it never is. Witness the recent (and ongoing) financial crisis brought about by the collapse of complex financial instruments lobbied for and created by the finance industry with the complicity and facilitation by their political proxies. The greed of the people running these firms knew no limits. Enough was never in their vocabulary. And the world is suffering for it.

Way back when Singapore was just formed, our then leaders, former Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and his colleagues took the less conventional route when formulating their policies. The Tunku did not. The result was the Singapore of maybe 15 to 20 years or so ago, one that we can justifiably call a miracle.

Today, a new generation of leaders have taken over the reins in Singapore. Of the pioneering batch of leaders, only Mr Lee Kuan Yew is still around. But he has acknowledged in public that he no longer has the energy to 'change the world'.

These new leaders have grown up in an environment where continued economic growth and development are the keys to progress and prosperity. But the world has changed. The old paradigm will not work anymore. Back then, the world population was at most two billion. Today it is seven billion and growing. Most of the resources needed for economic growth were still in the ground then. Oil was plentiful and easily obtainable. Today, we have incidents like the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico where we are trying to drill for oil through several kilometers of ocean and seabed. The low hanging fruit of resources are no more. These new leaders find themselves unable to think outside of the growth and development box.

I used to fantasise if you will, about Singapore buying or getting a long term lease on the Indonesian islands of Batam, Bintan and Karimun to alleviate our land scarcity. But not anymore. More land will not solve our problems, only delay it. Kicking the can down the road if you will. With the incessant clamour for further growth and development, these islands will in due course also run out of space. So, the solution to our lack of space is NOT more space. The solution is knowing when to say: Enough.

PM Lee's new year's day message spoke about our population challenges. Unfortunately, I believe by challenge, he means how to INCREASE our population rather than reducing it. If so, then it would be obvious that he has yet to realise that increasing our population is a dead end strategy. Or worse, he knows it is a dead end, but still persists in going ahead with it. It would be good if he can give us a firm figure as to what he considers would be the optimal population size for Singapore and WHY. Just saying it needs to INCREASE or get BIGGER is just fuzzy thinking as it obviously cannot increase without limit.

We will hit a resource and space constraint wall one day if we maintain the present policies of growth and development. Not if, WILL. What then? Will the government of the day then, having no alternative then chart another path? Not that they have a choice, they will have to by then. The question today is why not chart that path NOW instead of waiting until we have destroyed every last bit of our environment, running out of options and then having to do it anyway? Only by then, it would have become an even bigger problem. Just like the Eurozone and the US trying to solve their current debt problems with even MORE debt. How it that working out for them?

Like a cancerous tumour that grows and spreads (because it is the only thing it knows how to do) until it finally kills its host, economic policies that depend on continuous growth will end up destroying the countries having such policies. On a finite planet, perpetual growth is not possible. Absent discovery of an alien planet inhabited by backward blue skinned natives whose resources we can pillage, the only alternative is war among ourselves. War for the victors will clear all debts, gain access to remaining resources and eliminate excess demand (from too large a population). The future is bleak and only because we (like the lemmings) could not control ourselves when times were good to say: Enough.

Growth and development IS the conventional route in today's environment. To continue to chart our future in this way would be the present day equivalent of following the Tunku's lead. This way will not and cannot lead to success. The new paradigm is survivability and the policies that we need are those that emphasize sustainability, NOT growth.

Have our present leaders realised this? Or will they continue to feed us stories of the need for continued growth, letting in more immigrants if necessary (the equivalent of putting out a fire by adding more fuel). I guess we will find out in the months ahead of this new year.