2/10/2008

Indigenous population growth

We are getting 37,000 new births last year, slightly better than the year before but still not good enough. It is still not enough to replace the attrition rate. We need more babies. Go forth and multiply. It is easier said than done. How much does it take to bring up a child to adulthood? $250k, $500k? We have many pro family policies to encourage parents to have more children. The question is that how many can afford to bring up children to go through our expensive web of life? Everything costs money and the cost is going up very quickly. It will not come down. Having more children is easy. But how many will be able to reach a level of comfort, by paying through the education system and quality of living, to say that life is worth living? How many will end up struggling for an existence, a life not worth living? Come to think of it, it is better to bring in the richer foreigners to supplement our population target than to encourage the indigenous hardlanders to produce more babies and to end up living in drudgery.

1 comment:

  1. Singapore is a nation of immigrants and their descendants.

    There can never be a case of "indigenous" Singaporeans because through out history many different tribes occupied the island.

    The current influx of "foreigners" is characteristic in S'pore history. Without immigration and emigration, S'pore would not be what it is today.

    So you can stop worrying. There is only one race — the human race. It doesn't matter who or what "type" of human being occupies Singapore. Society is no a zero-sum game. It is a positive sum game — if left to its own mechanism of spontaneous order and not fucked-around with by central govt planning or political nonsense.

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