We are all very familiar with so many top surgeons, lawyers and CEOs joining politics and working in a field that their professionally trained skills and expertise were of no specific relevance. We are depriving the industries and people of these talents and putting them in areas that they may not perform at the best of their talents. It is also a great loss of investments in acquiring their skills and expertise. Training someone to reach the peak of their profession only to pull them out to do something that they are not trained to do but assumed to be equally experts.
The other area of increasing concern is to train graduates, with hundreds of thousands being spent in their education, to become taxi drivers. Not that driving taxis is a bad profession. It is just using over qualified people to do a much simpler job. It is definitely a misallocation of talents and resources. The same principle applies to highly qualified graduates not being employed to perform the jobs that they are trained and equipped to do.
The third area is the civil service. Many of our top talents, on paper, are in the civil service. Could they be deployed in more productive areas in the private sector? Agree that successful entrepreneurs do not need academic excellence. But there are many advantages of having academically excellent talents in many fields in the industry that required serious technical knowledge that some entrepreneurs are not armed with.
Are we allocating our precious little super talent pools efficiently?
Central planning of "talent allocation" is a recipe for failure.
ReplyDeleteThe best thing for Singapore is to keep the borders open and allow foreigners to come in and "try".
Spontaneous order, and usually a very robust order evolves out of chaos. Singapore needs to boil with chaos for a decade or so more...let the weak die off or if they have the gumption -- change and "get with the program".
Creative destruction is a necessary process of culling the unnecessary and allowing the best to flourish and raise everything up as the best grow and spread their influence.
In other words, allow the market to allocate resources, including "talent" (which it already does, wonderfully)
Let the person finds his/her own way to live.
ReplyDeleteBe it living as one chooses or to live as others want him/her to live.
No one has the right to stop a talent wishing to live as a hermit or a spiritual being. Nor can anyone accuse them of wasting their talents.
On the other hand, self claimed talents may not be recognized or accepted as talents. Not surprising that many such talents are just great talkers, some sweet, some intimidating and some downright cons and cheats.
one is talented only if PAPPPY says so.
ReplyDeleteThe object of the Party Against People is to monopolize & keep talented Singaporeans away from Opposition political parties.
ReplyDeleteThis is done via the scholarship system and civil service fast track.
Look at CSM and the Workers' Party.
See what can happen when a talented Singaporean is allowed to think for himself.
Sun Yat-sen was a qualified medical doctor. He gave up medical practice to be revolutionist to save whole population of old China instead of just hundreds or thousands or patients.
ReplyDeleteNg Eng Heng did the same in order to save the Singapore people from ???
It does not matter what you are trained as but it in important that you have lived to save the people.
There are always exception and Sun Yat Sen was an exceptional leader. How many leaders can hold a candle to him?
ReplyDeleteYes, there is nothing wrong with professionals trained in different professions to be in politics. With out dearth of professional talents, and if we consciously picked the best of every profession to go into politics as a policy, then many talents would be wasted in politics as their hearts are not in politics. They will be daily lamenting how much more they could make in their previous profession or how much lesser they are making now and complaining about sacrifices they made.
Sun Yat Sen chose to go into politics. There was a dire national cause, a mission to save a country and millions of people. He was not invited to tea and have to tell people he needed some time to think about it. And later reluctantly accepted and claimed to have sacrificed so much for not making money as a doctor.
We need people with heads screwed on properly to be in Politics, thats why we will always need such people. In Politics, and in Civil service.
ReplyDeletePolitics is policy making for the masses, not everyone is suitable, certainly not those who propose half-baked solutions, philanderers and people who tikam tikam suggestions all the time hoping one will hit jackpot.
Revolutionary liked Sun Yat Yen are born or response to the need of ones' nation.
ReplyDeleteThey are usually thinkers who are able to see the danger his nation is in. They know that it is imperative that they act to save the people and the country. Uppermost in their minds are the well-being of the nation and the people. Money and glory are not their priority.
Allowing foreigners to invade ones' country legally is UNIQUELY SIN. Which other nation on Earth allows it? Selling away ones' country is a treacherous act only traitors do, that is why no leader in any country does it. Many European Countries and Japan are even not interested in foreign talents. They abhor corruption of their indigenous culture.
As for Sin, if not for the talents, will Singapore be where it is today? Or as some like to claim, Sin is the work and credit of one man?
Is it misallocation of talents OR THE MISUSE OF TALENTS OR PEOPLE USING THEIR TALENTS IN THE WRONG PLACES???
patriot