Singapore Politics

IT IS a proud boast of Singapore that this very small but immensely wealthy city-state is the least corrupt and best place to do business in the world. And a chief reason for that, at least according to the politicians, is that they themselves are by some way the highest-paid elected officials in the world. Why would a minister bother with corruption, so the argument goes, when he can take home S$1.6m ($1.3m) a year for just keeping on the straight and narrow?

Singapore politics: Falling on their wallets | The Economist

It pays to be a politician in Singapore. Compare this with the US President $400,000 salary. After some public anger the salaries of government official in Singapore were lowered, but still higher than most places. Is this the secret recipe for low corruption? That is the debate.

Not So Great?

His central message, which has remained the same through global booms and recessions, is admirably humdrum. He seeks to describe, in detail, how great bosses run their companies. After decades of minute observation, he concludes that hard work and perseverance matter more than genius. His heroes are self-effacing company men who spend years patiently building their organisations, rather than self-promoting egomaniacs who leap from fad to fad and firm to firm. In essence, Mr Collins is repackaging the universal message of self-help literature. Everybody can be successful, he argues, so long as they stick to a set of demanding but not impossible rules. For most company men and women, few of whom are geniuses, this is heartening news.

Schumpeter: Built to last | The Economist

Yet it seems the argument is not so convincing..

Mr Collins’s love of vanilla virtues is as refreshing as a bowl of ice
cream. Other gurus who encourage companies to tear themselves apart in
the name of “transformation” have caused terrible harm. Few companies
have suffered much from trying to be more methodical. Yet it is hard to
read Mr Collins’s latest work without feeling doubts. Are his
conclusions as reliable as he implies? Some of the companies that he has
celebrated over the years—Hewlett Packard and Motorola in “Built to
Last” and Circuit City and Fannie Mae in “Good to Great”—have fallen
from grace. Circuit City, an electronics retailer, went bust. Fannie
Mae, a mortgage giant backed by the American government, is worse than
bust, having burned up tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ cash.
Mr Collins is allergic to egomaniacs, but how else can you describe the
late Steve Jobs, perhaps the most successful businessman of his era?

Religion and Economics

AS PROTESTANT Europe, in its own eyes virtuous and thrifty, wrestles with the debt problems of the continent’s Catholic and Orthodox countries, the idea that religious affiliation may influence the way people save, work and spend is more appealing than ever. The toppling of Arab tyrants has lent urgency to a similar enquiry: do Islam and Islamism permit the legal and social conditions that make for prosperity?

Religion and economics: Holy relevance | The Economist

 

Does religion have influence on Economics? Probably less than it seems.

Contemplating Greece’s economic woes, it is easy to dream up some theory that connects Orthodox Christianity (and its comparatively charitable attitude to human weakness) with corruption or cronyism. Orthodoxy has a less pessimistic view of “original sin” than the Christian West—and its prayers for the dead emphasise “no man lives who does not sin”. Does that imply winking at misdeeds? Possibly—but then try explaining why Greek-Americans, who are at least as devout as their motherland kin, do so very well in business, education and public service. The plausible reason lies in America’s institutions which make it easier to prosper in an honest way.

Farewell Andy Rooney

"I try to look nice. I comb my hair, I tie my tie, I put on a jacket, but I draw the line when it comes to trimming my eyebrows. You work with what you got." -- from an essay on his eyebrows, Nov. 24, 1996

"We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers. More college graduates ought to become plumbers or electricians, then go home at night and read Shakespeare." -- from an essay on finding a good job, March 21, 2010

"We didn't shock them, and we didn't awe them in Baghdad. The phrase makes us look like foolish braggarts. The president ought to fire whoever wrote that for him." -- on the start of the war in Iraq in 2003

Great lines from "60 Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney - CNN.com

Great lines from Andy Rooney the commentator on CBS's show 60 Minutes. He passed away ages 92.

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

www.wahaby.com

Energy Miracle

At the influential TED conference last year, Bill Gates declared that if he were allowed one wish to improve humanity’s lot over the next 50 years, he would choose an “energy miracle”: a new technology that produced energy at half the price of coal with no carbon dioxide emissions. He explained that he’d rather have this wish than a new vaccine or medicine or even choose the next several American presidents. To help understand the reasoning behind Gates’s thinking, one should read Daniel Yergin’s intelligent new opus, “The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.”

The Quest — By Daniel Yergin — Book Review - NYTimes.com

Even though the abundance of fossil fuels is finite, it will continue to be available in the foreseeable future. However other risks of fossil fuels remain.

Unless we shift our ways. Burning fossil fuels has a cost — perhaps an
unbearable one. We now have a mountain of evidence that the 30 billion
tons of carbon dioxide that humans pump into the atmosphere every year
are changing the earth’s climate in ways that will have negative effects
for most people.

And currently the alternative energy sources do not fit the bill. Solar, wind, even nuclear all have their issues. The need for new technology in energy is at the forefront like never before.

The reason Bill Gates wishes for a technology that creates energy at
half the price of coal with no carbon dioxide emissions is that he wants
a technology so compelling that it is adopted by poor countries as well
as rich ones. Coal is plentiful worldwide, and unless the new
technology is much cheaper, China and India will never adopt it. And if
these two countries — which together are building four coal-fired power
plants a week — don’t get off coal, nothing that happens in the West
matters, since the levels of carbon dioxide they will pump into the
atmosphere will be well above the danger mark. Half the price of coal
and no carbon: That’s a tall order, which is why Gates is looking for a
miracle. But what he means is a technological miracle of the kind that
happens from time to time. The steam engine, the automobile, the
computer, the Internet are all miracles. We need something on that order
in energy — and fast.

East and West

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

If It Feels Right - NYTimes.com

While the author laments the disappearance of the group as a moral unit in favor of individualism in the West, there still too much of it in the East. While the individual freedom prevails in the West, this same freedom is curtailed in the East. Neither condition is ideal. A happy middle of personal freedom and morality will hopefully emerge one day East or West.