The Invisible Hand has our society by the balls

And it is squeezing.

Two things conspired to make me sit up and take notice today.

The first was the announcement by the Singapore National Employers' Federation that it opposes legislation to extend maternity/paternity leave.

The second, and arguably more ominous, was a meeting I had yesterday.

But let's get to the first thing first. SNEF claims that extending maternity/paternity leave would be Detrimental to Business Operations, and of course we can't have that, can we? In place of that, they propose cash incentives for employers who pursue family-friendly policies, and nothing to prevent them from being family-UNfriendly. This is typical short-sighted, self-centred business thinking. Hello? If the next generation grows up speaking Tagalog or Bahasa Indonesia as a first language, your pool of suitable employees in future is going to run dry! And that's assuming that the generation raised by proxy doesn't turn out cripplingly maladjusted, which is by no means a sure bet. Of course, nobody bothers to think that far ahead.

SNEF further claims that extending mandatory leave would create a "sense of entitlement". Let me set this straight. A sense of entitlement is a good thing if you are, in fact, entitled to something. Parents are entitled to spend time with their children; it's part of their responsibility to society, and arguably more important, in the long run, than their responsibility to their employers. Even more so, children are entitled to spend time with their parents. The fact that parents and children do not have a sense of entitlement is, in and of itself, a cause for concern, and for placing said employers under careful scrutiny.

So what happens to the kids when Daddy and Mummy are at work and have no time for them? The meeting answers that question. It was held with some nice people who are indirectly connected to the childcare industry (those 2 words, put together, already sound ominous). During this meeting, I realized what a lot of my readers probably already know: there exists, in this country, a large population of infants aged 2 to 12 months who are being taken care of during the day - not by their parents, not by grandparents or relatives, not even by a maid. These infants are placed in daycare centres staffed by perfect strangers, for most of the day, during a period of their lives when they are first learning to recognize their parents and to develop anxiety when Mummy or Daddy isn't around. These centres are encouraged, but not required, to assign the same caregiver to the infant repeatedly, meaning that your child could be tended to not just by one nurse but a succession of strangers.[1] 

Folks, if this doesn't present a clear risk of long-term psychological damage, then I am Barack Hussein Obama.

So why do we persist with this programme that endangers our society's future? One word: productivity. Short-term productivity has replaced long-term sustainability, since the latter is difficult to measure by the metrics that civil servants[2] and CEOs seem so fond of. Equally, if 2 out of every hundred infants turn out to be damaged as a result, they probably consider that acceptable losses.

Thus the invisible hand. Market forces are pushing parents to work like dogs so their kids have access to all the right programmes, all the right schools. Market forces also mandate, through the same mechanism, that those same kids are entering those programmes with pre-formed insecurities, trauma and possibly even anger. Seen in this light, the case of Jonathan Wong the scholar-turned-statutory-rapist is not an aberration, but a logical consequence of our society's current direction. (As an aside, folks, it also implies that you ought to be very wary of intelligent, unattached young[3] men in your church choir.)

In short, the invisible hand of market forces is impairing our society's ability to reproduce psychologically healthy individuals. It is, as literally as possible, squeezing our society's balls[4]. I say we've become all too cozy with that invisible hand. And when even the NTUC, traditional bedfellow of Singapore employers, recognizes that something is very wrong with the way they operate, I say we ought to sit up and notice the problem - even if, like some experts, we think that maternity or paternity leave is not the solution.

[1] I have no objections to child-care centres per se. They keep the problem from having worse effects. However, ultimately they can only treat the symptoms and not the cause.

[2] It sometimes seems to me as though some civil servants suffer from a case of Stockholm syndrome. Whilst chafing and suffering under the rule of the God Almighty KPIs, they develop a kind of grudging affection for them, and would be helpless without them.

[3] Or not-so-young, as the case may be.

[4] I apologize to my female readers for not providing them with an appropriately gendered analogy, on account of having a minimal acquaintance with the female anatomy.