Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Pace of globalisation ‘will put social contract under pressure’: PM Lee

SINGAPORE — The pace of the global economic transformation will put the social contract in developed countries — including Singapore — under pressure. And governments have to deal with the challenge of “preparing young people to cope with the future world which we are not quite able to define yet”, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an interview with Time magazine published yesterday.

TODAY file photo

TODAY file photo

Follow TODAY on WhatsApp

SINGAPORE — The pace of the global economic transformation will put the social contract in developed countries — including Singapore — under pressure. And governments have to deal with the challenge of “preparing young people to cope with the future world which we are not quite able to define yet”, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in an interview with Time magazine published yesterday.

While the Government can help in various ways — training, transition assistance and social support for the unemployed — it cannot stop the change from happening, Mr Lee noted. “It is going to put the social contract under pressure. People have to feel that the Government is on their side and is helping them to cope,” he said.

He added: “It is also a challenge helping people who are already in the work force. They have a career, they have a family, they have obligations. And now they are not sure whether they can continue in the same job until they retire. And if they can’t, how can we help them? You cannot solve it by saying ‘keep out the problem, stop the change, and therefore I carry on doing what I used to do’. Even General Motors could not survive that way.”

Mr Lee noted that unemployment in Singapore is “very low by international standards”. However, “it can go up and it is going to go up even for the professionals”.

“Because blue-collars, in a way, are an easier problem to solve. The numbers are bigger but we can train them on courses for three months or six months while they learn new skills,” he said. “Bank managers — that is harder. And that is coming. You can see it beginning already.”

In the wide-ranging interview with Time editor-at-large Ian Bremmer, Mr Lee also spoke about the impact of technology and the Internet. “When the Internet came, people thought it was marvellous. Now, everybody can speak. But the actual result is to the extent that everybody can speak, you get a lot of strange stuff on the Internet,” he said.

Citing how people go online to access half-a-dozen major services — such as Google, Facebook and news sites — as well as entertainment and porn, Mr Lee said: “That is about it. It is not as if there a million different masterpieces in a library and you explore a new treasure every day. It did not turn out like that. Human societies are not like that.”

Noting that Singaporeans are “probably as facile as anybody in the world (at) using IT, except maybe for the Koreans”, Mr Lee said Singapore had made progress in terms of getting organisations to develop and deploy IT solutions. “As for being swift-footed, like a Silicon Valley company would be, I think we have a long way to go, and I do not know how far we can, how closely we can approximate a Silicon Valley firm. In the end, we are a country and we have to carry everybody along. In Silicon Valley, if you are a firm, I choose my partners, I choose my team and I need not be typical of the country.”

Referring to what Mr Bremmer described as “libertarians and billionaires” in Silicon Valley, Mr Lee said: “They live in a bubble. It is marvellous, you create your own environment, you have your couches, ice-creams, massages, celebrity chefs on the lunch canteen menu.

“But the world is not like that. When you are in a country, you have to take advantage of that efficiency, creativity and verve. But at the same time, you have to make the whole country work, everyone must feel that they belong and that this is theirs. Those are not strange guys from the outer space or worse, somebody who intruded in our lives and discombobulated our community. In San Francisco, the pushback against even the little white vans that go around collecting people to go to Silicon Valley is quite high.”

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.