Erosion of Social Cohesion and Low Birth Rates

Three news stories caught my attention on Monday:

1. ST quoted Workers' Party chairman Sylvia Lim as saying that there has been a "palpable sense of loss of identity" amongst Singaporeans, and that she had some Singaporeans telling her that they felt better treated as PRs in other countries than as citizens in their homeland.
2. ST reported an increase in the number of magistrate's complaints being filed by Singaporeans to resolve disputes.
3. Channel NewsAsia reported that Singapore's fertility rate has hit a new low of 1.16 in 2010.

To my mind, these three phenomena are all related and are due to the stress and alienation experienced by Singaporeans arising from having to bear the brunt of the costs of the government's single-minded pursuit of economic growth and its belief in the quack theory known as 'trickle-down economics'.

The relentless focus on economic growth has brought about a host of 'supporting' social-engineering policies that have caused a feeling of rootlessness amongst the people, perhaps akin to what Durkheim described as anomie. This then manifests itself in the atomisation of social entities and frayed relationships, resulting in phenomena such as neighbours suing one another in court. The 'normlessness' has also resulted in the erosion of moral values and the rise of various social ills. The following quotation from the Analects of Confucius is perhaps an apt description of our social situation:

子曰、道之以政、齐之以刑、民免而无耻。 道之以德、齐之以礼、有耻且格。- 《论语》为政篇

The loss of identity also shows up as a loss of hope and faith in the country and its system, resulting in couples not willing to procreate and have children, since the common belief is that life will get harder in future and some have doubts about the long-run viability of the country. In this regard, we can again draw on the wisdom of the Analects:

子贡问政。子曰足食、足兵、民信之矣。子贡 曰、必不得已而去、于斯三者何先。曰、去兵。子贡曰、必不得已而去、于 斯二者何先。曰、去食、自古皆有死、民无信不立。 - 《论语》颜渊篇

As we can see from the above passage, Confucius emphasised the centrality of hope in the country and faith in the government as a key determinant in the survivability of a country. Perhaps our new generation of policy makers would do well to revisit the teachings of the Analects in trying to solve the demographic problem that Singapore is facing, since the current gamut of economic incentives is obviously not able to reverse the decline in birth rates. In some sense, the lack of babies is a kind of existential crisis for the country, but we are trying to fix the problem using economic tools. That, to my mind, is a wrong diagnosis of the problem.