The Trampoline Government
The role of the government is to provide a trampoline, not a safety net.
The role of the government is to provide a trampoline, not a safety net. Now the Senior Minister of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam was serving as the Deputy Prime Minister when he introduced the notion in an interview with BBC’s Sackur.
The discussion of social safety nets frequently gets the spotlight in Singaporean politics. However, this notion was intentional to counter the common understanding of the concept. While the notion has been criticized for its shortsightedness regarding the falling back of citizens, as in this Business Times article, it gets the point across. The government is not meant to simply catch you if you fall, but to propel you back into fulfilling your purpose within society.
Despite its simplicity, the notion provides a profound alternative Asian paradigm to compete with the Chinese. The school of legalism, of which Shang Yang is a prominent figure, has been the most influential with the path China is drawing for itself out of the Century of Disgrace, as Cher Yi Tan describes in his article on the Chinese paradigm.
The sense of the collective, of a national responsibility felt by the individual is not absent in Chinese culture. However, Singaporean governance seems more affected by Confucian philosophy. The act of propelling its constituents is built on increasing the trust in the individual, and delegating greater responsibility of fulfilling social functions to him, in alignment with his awareness of this function.
An example of this comes from a Eurasian nation. Turkey’s laws force employers to provide childcare facilities for the parents they employ. However, many prefer to pay the fines rather than pay for childcare, as the article by Al Monitor notes. The COVID-19 crisis has reminded us that it takes a village to raise a child, as the Arab News article phrases it.
Grandparents play a particularly influential role in the development of the child in that village, as recent cultural studies highlight, and UNICEF emphasizes. The Turkish government seemed to solve a conundrum by providing salaries for grandparents caring for their grandchildren, following a legislation passed a few years ago.
The law has been received with mixed reactions, from an easy solution not everyone is happy with, to the law world grannies have been waiting for. A liberal argument might describe this fashion of tackling a problem as redundant or circular. Why raise childcare “taxes” or “fines”, and pay grandparents to care for their grandchildren? Couldn’t more profitable businesses and higher-wages, in other terms, money more freely floating in a neoliberal economy, do the trick of children better supporting their parents whom are caring for the grandchildren?
The grannies law symbolizes the role of a government in fortifying existing social dynamics. This is the trampoline government. Governance is not about allowing all to stride their path, leaving pre-existing structures to do all the heavy lifting, and carry the burden of failed social dynamics. This is what founding a nation on basis of continuously gutting the government yields, leaving caregiving grandparents to be associated with tragedy.
Neither is the government meant to simply watch us go on with our lives, nor is it meant to predicate the details of what must be done. It is meant to provide us with the stability we need to sustain our lives and purpose-driven endeavors.
This aspect of stability could be misleading. I have mentioned previously that the government leads, and sets a vision, and now I am saying it should provide stability. This is not to say it must keep things still, but lead us through a quasi-steady process — a process of change that is gradual enough for us to adapt, minimizing resistance. After all, rapid growth is a destabilizing force, as this journal article from the 60s conjectures.
This could not take place within a fixed image of what a government should do. In discussing modelling the economy over the lattice, I have pointed out to the problem of over-structuring — when systems in place become too rigid that they fail to fulfill their purpose.
The same is true with the government. In fact, the lattice representation is meant to allow us to observe the coupled dynamics underlying aspects of our societies typically categorized under separate fields, so that we, humans — where all this complexity converges — truly develop.
This is to say the way we define the public and private sphere right now is only possible with the explicit definition of their roles. When we tell businesses they must be purpose-driven, not profit-driven, we are inflicting an identity crisis upon them. What does it mean to be a business if it were not to make profit? On the other hand, should public utilities make profit?
An Indianman, an Englishman — notice the discrimination in our language which considers the first as a misspelled phrase, but not the second — and I walk into a canteen in Shanghai. “Metros are exorbitantly expensive to build, always run in the negative, and never break even. Buses are the perfect form of mass transit, if they run frequent enough,” I proclaim over lunch in the city with one of the world’s best metro systems.
One of my friends pointed out that public transit is not meant to make profit. In the line of thought I have developed over the past articles, I have argued that neither should businesses. Business should exist to fulfill a purpose. People should start or join businesses to fulfill a purpose — even if it were giving their family a decent life with integrity.
A business is thus set up to sustain the process of fulfilling that purpose, where sustaining includes improving, developing, researching and innovating … Likewise is the case with public institutions. The difference then lies in who gets to indicate these purpose(s) and update them.
We have, thus, unified the realm of public and private organizations. A purpose which drives you personally creates a business. An industry need creates alliances and standard committees. A purpose which aligns a nation drives a government. What is “unquestionable” — within the age of a nation — becomes constitution.
Within this framework, could you imagine e-mail servers arising from the realm of business as a public utility? If your imagination has lost its elasticity, try to recall the last time your city council intervened to save the neighborhood from disturbing architecture. I have introduced the notion of purpose to further facilitate the description of the essence of public and private organizations in a single realm. It, nevertheless, deserves to be further explored in a separate post, along with the question of representation.
