Inclusive Prosperity

今日はLSEのPublic Lectureでシンガポール副大統領のTharman Shanmugaratnamの講演を聞いてきました。LSEの卒業生らしいです。

簡単にまとめを書いたのでもしよかったら。

簡単な感想：内容がとても濃かった。自分の言葉で話している印象で、話し方が落ち着いていて非常に分かりやすかった。あとは主張が理論、彼の実践からの学び、信念が上手く組み合わされていて説得力がありました。

あとは参考までにここに彼の2015年当時のインタビューがあり、コアの主張は変わってないので興味ある方はぜひ。

<Convergence>

• Convergence of living standard has been expected over decades especially between developing and developed countries. It is generally measured by productivity level or income level of countries. However, these indicators over decades demonstrate that our expectation is not always the case. 
• For example, China’s productivity used to be 1/25 of that of USA. 30 years ago, however, it is currently 1/4, which is a successful case. On the contrary, India and Latin American countries haven’t been successful in catching up developed countries in these indicators.

<Social Mobility>

• Other important indicator is social mobility, which illustrates rather mobility of social status (e.g. income level, education level, gender, ethnicity, etc) than physical mobility. This has become very low recently.
• For example, it’s not common anymore that income of children surpasses that of parents.
• When social mobility becames low, the identity of ‘we’ that was formed after WW2 is forced to be modified to ‘us’ and ‘them’. We never interact across social status.
• This actually generates elimination, exclusiveness and anti-multi culturalism.

<Technology and Dispersion>

• Although globalism seems the centre issue of exclusiveness/elimination, the impact of technology is getting in-negligible.
• It’s not technology that brings about issues, but how we react. This is usually determined by domestic policies including both national and local levels.
• Frankly speaking, dispersion within countries is generated by domestic policies.
• In order to shrink this dispersion, we need a social democratic model, which required different approach from the conventional way of redistribution. We need ‘regeneration’.

<Focus Points>

• Education: Egalitarian education actually results in in-egalitarian results. Bespoke education will be more in demand for the future. We need of bright professors in universities, of course.
• Innovation and Technology: To adapt yourself to innovative and technological society (or for society to adapt the trend), continuous leaning is critical. Education is not only for young people, rather for everyone (including old people). A problem is how we provide education for everyone. Especially, in the field of technology, practice is more important compared to the conventional education. One idea to put it into practice is community learning.
• Social Partnership: They implement quite special housing scheme. This policy is original to Singapore and focuses on neighbourhood community and mix of ethnicity (have quota for ethnicity). There are more advantages for this policy up until now.
• Trade Openness: It is actually driven from supply side rather than demand side. In order to take advantage of trade openness, we have to keep improving productivity. Collective responsibility makes law being enforced into practice. An essential core is personal and family responsibility, which is a small piece in the society but forms a social market when they’re compounded. We have to contribute to public goods through individual responsibility.

<Other points>

• One of the mechanisms to trigger ‘U.S. Election/Brexit’ is that while benefits from globalisation are well provisioned, its cost is concentrated on only certain places.
• Finance sectors has been overwhelming the economics, but now it has been gradually overtaken by technology sectors. A lot of jobs in the back office of financial sector are being substituted by technology.
• Some African countries are stagnated in the vicious cycle of development, partly sue to abundant natural resource (=resource curse). In order to combat the situation, they should implement inter-generational view so that they plan the use of the resources over generation for the future development. Furthermore, transparent governance should be ensured.
• Friendship and interaction are critical for multi-culturalism.

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