[i]The differences suggest that younger people are working harder, getting inadequate wages and have less time with family or to enjoy. Perhaps this accounts for their reluctance to marry and raise a family.[/i]

hello friend
a good moanin to you
how to get married?
not relucant
olden days
papa salary can help the son to get married
(durin that era it was their ^GRANDCHILD^ shotgun weddin)
today?
have you check the price of a decent hdb flat/furniture/weddin dinner?
do you have $50,000 in readyca$h?
if not
forget bout gettin married
unless
you want it to be a voideck weddin lark….

Great survey! I’m only concerned about the low sample size of 115 respondents, which may not give an accurate picture of the general population. Perhaps this poll should be kept going for a longer time to get more data.

Mr Tan,

I suspect S’poreans don’t dislike National Service (NS) per se. We dislike the concept that permanent residents don’t have to serve NS, but enjoy almost the same public benefits as S’pore citizens. Our ministers are always quick to point out that 2nd generation male PRs have to serve NS, but let’s that’s bullshit. @nd generation PRs can easily evade NS by rennouncing PR status before age 16. By age 16, male PRs would have completed Secondary 4 and ready to enter college in the US or UK…..thus S’pore would be useless to them!!!

What’s more PRs enjoy the same priority as S’pore citizens for Primary 1 Admission!! That’s one BIG stupid policy that has to be changed

“I suspect S’poreans don’t dislike National Service (NS) per se.”

i think you are very wrong in this. =)

Kin Lian, thanks for your efforts in civil issues. I felt proud to be a Singaporean in the 90s. With this current government, I am feeling sick to the bones as a Singaporean.

The reason is that I feel this is a government is not sincere in serving the people. They have raised their own remuneration beyond a reasonable amount compared to the rest of the world leaders. Their justification is weak when compared with leaders of countries with far greater GDP and bigger population. They have shown no accountability like the Mas Selamat case. They have not done much to tackle the rising costs of the last two years, instead they were instrumental in increasing the living costs like ERP (Every time I pass an active ERP gantries during evening time or neigborhood ERP gantries, I am reminded that my vote during the next election is important ) and GST hike. They have led us into a recession ahead of the rest of the world in this financial crisis. They seem to have no solution to stop the exodus of MNCs that they so fervently woo (that is the reason for Casinos in Singapore) in place of support for SMEs. They seem to have resigned to the fate that moving into Services is the solution (maybe it is) but without guidance to the people that we have to lower our expectations as a Service-based economy is not scalable compared to a Manufacturing-based economy. This lack of guidance is very apparent in the huge pay increments that they gave themselves and also the civil servants. Private sector cannot keep up to the remunerations of the Public Sector.

I think it is time for me and fellow Singaporeans to understand the truth and recognise the sorry state that our economy is in before it is too late. Calibrate the people’s expectations. Restructure to have a leaner public sector. Reduce our business costs to slow the exodus of MNCs and to buy time for local enterprises to grow. Truly and sincerely focus on solutions to grow SMEs and entreprenuers (I think there are existing schemes and dreams to help SMEs but the effectiveness is questionable). SMEs contribute 42% of our GDP and they are mostly rooted here in Singapore. MNCs are moving out and some I heard are staying because of penalties from the grants that they have recieved from the government if they shut immediately. Yes we cannot change overnight and we may come of this recession worst of then before but I really urge leaders (PAP or not)to step up to the Challenge and lead us with sincerity to better grounds. I wish this for my children. I am resigned to fighting and surviving this horrendous recession and helping those that I can do the same.

Good ground work by TKL. Keep up the civil consciousness here.

I am one of those who dislike Singapore since the last 2006 GE as we see increasing a distant govt trying very hard to close the ground. By paying themselves millions this is already a deep cut on the morale of the people.

The govt is asking people to retrain and tighten up but they can pay themselves millions even after the recent 15% pay cut. For yr info, our PM pay is still at $3 mil a year after all the necessary adjustment! A Perm Sec like the one that went to PAris to waste tax payer money is worth a million in annual salary at least after all the latest pay adjustment.

Their bonuses can be in the region of few hundred thousand dollars (some up to 6 months of their basic pay per mth) as it is tied to the GDP (they compute by adjusting the bonuses to the GDP growth as if they are the ones working their guts out to solicit for sales in the open market).

Most sit behind the ivory tower and pull the strings when civil servants are the ones that try their best to sort out the policies on the ground.

My take is that the current govt is too pro-business in it;s approach especially the past few years. How they treat the FWs is a growing sign of their affliction to the employers who will help to increase on the GDP.

By treating Singapore as an economy, many people just live to make money and later migrate in their 40s to a nicer country that speaks more of human rights and freedom.

I am one such person and I see more people planning to exit Singapore as not all want to be slave to a country that treat you like a number machine that help contribute to the GDP growth per year.

Something is very wrong in this beautiful (once) country of mine and I am ashamed of it.

Hi Kin Lian, I am grateful for the effort you have made to gather some kind of ‘data’. Although the numbers may be small, I think it is a good indication. It could be worst if more Singaporeans came forward to give their opinion. In a nutshell, Singapore is an elitist society which overly rewarding the brightest and limit ing the ordinary peasants. My family and I decided to leave Singapore as we know, we would become useless after the age of forty. Moreover, my business was ‘eaten up’ by the another competitive government company which undercuts the privately owned enterprise. It is true, that a big group of Singaporeans in our new country, dont give any respect to the Singapore leaders. They enriched themselves and at the same time take no responsibility and talk so big. They ought to learn from Obama and his team and humble themselves otherwise it is a matter of time Singapore will go all the way down. It is really time to have a change in Singapore. A change of government in to replace the present leaders with ones who are wise and humble. Also, there should be equal opportunities for ALL Singaporeans notwithstanding their AGE. Where I am, I can still obtain a scholarship and pursue the study of my choice without any discrimination (esp age). I still can get a job based on my competency skills and experience and not based my age. I would like to emphasize again that Singapore belongs to Singaporeans and NOT THE PAP. So to hell with the present leaders and we ought to vote for new ones who more pragmatic and wise possessing strong compassion for the people of Singapore.

Just a suggestion: graphs would be easier to interpret than figures.

aiyoyo

things so expensive even in gloomy economy,

how to overcome huh?

not sure any good ideas from ELITEs?

aiyoyo

Hi Mr Tan!

I think you’ve got some nice data there! A lot of effort put into gathering input from your avid readers. It would be better if it could be extended to people who do not read you blogs, especially the lower (real low) income group who do not even have the resources to afford a decent computer and internet access, those typically below 20-30k per annum. Which makes me wonder why those before 50k is considered “low income”.

Would this mean that fresh uni graduates, who have a 3.5k monthly salary and a 13th month bonus, would fall under this category of “low income earners” ? How about the _truely_ low incomers?

I respect all the effort you have put into conduct of the survey and the data collection and tabulation process. I’m not going to comment on the reasons why and the socio-political reasons behind the data. Rather, here are some suggestions I think might make the data more impactful.

1. The Likert scaling (used here) may be subject to distortion from several causes. The one possibly more applicable to this is that respondents may avoid using extreme response categories (central tendency bias, where people just pick neutral for the lack of opinion). I’m not certain of the demographics of people who visit your site, whether many have strong opinions or like to sit on the fence, but this can nevertheless be a major problem in many statistical studies. Sometimes a four-point scale is used. This is a forced choice method since the middle option of “neutral” is not available.

2. Statistical significance. p-value wasn’t shown, hence I’m not sure whether a 0.2 point difference is considered statistically significant. For that matter, the test was not mentioned either (t, z, multivariate, etc..). For the benefit of doubt, i’d assume that those tests were done but left out of the tables to prevent cluttering.

3. Multivariate stats analysis and correlation. I suggest that, to make the data more powerful, you could also work on the data to see whether there is statistically significant correlation (and the strength of it) between the variables (such as age and income level at a greater resolution of subdivision) and the response value. Merely commenting base on point difference does not give statistical evidence that a conclusion can be made.

Important take away is that, statistically, a difference in figure doesn’t necessarily imply an underlying difference in response. Whether there truely lies a difference boils down to the model used, the sample size and the power of the test.

Notwithstanding, I still applaud the timely and necessary study that was done! :)

I see nothing surprising from the survey.

Mr Gilbert: “By treating Singapore as an economy” I think your meaning is that we are treated like an economic resource instead of a human being. In economics and policy-making, citizens = workers = economic resources. And they have so far been rather efficient in deploying economic resources. Our economic development and standard of living have been decent.

But that’s their view. We should enjoy ourselves thoroughly, without care for the views of the top.

Hi Dounai (#10)

Can you contact me at kinlian@gmail.com. I will pass you the raw data for the survey. You can help me to use the statistical analysis and to write the report. I am not a statistical expert and will welcome the help from one who is more knowledgeable.

Hi hansolo (#8)

Can you take the figures in my table and prepare the charts for me. You can put the charts in a Word document and mail it to me at kinlian@gmail.com. I have other reports and wish to have help from the experts who are good at preparing nice charts.

I know help from those who are familiar with statistical analysis and chart drawing to the following two reports:

Active citizenship
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcqjz7c8_60dpxrxbgx

Democracy
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcqjz7c8_613kmtb4gj

Please send your completed reports or charts to kinlian@gmail.com

Unfortunately such online – English language surveys will almost never be able to capture the response of many, if not most, non-English speakers / lower-income / elderly. These people form a significant portion of the Singapore population, but are often the “silent majority”.

The young / middle-income / English speaking bias are always there in internet / media surveys. More than just voicing out, it’s time for us to listen to the silent voices.

Greetings Sickening
Thank you for exposing all the same grouses that I share with you about the gehmen since 2006. The gehmen’s handling of the local politics in amplifying the huge false line between the elites and the rest of our society , the ill-timed GST increases, transport fares, almost zero social graces in helping our poor, means testing for medical expenses, etc., etc., have caused my mood to plunge from being proud to be Singaporean to being ashamed of it.
There is however one point which you have glaringly misssed out. This is the astronomical losses in the recent foreign investments by our sovereign funds. The gehmen has squeezed every drop of our money (anything which they consider to be beyond their own definition of affordability) to go to these investment vehicles, only to lose them by the tens of billions in such companies like UBS, Citibank, ABC. Barclays, etc., etc. All my foreign friends are laughing at me for all these shameful losses, and have commented that Singapore always pays a grand premium for all the foreign stocks and shares they have invested in.
These losses dwarf the relatively meagre supplementary funds that the gehmen is now asking the President to release in their budget.

Would like to know if the Straits Times would do a similar survey.

The survey is still ongoing. I now have 168 responses (compared to 115 responses) that were used to compile the above report. I will wait for 200 replies before I close the survey and recompile the results. I suspect that the results will not differ much.

The survey does give a good indication of how the different categories of people (i.e young, old, higher income, lower income) feel about the above indicators. Although the participants are the internet savvy and English educated, I believe that the results do reflect the views of other people in similar age groups and income levels of the non-English educated.

It is the relative ratings that matter, and not the absolute ratings. I was somewhat surprised to read the results for the younger people, which were somewhat unexpected (i.e. they work longer and are not happy about their wages).

The ratings given by the lower income people are expected. They don’t like the wages and high cost of living.

I have conducted a similar survey on how people feel about active citizenship and democracy. I will wait for 50 responses, before compiling the results.

If you wish to participate, you can go to http://www.tankinlian.blogspot.com. Look at the right panel to see the ongoing survey.s

Tan Kin Lian, I really appreciate that you aren’t afraid to standout and fight for what is right and wrong values in Singapore system.

I looking for opportunity to leave this place cause it will be too late after forty!

I am not good at creating charts using Excel. Many people are good skilled in this task, as they create beautiful charts.

Can someone help me? Look at the statistics shown above and present them in charts. Send to me in a Word document. I will use these charts to make better impact.

Hi True Blood Singaporean (#20)

Don’t go. Stay and help to change the system. Encourage more people to come forward.

“Unhappiness about National Service”

The so called leaders cannot simply tell the people go serve and defense spore, ask the young citizen to sacrifice for national service with a cheap labour rate.

Then ministars at same time help themselves with millions of tax payer money…

This is not lead by good example and sacrifice….. where is equality??

Who would want to serve with true spirit and care for the nation??

Ministars all say “We can pull through this recession together”. Sure, it is very easy for them to do so even with their 2o% pay cut because they are paid stratospheric salaries. But they don’t understand that the poor people who are paid not even one-tenth of a peanut cannot pull through like them. With such an enormous gap in pay between the ministars and us how can the ministars understand or feel for the poor people??

Kin Lian,

Jason @14 has a point there. Perhaps high time to reach-out to the ’silent majority’ at the heartland – go door to door is the answer.

You can read the results of other surveys in my blog
http://www.tankinlian.blogspot.com

Surveys on:
Active citizenship
Democracy
Budge 2009
An acfive Parliament

You can search for the surveys using the keyword “Survey”. You can also read the survey results

Sample size too small, so survey is unrepresentative.

A response of 200 out of at least 4 million people is at most 0.005%. Having a sample whose income distribution matches the actual population distribution (assuming we know it) may eliminate bad surveys, but it is not good enough to make representative surveys. Response rate within each income group still too small.

Moreover, there is a sample bias since not all people in the population are equal likely to participate in surveys.

I am not trying to be too critical, but i have to say that having unrepresentative surveys may not be better than not doing survey at all.

We have an efficient public transport system, so it should get high scores.

But the scores are poor. This is probably due to over-crowding, due to the large increase in population. And maybe, the cost is high.

What are the reasons for the low score?

1. A response rate of 200 for a population of more than 4 million is too low to produce a reliable survey.

2. Besides, not all people in each income distribution is equal likely to participate in the survey.

TKL (26)

I didn’t read the poll questions except the analysis above, but is the survey asking respondance to give rating to the Transport system rather than public transport?

I agree with you that our public transport system [MRT & Buses] is pretty good compare to other countries but I could not said that if it refers to overall transport system.

Our roads are over-crowded, too many ERP, Cost to high etc. All these problems are caused by government policies of milking money from the public without planning ahead.

When Govt keep issuing more COE [ low COE price and more motor vehicles] than the road can take, promoting easy credit for car loan (7 to 10 years), then take the easy way to increase ERP charges when road congestion occured. This will definitely creates unhappiness and dissatisfaction because people are
con into believing his affortability to own a car and find out later that the running costs have increase.

Moreover, he find that he cannot sell the car to reduce his expenses because the realisable value of his car is not able to redeem his loan.

Many SinKaporean migranted to the West e.g UK, Australia, New Zealand and USA basically to seek educational opportyunities and after graduation stayed on as wages and living standard are much better. Keeping wages low is not a long term solution and limiting the educational opportunity limited is self defeating. It is well known that the gahment regarded the most importance resource SinKapore possess is Human resources and yet it is not doing enough. With the large reserve the country possesed it could easily used it to provide more affordable education for SinKaporean. It will definitely make life more livable for many families. The rate SinKapore is losing its educated population is runing into many thosand a year. The right policy for any gahment is make it more attractice for SinKaporean to return home. One wonder. what the PAP regime is up to? Replacing local born with import to make up the number is a short sighted policy as everyone know SinKaporean character is unique because of the way we were brough up and educated. The SinKapore as we know it will never be the same again in say 10 year from now. One just hoped it changed for the better.