Happiness and Our Population - A gamers view
After 2 weeks of writing my Capstone Project Proposal and dozen of literature reviews, I realize my Ang Mo and critical writing skills are truly degrading. May be a result of lack of linguistic exercise from such a long time away from blogging. Its time to put those academic work a side for a while and share my opinion on the "Population White Paper".
No....I haven't read the Population White Paper and I don't intend to start reviewing its content. This job are better suited for our Statesman. I wonder how many people do actually read it from head to tail but I am sure most will appreciate the emotional disturbance to citizen this White Paper had, which the Parliament had already voted in favor. No thanks to the overwhelming White-shirtess votes.
Is a 6.9 million population even viable in Singapore? It all depends on the resources are country can provide to support such huge numbers on a tiny island. The basics like food, water, sanitation, shelter and healthcare are absolute necessary for humanity survival. State planner are of course ready to predict/forecast the resource demands using whatever mathematical model or super computer they had. What about happiness of Singaporean? Can it be measured at all?
If anyone had played the computer game, Civilization (I, II, III, IV and now V), you would be very careful on your citizen happiness level. As the smart player (or ruler) in the game, beside fielding a armed force to scare the shit out of other civilization from attacking you, you will also watch out for domestic affairs like production, gold and most importantly populations. Production and Gold output of the civilization greatly depend on the number of citizen that can work the territory and like our Gahmen, I love to have lots of gold reserve for emergency us as well as urging my citizen to be more productive at work. The simplest way to increase either of this are simply to increase population.
Now the problem of increase population, in this game, is the decrease in citizen happiness. The counter such effect, we start building "Happiness" building like a Colosseum, Theatre, Wonders ...etc etc. Sometime, we implement policy to improve the existing happiness of our people. Sometimes a civilization with great culture value translate to improved happiness when adopting certain policy.
Using a computer game to illustrate effect of increased population may be slightly naive due to its "helicopter" view of real work situation but this games does set me thinking on the reasons of our unhappiness. Why are we unhappy with further increase in population? In my view, its a case of lack of resources (happiness building), high cost of resources( the price citizen had to pay for happiness building), invasion of culture (losing culture value) and poor policy making.
In the game, players aim to dominate other civilization before 2030 through Military, Science, Diplomacy or Culture. I wonder what Singapore will be like in 2030. Large population don't guaranteed a civilization success, neither lots of gold and production level. In real life, I am a firm believer that even with a Singaporean core of just 2.7 million.... there are plenty of talents to lead our country to greater success on the world stage. In the meantime, I hope our government are truly honest that the White paper is just a projection.
