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7 Adapting to Our Population Challenges
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7 7 ADAPTING TO ADAPTING TO OUR OUR POPULATION POPULATION CHALLENGES CHALLENGES Donald Low In Robert Zemeckis’s 1989 blockbuster, Back to the Future II, Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to the year 2015. The future that was depicted in the movie bears some similarities to our world today: ubiquitous security cameras, wall-mounted flat-screen TVs, the ability to watch six channels at the same time, video games that do not require the use of hands, and the popularity of plastic surgery. But many other features of the future imagined by Zemeckis and his team are almost comically divorced from the reality we know today: flying cars, hover boards, clothes that automatically dry and adjust to the wearer’s size, shoes with automatic laces, ovens that hydrate mini-pizzas, oddly shaped and coloured buildings, and so on. Above all, Zemeckis and his team missed what were perhaps the most important innovations of the last 25 years—the internet and the near-universal access we have to it thanks to cheap telecommunication technologies, and the speed at which information is spread and amplified through social media.1 When thinking about the future, a great dose of humility and an appreciation of the limits of human cognition and imagination are in order. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr famously said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” The reason we frequently get our predictions wrong is that the human mind reasons by analogy and extrapolation. We are drawn to internally consistent “stories” about the world as we know it, and we tend to project these stories into the future, often in a linear and mechanistic fashion. But just because a story is consistent or coherent does not make it correct as a prediction of the future. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize laureate for Economics in 2002, puts it this way, “[T]he exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives. Fast thinking is not prone to doubt.” Kahneman goes on to argue that our deeply-ingrained, psychological desire for coherence (or consistency and predictability) breeds overconfidence: “Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence of the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favours overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.”2 These findings from the behavioural sciences were very much on my mind during the population debate in February 2013—both inside and outside of Parliament. Much of the debate centred on the government ’s dire predictions of Singapore’s future as an ageing society. One of the main assumptions of the Population White Paper was that as Singapore ages, our economy would lose vibrancy, exciting jobs would dry up, and young, talented Singaporeans would leave the country in search of better opportunities elsewhere. To prevent this apocalyptic scenario, the argument goes, Singapore needs to maintain relatively 98 ADAPTING TO OUR POPULATION CHALLENGES [3.209.81.51] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:22 GMT) high levels of immigration and keep its doors open to foreign workers. Worsening old age dependency ratios were frequently cited to remind Singaporeans of an economically dire future if we did not accept a larger population comprising a larger share of foreigners. During the debate, I was struck by how policymakers, businesses, experts and citizens made confident predictions of the future. Rather than think about the future in probabilistic terms, we tend to zoom in on a single scenario, usually one extrapolated from the present we are familiar with. Even when we remind ourselves that the future is uncertain and we adjust our scenarios to take this into account, the present exerts a strong anchoring influence. Consequently, the adjustments we make are insufficient, and we systematically underestimate the extent, rate, and possibility of change. For instance, the government’s projections in the White Paper were strongly influenced by Singapore’s current growth model, while its projections of future labour demand reflected firms’ current demand for foreign labour. Meanwhile, citizens’ perceptions of quality of life in the future were similarly influenced by...