Further Lessons from an economic story

 

In my previous article, I wrote about lessons from an economic story. I told the story (an imaginary one) about a taxi driver. He works hard and has many skills. Yet he remains relatively poor by earning smaller income.

Notice that he is forced to be a master of all because of an imposed closed system. He is kept there and forced to be self sufficient. He is imprisoned as a result of a system that regulates social action. Call it the governing system

His less talented neighbour, less resourceful and lazy, earns a better living. He earns a higher income. He is the fictionalised government officer in our story.

The taxi driver and the government officer are all economic actors within the governing system.

The system has kept the taxi driver in his place while the same system is controlled by the government officer who ensures the system is kept that way. By now readers would have come around to say, the government officer in the story is not necessarily any government officer in the conventional sense, but one who represents those who control the levers of power of government.

The responses to the story affirm several points which I want to put across.

Sometime ago, I wrote that what we are actually looking for is equality in opportunities. In this story equality in opportunities would be in the form of opening up the system. Many commentators objected to the taxi driver earning the same as the government officer (assumed to be a degree holder).

Ah ha, we actually don't want equality in outcome after all. In some of my previous articles, when I offered the opinion, that we want equality in opportunities not equality in outcomes, that proposition was trashed.

By the many comments to this story about Lessons, we know, we actually want equality in opportunities and not equality in outcomes. Outcomes commensurate with education and effort.

There were several heart-warming stories about real life taxi drivers making it good. Their station in life became better when taxi drivers of this world; refuse to accept any current station in life as being inherently determined.

Hence that would demolish the idea that any one particular group has been able to pull ahead from another, because they have been imbibed with the genetic code to succeed. That would also demolish the idea that the Malay is less successful because he is not imbued with the genetic experience.

For instance, the Chinese who came to Malaya is said to have succeeded because they have had thousand of years, value indoctrination. As I recall the Chinese who came to Malaya sometime ago were the marginalised themselves and were from the lower strata. We can almost say, they were the dregs in Chinese society. That would make it untenable to accept the proposition that they were predisposed to success because they have had secret codes of success embedded in their genes.

The taxi driver and the Chinese singkeh ( sengkek in Pahang) were able to pull themselves ahead because of acquired habits and values offered as response to external challenges.

The several times retrenched taxi driver learnt the value of harder work, determination, not giving up, wanting a better life, thrift and saving to pull ahead.

The taxi driver and the immigrant Chinese represent what? They represent different actors affected by an identical general cause. They reacted in their own ways to the forces set in motion by an identical cause.

As Arnold Toynbee says- a society is confronted in the course of its life by a succession of problems which each member has to solve itself as best as it may. The presentation of each problem is a challenge to undergo an ordeal and through this series of ordeals the members of the society progressively differentiate themselves from one another.

I did not expect that short story to degenerate into an us- versus- them arguments. This is not about Malay and Chinese economic positions. I wanted to establish the principles by which the taxi driver can progress. He pulls ahead by leveraging on acquired habits and values and refused to be imprisoned by the system. His acquisition of the pro progress habits and values (gleaned from real life examples) is the response to the challenge set in motion by an external cause.

The government officer remains that way, because within the upper loop of his section of society, everyone who is a member of his fraternity is allowed to trade. The ones refused entry and disallowed to trade are the taxi drivers of the world.