The road to high income economy-2

walla

I will let Walla tell us about the road to a high income economy. Walla tackles the question that I have asked in my latest article; how to increase the cash income of individuals. The typical individual in Malaysia is likely be one who takes home on average RM 3,000 per month. How do you increase his cash income?

By asking him to be entrepreneurial. In Malaysia this translates at the most simple level as asking him to work hard, not to accept handouts, not to depend on others and not to have this mindset that others owe it to us to help us out. We must also get out of this mental rut that the good life is a matter of right to us. Rights are acquired. They are something you fought and struggled for and qualify for. You acquire ownership and title to a TOL land by working it and 'having worked' it qualifies you to acquire a right. Hence a right is something you qualify for and not acquire by being someone, some race etc.

A: 'I read that 74 percent of Malaysians draw no more than rm3,000 per month. You reckon we must be somewhere inside a low-end quartile of per capita incomes relative to cost of living compared to many other upcoming economies?'

B: 'You mean net zero at beginning of the month so that each household is actually floating on credit to get to the next payday? Probably so. Especially when each has to commit so much to essential high-ticket items like homes and cars. And the tightness is not going to soften as they grow older because they will have children and old folks to take care with education and medical costs rising. Not unless and until they can earn more to save up now. That's save up to survive, not save up to spend to spur the economy, mind you.'

A: 'But how? The ecosystem is not pro-innovation. Hard to get loans and grants for ideas. Hard to find good designers. Hard to find professional fabricators, people who can take your plan and micro-machine what you want, or integrate applications to deliver a seamless service. And probably a whole layer of sly bureaucracy along each step. It's quite demotivating, especially when all of one's waking hours are already spent slogging for sleepy companies in moribund industries.'

B: 'We need to spark idea-labs, Sofea. With communications technology, it gets easier to tap the new social computing wavefront and get diverse and borderless resources to collaborate. That's one way to spark innovation. Maybe the MSC people can run with it and the Mida etc people can set up a single welcoming mat to attract some of the brains in the US and Europe who have been untethered by their financial crisis to e-venture here. That's a shift from luring capital and equipment to luring talent and brains. In any case, they don't have to be physically here. But they will be essential not just for their know-how but also for their know-where. They know where the markets are that we need to target. Ours is too small for any big-wave high-income activity. We can sell that we are lower cost and presumably still smart people.'

A: 'But they can get more from India, China, Russia, the East Europeans, Philippines, even Vietnam. Why us?'

B: 'Ah, for that you must ask the Ibrahims and Nordins of this country. They talk big, loud and fast so they must have brains and answers for everything. And I mean everything, all the way from bumi to langit.'

A: 'Sir, I don't think they have done a single productive thing in their entire lives.'

B: 'Except make investors shake their heads and walk away? Hmm. Who outside UMNO still doesn't know that?'

A: 'Your way of posing two statements as one twisted question makes me dizzy, Tun.'

B: 'Only to make you pliable to what I am going to say now, Sofea, which is this - our road to a high income economy is paved with the corpses of shattered excesses.'