Singapore's economic policies are complicated and often misdirecting. I'll break down the misconceptions.
The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average decades) at rock bottom interest rates (it's pegged to the overnight rate or a minimum of 2.6%). The returns are specifically decoupled from the real long term returns. This has historical roots in the government needing vast capital financing. They make enormous amounts of the delta between the short term interest rate and long term capital gains. Singapore has no oil or natural resources, but it's sovereign wealth fund has AUM in the regions of countries like Norway which do for this reason. It is not a shock absorber like the article suggests. The withdrawal terms are strict - housing, a significant medical expense and retirement are the only real ways to get money out of it.
"Trying to keep people employed" is a goal, not a policy. In fact the Singapore government maintains a large worker supply through immigration. The foreign worker population, ~30%. The main goal of the government is to maximize the absolute number of people working.
The reason it raising the retirement age is effective in workforce participation is because most people have no choice. Retirement only pays out after the age. The working life of an average Singaporean has seen 37% gone to CPF, maybe another 10% to income taxes, another 5% to GST, road tax, property tax, etc. After all this there's the astronomical cost of living. This is also intentional, to raise the number of employees.
Like Dubai, many of the migrant workers are ineligible for post retirement life in Singapore and so despite any mandatory savings will not represent any kind of burden on the state compared to delivery of health and housing and care costs.
So they are functionally productive and net positive to any scheme about post work funding for the community.
The CPF sounds pretty clever. It covers a major individual cost and need (retirement, medical, housing) instead of just throwing it into a tax. It makes the government money. This sounds like a win win kind of policy.
> Singapore's economic policies are complicated and often misdirecting. [...] it's sovereign wealth
Tangentially, I've had a similar gripe around how some US folks discuss Singapore's similar old-rival Hong Kong. They'll advocate "Hong Kong shows policy X works, we should do X here too", while ignoring the other half of the system required to make it work, policies the same advocates would never want to adopt.
In particular, celebrating HK's "tax freedom" while glossing over how the government does fund expenditures. It's the ultimate landlord, deliberately constraining supply (with high subsidies to the poor to prevent revolt), and draws from its huge [0] sovereign-wealth fund.
[0] Huge by any US standards, even if far smaller than Singapore or Norway. To put the per-capita amounts in context, if the US is 1x, then HK=80x, Singapore=356x, Norway=379x.
> The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average decades) at rock bottom interest rates (it's pegged to the overnight rate or a minimum of 2.6%).
Social Security is effectively the same thing. Payroll taxes are collected and placed in the social security trust fund, which invests them in federal bonds.
A lot of follow up comments are representing this as a forced bond purchase with subpar returns, without also considering that, it essentially forces folks who wouldn't otherwise save for retirement to do so (albeit at the government's definition of retirement age)
For those who know how to manage their money, this is absolutely a hit on potential returns. But for many who may not, this is net more than what they would have otherwise
I had the privilege of getting a working gig in Singapore for a small AI startup: such a well run country! There is a sense of community for helping by employing people who need jobs, the police were friendly and I felt very safe there (I like to take long walks either early in the morning or late at night and I felt very secure.)
Amazing what the people and government have achieved since the end of WW2. 100% respect for them.
A side comment: I enjoy listening to English language news from many countries around the world to get different viewpoints. News media from Singapore is very interesting, indeed!
I worked with a guy from sg. He gave me tips for when I went to visit. He hooked me up with a family member that showed me the backend a bit.
The country effectively runs on a slave class. You must drive a new vehicle under 5 years old, and the license just to buy a car was $90,000 or so. This means an entire class of people that will be taking the bus to do your laundry and clean your house for the rest of their lives and likely their kids lives.
The guy took me around to construction sites. The Indonesian and Malaysian workers were some of the most brave or stupid workers I’ve ever seen. I saw a guy install a window in a three story building by effectively free climbing from the outside half a flight up starting on the third floor, from the outside of the building. No harness, no ropes, just him out there hanging and pushing against a nook with his work boots. The SG contractor had helmet, hi-vis, steel toed, carhart, radio, clipboards etc.
Singapore is an amazing place. It’s like, a rorschach test kind of. Like everyone sees something different there.
I noticed things that trip. However… I was able to enjoy the botanical gardens and Marina Bay Sands rooftop like the other tourists… fond memories, but they have a backdrop that reality is only thinly hidden there.
I spent years in Singapore and loved it there. Never had to face road rage (which so many of us experience daily several times driving in Texas! NextDoor is full of these stories) or aggressive behavior by anyone in authority including police and immigration officers. I know many people find Singapore boring after a while but it didn't bother me much. On the flip side, the cost of living is high as a foreigner and traveling to the US is very tiring due to the long distance.
Singapore is an effective slave/permanent underclass state with few personal freedoms that is ethnically and culturally homogeneous (in each class). Not trying to do a "who's the bad/good country" but nothing about it really applies to the US or should.
Listening to political speeches from Singapore are so refreshing compared to the juvenile garbage that we have to endure in the US from US politicians.
A confounding factor here is that savings behavior is cultural rooted: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6135367/. Studies show that people within a country can have substantially different savings behaviors, robustly correlated with their origin countries, even among people who are third generation immigrants. It’s a mistake to treat either the U.S. or Singapore as homogenous populations for purposes of this analysis.
European languages have a future tense, which means people have different ideas of themselves in the present and future. You can even hear this in phrases like "that's a problem for future me."
While Chinese lacks the European styled future tense, ignoring time phrases, auxiliary verbs, etc. So people more clearly conceptualize their present and future selves as the same. Leading to things like increased saving.
This of course is rooted in linguist psychology, a very soft science. But still an interesting idea.
75% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese so based on what you are saying it would be worth comparing SG Chinese to Chinese CN on regret since China has a much less robust safety net.
You know who they didn't interview: those who regret saving so much. Many of those people are dead and so the regret is something we can only apply on assumption that they would. I've known a few people who unexpectedly died before they hit retirement age. I've know a few people who retired and died suddenly. The vast majority of people in a "first world" country have an expected lifespan of about 80 - but there is a statistical curve and people start dieing in significant numbers at 65, while you are not an outlier until you make it to near 100 (though some exist).
You need to have some emergency savings. You should save for retirement somehow. If you can structure the above as insurance - and you can trust the insurance - (I know a few cases where the insurance type system went bankrupt and those with a "policy got nothing") that is best.
Once the above is taken care of though, you can't take it with you (at least in most religions) so spend it. Save enough, but not too much.
People who save a lot are typically people comforted by sitting on a big nest egg. Saving a lot for retirement and then dying the day before retirement isn’t necessarily going to be a source of regret, because they had 30 years of warm fuzzy feelings about eventually hatching their nest egg. They could have spent it all instead, and had a life full of anxiety.
You’re looking for people who didn’t want to save but begrudgingly saved at the expense of their pre-retirement life and then died before they could enjoy retirement. That’s a much smaller group.
This is more fleshed out in the book "Die with Zero" which may be a bit too extreme.
But in general you have three things to spend in your life: time, money, and effort.
You don't want to spend all your time saving money because you'll run out of time eventually, but you also don't want to spend all your money saving time because you'll run out of money.
It's all about balance and thoughtfully understanding what you actually want and how to get it.
> you can't take it with you (at least in most religions) so spend it.
I don't understand this PoV at all.
I can't take it with me, sure, but I'm happy anyway if I leave it behind to my kids.
This PoV that you need to spend, spend, spend to get the most value for your money is very primitive - my kids will do better if I die before touching my nest egg, and if I don't at least I'll have a longer runway to live without working.
There is no downside here, other than the artificial one that dictates you spend it all and leave nothing behind.
> Once the above is taken care of though, you can't take it with you (at least in most religions) so spend it. Save enough, but not too much.
I get it to a certain extent, don't live in poverty if you don't have too, but I am a major saver. I rarely buy new things if an old thing is working fine. If I die early at least my family will will be set.
Really the social safety nets in the US are basically non-existent so having a big savings buffer makes me feel a bit safer. Honestly dying early doesn't worry me too much, I'll be dead so doesn't bother me. What does worry me is the economy tanks and all my saving become worthless. Then I would have some regrets...
You just get taken in by life though, it isn't even about saving for some idealized retirement to me. As you age and your parents get old and you have kids and a spouse you just live less and less for yourself. You have to adopt a mental state where you feel gratification in sacrificing for others, if you constantly regret the things you can't do because people depend on you, you will drive yourself nuts. That sort of "I am a reliable provider and helper" mentality lends itself to obsessively building up a "safety net" because you can feel good about how stable and safe you make your loved ones.
Indeed. In fact, I would go further and say than, more than saving money, one should make preparations for a dignified passing should one's time come early. Living happy, dying before a gruesome disease completely erases that treasure. And, if destiny has it that one gets old enough, and one does so with little more than a camping tent, leaving this world because the night was too cold and one succumbed to hypothermia beats what most people get at the end.
Singapore has a regressive shock absorber model where something like half the country are immigrants that are ineligible for, say, public housing which even the better off citizens take advantage of in Singapore (maybe even disproportionately so since there can be a long wait to get in, you are older and more settled at that point). Immigrants that get milked dry and go broke and jobless during a shock are booted from the country before they can be polled.
------ re: below due to throttling -------------
Vs say US, where immigrants and those funding public housing are generally better off than the people getting subsidized housing. Public housing is more a progressive than regressive tax in the US, so quite dissimilar. Immigrants in US are on average far better off than those on public housing. Asking "but how is this any different" (after I already answered it, lol) over and over doesn't negate this, nor the fact that immigrants are like half of workers in Singapore vs only 10% in the US so the funding dynamic and dependency is far different.
> Singapore has a regressive shock absorber model where something like half the country are immigrants that are ineligible for, say, public housing
Singapore has about 1.5 million foreign workers[0] of the population of 6.1 million or just under 25%. Of that 1.5 million, 75% are WP holders who pay no tax and have housing provided as a condition of their employment. Why would you expect social housing to be provided for them?
Only about 5-6% of the population are on EPs and SPs. They are definitely vulnerable during a downturn, but they are professionals and they know the rules coming in. At least while they're here they enjoy low tax rates and don't have to contribute to CPF. If they fell into the expat trap of living the high life and didn't save, that's on them.
>Singapore has a regressive shock absorber model where something like half the country are immigrants that are ineligible for, say, public housing which even the better off citizens take advantage of in Singapore
It's similar in Vienna where only native Viennese are immediately eligible for social housing, but outsiders will end up paying into the system without being eligible.
How is that different from the US? Immigrants also get booted here if they lose their job. They also pay social security, Medicare, and other taxes but usually don't get the benefits unless they stay here for long enough and get a green card.
Singapore, despite some of its laws being rather harsh, also had very intelligent leaders. Lee Kuan Yew was one of them; he correctly analysed the US behaviour. That can be seen on youtube too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNQXLhIcPrc
What I find interesting about Singapore is that it is a fairly small country: a bit over 6 million people. That's small compared to the USA (341 million). When you are such a small country or city-country, being prosperous requires intelligence and efficiency. And diplomatic skills too. Taiwan also showed this, though it is a bit larger than Singapore (23.4 million). It seems that this is a good success story - to have competent and intelligent workers and people. Education is one key factor of success here.
It's sort of a small country but bigger than Finland, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, Qatar. It's actually right about in the middle in terms of population.
Forced savings like done in Quebec, Canada is likely the best model for most people even though I dont like it as an individual that knows how to manage its portfolio. It also has the benefit of creating a sovereign wealth fund that can invest locally and be an economic driver but independent from the government.
I actually like the forced saving of Québec. I also have a defined benefit pension plan, a TFSA and RRSP but I am happy to be forced to contribute the RRQ for the general welfare of the province even though I know how manage my portfolio.
Considering that they also have to consider economic development in their investment decisions, the RRQ funds are well managed by the CDPQ.
People who score well on probability numeracy are likely better educated and better paid and have more in automatic savings plans. So if someone is maxing out their 401k they don’t feel they need to save more.
The article shows that in the US there is a 25 point gap between high and low income on savings regret, and a 14 point gap between high and low numeracy scores.
In Singapore where savings are more automatic numeracy is a more powerful predictor.
>They’re failing to save because the world is rough, and their institutions don’t do enough to help them weather it.
Well, America is rough. It turned on hardcore capitalism mode for itself because a significant portion of its population wants to try and solo socioeconomic hardships and hates any one who doesn't want the same challenge.
But not to just blame the voter, lots of money is spent for setting up systems to be amenable to acquiring more money. The very richest have correctly made a bet that uprisings to displace the wealthy and politicians just don't occur here these days, and therefore there is no real threat or need to change the way things have been going for the last 25 years or so.
Isn't it more a cultural issue though? As a European, I think many Americans take pride and love to succeed "on their own" and accept they could "die trying" (exaggerating a bit, hence the quotes, but the feeling holds).
Yes, the systems are amenable to acquiring more money, but I would claim that all that the richest need to do is to push the idea that "anyone can make it" - which was probably (more) true 50 years ago, but is probably an illusion today (some comments at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...).
Edit: I do not claim one model is better than the other; just that the culture influences the outcome more than other aspects.
"Saving regret" ought to also refer to when you have saved too much. The shocks in that case would be things like "inflation ate away all my savings before I got to use them" or "the government confiscated my savings via wealth taxes" or just generally "the government made me spend 37% of my income on saving when I wanted to use it to raise kids."
> "the government made me spend 37% of my income on saving when I wanted to use it to raise kids."
This is a particularly funny one tbh. A nation's kids _are_ the retirement plan. It doesn't matter how many numbers you put in spreadsheets dated for 20-40 years into the future, if in said future, there isn't actually anyone to accept those numbers in exchange for labor.
Raising kids in a society where people hate their community and don't want to contribute through things like taxes generally isn't a society that is good for kids and their development.
Maybe I missed something in the article but why Singapore and not a country closer in culture to the US? Like why not compare to Canada or the UK, or anywhere in Europe?
Did the study have to go as far as Singapore to find somewhere where the situation was reversed or was there another factor?
A few days ago there was a discussion about how Singapore forces their people to save and invest in bonds. The country makes money on the difference between the daily/compound rates and it keeps their workforce working.
In other words, I suspect it's "we started with Singapore then compared to America" not the other way around.
Did US have economic shocks? Compared to, say, Eastern Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa, all people who lived through real economic shocks and hyper-inflation tend to save less, not more. Because they know the savings can evaporate one day.
They absolutely save. Just not in their own currency - they'll instead rush to cash out for gold, USD, prime real estate (if they're rich), or some other less volatile store of value, before their currency gets devalued even further.
This article seem to be confounding external impact with internal motivation.
Yes the jobloss impact caused the people to be unable to save and in turn they wished they have saved more.. but ignored is whether they could to begin with.
Of course external impact had little to do with internal procrastination.
Maybe I read the article too fast but I didn’t get that takeaway at all?
It’s basically just saying that the uninsured catastrophic event risk in America magnifies shock events.
E.g., if you have a major hospital visit in America you’re way more likely to regret not saving enough, but in Singapore there’s basically no effect since hospital stays don’t drain your savings account.
Comparing any country to Singapore is frankly ridiculous. Singapore is a unique tiny tax haven where billionaires send their kids to study. To compare it to the biggest economy in the world just seems silly.
The 'saving' vs. 'investing' debate here has a direct parallel in technical debt. Singapore’s model of high-efficiency reinvestment is like a well-refactored codebase—it allows for rapid pivots when a shock hits. America’s model feels more like a legacy system with massive technical debt; the 'savings' are there, but the friction of the existing infrastructure makes it nearly impossible to deploy them effectively during a crisis.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
InkCanon|11 days ago
The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average decades) at rock bottom interest rates (it's pegged to the overnight rate or a minimum of 2.6%). The returns are specifically decoupled from the real long term returns. This has historical roots in the government needing vast capital financing. They make enormous amounts of the delta between the short term interest rate and long term capital gains. Singapore has no oil or natural resources, but it's sovereign wealth fund has AUM in the regions of countries like Norway which do for this reason. It is not a shock absorber like the article suggests. The withdrawal terms are strict - housing, a significant medical expense and retirement are the only real ways to get money out of it.
"Trying to keep people employed" is a goal, not a policy. In fact the Singapore government maintains a large worker supply through immigration. The foreign worker population, ~30%. The main goal of the government is to maximize the absolute number of people working.
The reason it raising the retirement age is effective in workforce participation is because most people have no choice. Retirement only pays out after the age. The working life of an average Singaporean has seen 37% gone to CPF, maybe another 10% to income taxes, another 5% to GST, road tax, property tax, etc. After all this there's the astronomical cost of living. This is also intentional, to raise the number of employees.
ggm|11 days ago
So they are functionally productive and net positive to any scheme about post work funding for the community.
ecshafer|11 days ago
Terr_|11 days ago
Tangentially, I've had a similar gripe around how some US folks discuss Singapore's similar old-rival Hong Kong. They'll advocate "Hong Kong shows policy X works, we should do X here too", while ignoring the other half of the system required to make it work, policies the same advocates would never want to adopt.
In particular, celebrating HK's "tax freedom" while glossing over how the government does fund expenditures. It's the ultimate landlord, deliberately constraining supply (with high subsidies to the poor to prevent revolt), and draws from its huge [0] sovereign-wealth fund.
[0] Huge by any US standards, even if far smaller than Singapore or Norway. To put the per-capita amounts in context, if the US is 1x, then HK=80x, Singapore=356x, Norway=379x.
philwelch|11 days ago
Social Security is effectively the same thing. Payroll taxes are collected and placed in the social security trust fund, which invests them in federal bonds.
nicholasluimy|10 days ago
For those who know how to manage their money, this is absolutely a hit on potential returns. But for many who may not, this is net more than what they would have otherwise
janpeuker|11 days ago
NooneAtAll3|11 days ago
how does that work?
DaedalusII|11 days ago
the UK effectively does the same thing with DB schemes forced to buy Gilts
eru|11 days ago
Why? What? You know, they have to win elections?
They recently tightened migrant worker visas quite a lot.
brutalc|10 days ago
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mark_l_watson|11 days ago
Amazing what the people and government have achieved since the end of WW2. 100% respect for them.
A side comment: I enjoy listening to English language news from many countries around the world to get different viewpoints. News media from Singapore is very interesting, indeed!
SV_BubbleTime|11 days ago
The country effectively runs on a slave class. You must drive a new vehicle under 5 years old, and the license just to buy a car was $90,000 or so. This means an entire class of people that will be taking the bus to do your laundry and clean your house for the rest of their lives and likely their kids lives.
The guy took me around to construction sites. The Indonesian and Malaysian workers were some of the most brave or stupid workers I’ve ever seen. I saw a guy install a window in a three story building by effectively free climbing from the outside half a flight up starting on the third floor, from the outside of the building. No harness, no ropes, just him out there hanging and pushing against a nook with his work boots. The SG contractor had helmet, hi-vis, steel toed, carhart, radio, clipboards etc.
Singapore is an amazing place. It’s like, a rorschach test kind of. Like everyone sees something different there.
I noticed things that trip. However… I was able to enjoy the botanical gardens and Marina Bay Sands rooftop like the other tourists… fond memories, but they have a backdrop that reality is only thinly hidden there.
malshe|11 days ago
peruvian|11 days ago
michaelteter|11 days ago
rayiner|11 days ago
dexwiz|11 days ago
European languages have a future tense, which means people have different ideas of themselves in the present and future. You can even hear this in phrases like "that's a problem for future me."
While Chinese lacks the European styled future tense, ignoring time phrases, auxiliary verbs, etc. So people more clearly conceptualize their present and future selves as the same. Leading to things like increased saving.
This of course is rooted in linguist psychology, a very soft science. But still an interesting idea.
janalsncm|11 days ago
guardianbob|11 days ago
We are talking about material impacts, not culture
bluGill|11 days ago
You need to have some emergency savings. You should save for retirement somehow. If you can structure the above as insurance - and you can trust the insurance - (I know a few cases where the insurance type system went bankrupt and those with a "policy got nothing") that is best.
Once the above is taken care of though, you can't take it with you (at least in most religions) so spend it. Save enough, but not too much.
3rodents|11 days ago
You’re looking for people who didn’t want to save but begrudgingly saved at the expense of their pre-retirement life and then died before they could enjoy retirement. That’s a much smaller group.
bombcar|11 days ago
But in general you have three things to spend in your life: time, money, and effort.
You don't want to spend all your time saving money because you'll run out of time eventually, but you also don't want to spend all your money saving time because you'll run out of money.
It's all about balance and thoughtfully understanding what you actually want and how to get it.
lelanthran|11 days ago
I don't understand this PoV at all.
I can't take it with me, sure, but I'm happy anyway if I leave it behind to my kids.
This PoV that you need to spend, spend, spend to get the most value for your money is very primitive - my kids will do better if I die before touching my nest egg, and if I don't at least I'll have a longer runway to live without working.
There is no downside here, other than the artificial one that dictates you spend it all and leave nothing behind.
yoyohello13|11 days ago
I get it to a certain extent, don't live in poverty if you don't have too, but I am a major saver. I rarely buy new things if an old thing is working fine. If I die early at least my family will will be set.
Really the social safety nets in the US are basically non-existent so having a big savings buffer makes me feel a bit safer. Honestly dying early doesn't worry me too much, I'll be dead so doesn't bother me. What does worry me is the economy tanks and all my saving become worthless. Then I would have some regrets...
ericmcer|11 days ago
dsign|11 days ago
throw-the-towel|11 days ago
mothballed|11 days ago
------ re: below due to throttling -------------
Vs say US, where immigrants and those funding public housing are generally better off than the people getting subsidized housing. Public housing is more a progressive than regressive tax in the US, so quite dissimilar. Immigrants in US are on average far better off than those on public housing. Asking "but how is this any different" (after I already answered it, lol) over and over doesn't negate this, nor the fact that immigrants are like half of workers in Singapore vs only 10% in the US so the funding dynamic and dependency is far different.
exidy|11 days ago
Singapore has about 1.5 million foreign workers[0] of the population of 6.1 million or just under 25%. Of that 1.5 million, 75% are WP holders who pay no tax and have housing provided as a condition of their employment. Why would you expect social housing to be provided for them?
Only about 5-6% of the population are on EPs and SPs. They are definitely vulnerable during a downturn, but they are professionals and they know the rules coming in. At least while they're here they enjoy low tax rates and don't have to contribute to CPF. If they fell into the expat trap of living the high life and didn't save, that's on them.
[0] https://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-workforce-numbers
joe_mamba|11 days ago
It's similar in Vienna where only native Viennese are immediately eligible for social housing, but outsiders will end up paying into the system without being eligible.
eunos|11 days ago
finolex1|11 days ago
dangus|11 days ago
shevy-java|10 days ago
What I find interesting about Singapore is that it is a fairly small country: a bit over 6 million people. That's small compared to the USA (341 million). When you are such a small country or city-country, being prosperous requires intelligence and efficiency. And diplomatic skills too. Taiwan also showed this, though it is a bit larger than Singapore (23.4 million). It seems that this is a good success story - to have competent and intelligent workers and people. Education is one key factor of success here.
AdamN|10 days ago
Sytten|11 days ago
nick__m|11 days ago
Considering that they also have to consider economic development in their investment decisions, the RRQ funds are well managed by the CDPQ.
janalsncm|11 days ago
People who score well on probability numeracy are likely better educated and better paid and have more in automatic savings plans. So if someone is maxing out their 401k they don’t feel they need to save more.
The article shows that in the US there is a 25 point gap between high and low income on savings regret, and a 14 point gap between high and low numeracy scores.
In Singapore where savings are more automatic numeracy is a more powerful predictor.
hnthrow0287345|11 days ago
Well, America is rough. It turned on hardcore capitalism mode for itself because a significant portion of its population wants to try and solo socioeconomic hardships and hates any one who doesn't want the same challenge.
But not to just blame the voter, lots of money is spent for setting up systems to be amenable to acquiring more money. The very richest have correctly made a bet that uprisings to displace the wealthy and politicians just don't occur here these days, and therefore there is no real threat or need to change the way things have been going for the last 25 years or so.
vladms|11 days ago
Yes, the systems are amenable to acquiring more money, but I would claim that all that the richest need to do is to push the idea that "anyone can make it" - which was probably (more) true 50 years ago, but is probably an illusion today (some comments at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...).
Edit: I do not claim one model is better than the other; just that the culture influences the outcome more than other aspects.
arolihas|11 days ago
Noumenon72|11 days ago
kaibee|11 days ago
This is a particularly funny one tbh. A nation's kids _are_ the retirement plan. It doesn't matter how many numbers you put in spreadsheets dated for 20-40 years into the future, if in said future, there isn't actually anyone to accept those numbers in exchange for labor.
kdheiwns|11 days ago
nancyminusone|11 days ago
readthenotes1|11 days ago
That seems like what they should have been looking at re procrastination--conscientiousness.
I am not at all surprised that people who Take Care of Business lament not doing a better job (saving) and people who YOLO don't as much.
bdbdbdb|10 days ago
Did the study have to go as far as Singapore to find somewhere where the situation was reversed or was there another factor?
inanutshellus|10 days ago
In other words, I suspect it's "we started with Singapore then compared to America" not the other way around.
deepsun|11 days ago
10000truths|10 days ago
unknown|10 days ago
[deleted]
Aperocky|11 days ago
Yes the jobloss impact caused the people to be unable to save and in turn they wished they have saved more.. but ignored is whether they could to begin with.
Of course external impact had little to do with internal procrastination.
ebiester|11 days ago
It says that understanding risk (as operationalized by understanding probability) has a larger effect.
But it is also saying that the more external impact someone has, the more they regret saving more -- in the United States but not Singapore.
The study is explicitly saying that internal motivation does not seem to matter. And the article is arguing the reason why.
dangus|11 days ago
It’s basically just saying that the uninsured catastrophic event risk in America magnifies shock events.
E.g., if you have a major hospital visit in America you’re way more likely to regret not saving enough, but in Singapore there’s basically no effect since hospital stays don’t drain your savings account.
wraptile|11 days ago
choonway|11 days ago
if it exists in abundance like the air that we breathe no amount of conspiracy will be able to monopolize it.
finance only works in a very narrow band of environmental conditions. we are very well past that.
solarisos|11 days ago
Filip_portive|11 days ago
[deleted]