Chapter 6 - The Human Element

Summary

The early stages of economic growth are necessarily a cruel and harsh process, and it needs a robust, philosophical outlook to go through with it.

— Goh Keng Swee (Radio broadcast on 30 January 1967)

There is no doubt that most of Goh's intellectual energies were targeted at the fields of economics, finance and defence. However, throughout his life, he held strong views that he voiced publicly about what can only be called “The Human Element” and how this impinged on the best laid plans of mice and men, including Goh.

How humans are prone to act under tightly identified situations is part and parcel of basic economic theory. National macroeconomics, however, provides ideas and tools of coercion and manipulation that put the human element in another light; human propensities have to be controlled for the greater good, and not merely acknowledged and utilized. Given Goh's early economic training in the 1930s when Keynesian intervention was parrying the worst criticisms that socialism could throw at capitalism, along with his interest in the workings of a war economy in the early 1940s, one can safely assume that Goh's approach to economics — as is evident in his 1940 work, The Economic Front from a Malayan Point of View — is national economic in essence.

His early career as a civil servant and his surveys on poverty and housing contributed to his perception that state intervention was inevitable in creating economic growth and sustaining it without causing an excessive income gap through excessive reliance on private entrepreneurship. Where the political aspect of housing policies was concerned, Goh's old roommate Lim Kim San, the man Singaporeans remember as the builder of the ubiquitous HDB blocks that are today more a physical depiction of the country than the Esplanade Theatre can ever be, recalled the following many years later.

Dr Goh had already seen the situation on the ground. He did the Social Survey when he was in the civil service in 1952. He wanted me to look at it personally, to see how urgent the housing problem was. The overcrowding was a breeding ground for gangsterism and crime. It was difficult to catch criminals who would just run in and out of these buildings. Politically, it was a dangerous situation. The Communists were exploiting it to win support. Housing was critical.

(Chew 1996: 163)