Nation or Corporation?

Not a long discussion, just an interesting question:
Singapore: When a country is no longer a country.

Why bond breakers left.

I made a point in class a few weeks ago, how the economic environment is changing.
1) Corporations now prefer to outsource jobs, instead of investing in training the employees they already have.
2) "Restructuring", "downsizing" (euphemisms for sacking people) mostly target older workers, whose higher wages make them by definition less efficient, ceteris paribus (a younger person can do the same job for less pay).
3) "Foreign talent" is imported to perform functions essential to Singapore's ambition to become a financial / biomedical / cultural hub.

I went on to argue that the economic environment shapes the social environment: people are conditioned to value utility over fidelity - both in the workplace and elsewhere, people are judged more for his or her usefulness than any other quality. This has an impact on interpersonal relationships, which could be the reason why families are getting smaller and more fragile.

(I noticed a quintessentially Singaporean argument in one of the essays:

Singapore's dependence on Malaysia for a key resource like water is politically disadvantages; Malaysia can use the threat of cutting off the water supply as leverage... As Singapore's industries is heavily reliant on a consistent water supply, cutting it off could be disastrous...

Um... PEOPLE DYING OF THIRST is also rather disastrous, imho.)


Mr. Wang independently corroborates the points about the economic paradigm.