Beyond metrics: Is Singapore’s fixation with measuring everything holding it back?
By turning life into a scorecard, we may be losing the incentive to come up with innovations whose impact cannot yet be measured.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Singapore is very good at assessing students and workers relative to one another, says the writer.
ST PHOTO: ONG WEE JIN
Holly Yang
Singaporeans have long excelled at answering questions that can be measured easily. What was one’s PSLE score? What was the ranking of one’s university? What is one’s housing status or starting salary? Increasingly, the scorecard has followed us into every corner of life.
But as Singapore debates why it has struggled to nurture a company like Samsung or TSMC, perhaps we should also ask a more uncomfortable question: What happens when a society becomes exceptionally good at measuring people relative to one another?
