Selected essays
Attempts to think seriously about social issues, policy and ethics through questions that do not have easy answers: how ideas and action intersect in the systems that shape people's lives.
Writing is how I find out what I actually think.
Philosophy
Before asking how a policy should work, I want to know whether the principle underneath it holds. Questions about moral responsibility and the limits of individual freedom are not abstract to me. They arrive in every project on this site, dressed differently each time.
Legislation
Where principles become rules, and rules become the reality people have to live with. Debate taught me persuasion. Legislation forces me into process: how frameworks get built, how competing interests are reconciled and how a principle ends up as something people are required to follow. That raises questions advocacy cannot answer on its own. Who does this policy protect, and what happens to the people it overlooks? The casework I do at Meet-the-People Sessions shows me those are not theoretical. They arrive every week, in person.
Economics
Where I move from observation to interrogation. Scarcity can be modelled, and a model is only as good as the assumptions built into it. Watching how resources actually get allocated, here and in the communities I have worked in across the region, raised the questions the model does not ask. Why do some populations sit entirely outside formal economic systems? What does it cost when someone cannot participate, and who pays to keep a scheme running once the funding round ends? What the model cannot capture is not always a rounding error. Sometimes it is a person.
Philosophy and legislation
Is Tax Theft?
Written May 2023. Submitted to the John Locke Global Essay Competition 2023, philosophy question three.
Whether income tax is theft, taken as a genuine question rather than a provocation. The essay separates the legal claim from the moral one and tests each against three stakeholders: the individual, the government and society. The legal claim collapses quickly. The moral one does not, and the essay concedes that individuals do have a moral claim to pre-tax income and that taxation is coercive. It concludes that tax is nonetheless not theft, because the social contract and the uses tax is put to outweigh that claim. Writing it was the first time I noticed that a question can have a clear answer and still leave the objection standing.
Philosophy
Are you responsible for your beliefs?
Written May 2024. Submitted to the John Locke Global Essay Competition 2024, philosophy question three.
The essay argues that we do have enough control over how beliefs form to be held responsible for them. Not because we can choose what to believe on the spot, but because we choose what to expose ourselves to and whether to check anything. It works through the illusory truth effect, confirmation bias and what it calls epistemic negligence: the beliefs people accept out of convenience because checking is effortful and there is too much to check.
Legislation
Amending the Public Order Act in Singapore
Written June 2024. Drafted for the Moot Parliament Programme 2024, where I led the ACS(I) Team 1 drafting group.
Not an argument about a law but a bill: an executive summary, the amendments clause by clause and an explanatory statement. It proposes replacing the permit requirement for public assemblies with a notification requirement, and keeps the Commissioner’s power to impose conditions on public order and safety grounds while removing the grounds based on political content. It argues from the evidence that Singaporean attitudes to public discourse have already shifted, and from cases where permits were refused without reasons specific enough to act on.
Drafting is where I learned that a principle survives or fails on the wording of a single subsection, and that most of the work is anticipating how a clause will be used by someone who does not share your intention.
Economics
Man vs Machine: Navigating Education in an Automated World
Written October 2024. Submitted to the Harvard International Economics Essay Contest 2024, on workforce and education.
The essay asks which skills the economy will still reward when many cognitive tasks can be automated faster than a person can perform them. It refuses the easy answer that soft skills are the future, and runs a cost-benefit comparison instead: a STEM-heavy education produces technical skill that dates quickly, a soft-skills-heavy one produces adaptability without the technical grounding to use it. It argues for reweighting rather than replacing.
The half I care about more is the second half, which asks who would actually do it. Top-down through national curriculum and lifelong learning funding, taking SkillsFuture, Singapore’s own retraining scheme, as the working example. Bottom-up through class sizes, experiential learning and interdisciplinary study. That is the same question I now spend most of my time on: not what should be taught, but who is made responsible for teaching it and what pays for it.
Legislation
The Resolution of Frustrated Contracts
Written January 2025. Submitted to the Peter Cane Legal Reasoning Prize 2025.
A problem question rather than an essay. A boat is hired for a ceremonial viewing, the King falls ill, the event is cancelled and money has already been spent on both sides. Nobody is at fault and somebody still absorbs the loss. The answer works through Section 1 of the Law Reform (Frustrated Contracts) Act 1943 and lands on the trade-off in the statute itself: the discretion that lets a court reach a fair outcome is the same discretion that makes the outcome unpredictable before you get there.
It ends by saying legislators have to be careful how they phrase the grounds for that discretion. That is why this essay sits with the durability question rather than under legislation. Fairness is not a formula, and a rule that relies on judgement has to be drafted so the judgement is exercised the way it was meant to be.
What the five have in common
I did not set out to write about the same thing five times. Looking at them together, I have. A principle only starts to matter once someone has to live under it, and every one of these essays is about the moment that happens. Tax becomes coercive at the point of collection. A belief becomes accountable when it turns into action. A right to assemble is worth what the permit process leaves of it.
The last two arrive at the same place from opposite directions. One asks who should absorb a loss when nobody is at fault, and finds that the answer depends on how carefully a statute was drafted. The other asks who should pay to teach the skills an automated economy still rewards, and finds that the answer depends on whether a government builds the funding in. Both begin in law or economics and end in responsibility: who carries the burden, and what happens when nobody does?
I can identify who a rule overlooks and I can argue for a different one. Neither is the same as knowing what makes a rule hold. A commitment outlasts the people who made it only when something beyond individual goodwill sustains it. What that is, in a school, a platform or a statute, is the question I am still working through.
Shorter, more current writing on civil liberties, AI governance and media power lives on Policy commentary.