Policy commentary
Shorter pieces, written roughly once a month since December 2024. This is where I work out in public what I have not yet worked out in private. Some of these questions I have come back to more than once.
The questions underneath the work
Policy design
Who a rule reaches
Policy as it is received rather than as it is written. A scheme can be published, funded and available and still not arrive. These are about the distance between a rule and the person it was written for.
Participation
Who gets a say
Whose voice counts, and who was in the room when a decision was taken about them. Whether being heard is the same as being served.
Civil liberties
Where the line on dissent sits
What a society permits to be said and done, what that costs and who pays it. Two of these compare Singapore with the United States directly.
Institutions
What makes a commitment last
Incentives, funding and durability. Whether anything holds once the attention moves on, and what makes a government or a platform keep to something when keeping to it becomes inconvenient.
The Permanent Record
Mine is the first generation to grow up with a complete, searchable record of itself. Escaping your past is becoming something you can afford, or cannot.
The Language of Exclusion: When Policy Speaks and You Cannot Follow
At a Meet-the-People session, I could not explain a CPF rule because I had not understood it myself. Availability is not the same as accessibility.
Tuition Culture: The Unequal Playing Field
Households spent $1.8 billion on tuition in 2023 alone. When most of a class arrives already taught, the students who cannot afford to keep up fall further behind.
Can Books Break the Barriers?
Over 750 million adults and children lack basic literacy. Beyond test scores, finding yourself in a story is the first signal that your perspective belongs at all.
The Age of Artificial Intelligence: The Greater Equaliser or Divider?
AI is cheap and powerful for anyone with a device and a connection. For everyone else it widens a gap that already existed. The bias in these systems is not a bug.
The same question, wherever policy lands
The region
A vantage, not a subject
Singapore, Australia, Nepal, India, Malaysia, Pakistan.
A CPF form at a constituency office. A voting age argued in Parliament. Nepal’s prime minister resigning in 48 hours. India’s farm unions. Malaysian media ownership.
Read separately, posts about separate countries. Read together, one person looking at the same problem from inside a region rather than reporting on it from outside.
Policy
Followed past the argument
From what a rule says, to whether it reaches anyone, to who pays when it does not.
From Chalkboards to Change asks what a demonstration policy could not anticipate. Two years later, When Protest Goes Digital returns to it by name and asks what actually moves an institution.
That is implementation rather than opinion, and it is only visible if the two are joined.
Institutions
What holds, and what does not
Incentives, funding and the gap between a promise and its delivery.
The Algorithm Decides Who Gets Heard revisits its own assumption and lands on incentives rather than rules. Talking to the Machine reopens an earlier post and finds the divide was never access.
Both end where the durability question begins: what makes anything hold once the attention moves on.