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Month: July 2025

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Lee Hsien Loong at the 69th Economic Society of Singapore Annual Dinner.

Victor Tan
 

Two nights ago, the Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore posted an excellent talk by Singaporean Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the 69th Economic Society of Singapore annual dinner!

There is plenty to learn about and a ton of different insights on many different topics from SM Lee, and I highly recommend anyone who is interested in the economics of our changing world order to watch it with interest and even to consider taking notes.

There is plenty to learn here, from marginal thinking to tariffs to the realities of taking back a policy – and it is all very much worthwhile.

The only part that triggered me a little bit was when a lady representing Singapore’s GIC asked a question about the skill sets that will be important for the workforce in the age of generative AI; I made a small contribution on the page as such, and you can also read it here, through the pictures.

Here was my response.

SM Lee,

Thank you for the insightful talk, which offered me a lot of insight into trade policy, the politics intertwined with economics, the Pandora’s box that is Liberation Day tariffs, and so many other things!

It was packed with insights and many thoughts that I found were interesting to think about – I certainly will choose not to lie flat and hope to make a difference in many good ways, whether from where I am in Malaysia at the moment or in any eventuality of time when I should move to Singapore, which I would be happy to if the correct opportunity were to come along.

If I were to make a small contribution, SM, the lady from the GIC was asking specifically about generative AI, which is not in general the same as artificial intelligence and machine learning models that seem more pertinent to the examples you provided. Generative AI is more ChatGPT than medical diagnosis, and is more related to creating text, images, and videos upon prompting and making use of computing systems in order to create things that humans might otherwise not have the inspiration or understanding to be able to do – which encompasses anything from writing emails from bullet points – and then summarizing emails into bullet points!!! – to doing homework and in turn to generating pictures and even movies.

Perhaps part of the skill of functioning well in a generative AI world is knowing and understanding what it means to be human and how to accentuate and articulate that humanness in the face even of multiple AI-generated sources of influence, whether to appeal to others who are also human through personality and advocacy or being able to distinguish what was artificially generated from what was humanly made to finer and finer degrees even as we become more integrated and AI in turn shapes our patterns of thought.

I would further add to that that at 43:56 you said “automatic” general intelligence, Sir.

If I may make a small correction, it is actually Artificial General Intelligence; although it is yet to come fully into existence, the challenges that it poses, I think, are not just about what statistical models can produce, but in turn also touch upon the question of whether it can self-improve and get to a point whereby it becomes independent of human beings – a notion that is very interesting, philosophically speaking, though it is unclear that in the scenario of existence of such a thing, the concept of moving to another industry would be relevant.

It is definitely logical to think about what the technology can do at this point and to understand its implications and possible uses and how it can translate into second- or third-order effects as the technology changes.

We are left fundamentally still with the problem of managing how human beings live, work, interact, and negotiate the boundaries of a world that is changing and has changed in both this era and beyond.

Thank you again for your sharing, and I look forward to learning more from you in the future – if at a later point you will take up my invitation to join me on my podcast, I look forward to meeting you in that context then!

V.

Sorry for the irregular updates of late – will try to get back on track in a bit; enjoy the video!

Yours,

Sepupu.

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A Levels Blog Economics IGCSE Economics

Analysis Versus Evaluation

Victor Tan
 

Analyze better!

Your evaluation is not enough. 

If you were like me, these were words that you confronted in the course of your economics classes as a younger student. And if you are anything like me, they would have infuriated you as you wondered to yourself what it would mean to perform that strange, almost unavoidable injunction time after time as understanding eluded you and comprehension of what you were meant to do evaded your every grasp. 

In today’s blog post, I hope to explain the difference to you and also to ground your understanding of what it means to analyze and to evaluate to make your economics journey that much smoother, that much easier, and hopefully just a little more meaningful than you might have expected it to be. 

Ready? Let’s go!

Let’s start by revisiting something small, but fundamental and important. 

Economics is the study of choice under scarcity. As we discussed before, that scarcity can take the form of pretty much anything and everything that is finite in this universe. 

Most often we think of it as money, but it can also be time, or anything else that we could use to serve a goal in our universe.

Okay, great. Now have a look at the analysis and evaluation assessment objectives for a quick bit. 

All right, you’ve probably seen that before – it’s also relevant for IB Economics since all we really are interested in is just the general idea or concept of what this set of topics mean, so now let’s refresh everything a little bit.

Let’s first talk about analysis. 

You’re told that analysis means that you’re able to select, organize, and interpret data. You should be able to use economic information and data to recognize patterns and to deduce relationships, and apply economic analysis to written, numerical, diagrammatic, and graphical data and analyze economic issues and situations, identifying and developing links. 

Sounds like a mouthful? 

Sure, but here’s another way you can think about it. 

Think about it as understanding the results of a choice. 

Analyzing in economics is understanding and knowing consistently how to answer this question: what will happen if we make this choice according to economic theory? 

Here you can see why the diagrams come in because you need to be able to look at something that’s happening and understand how to apply the theory and what would happen according to the theory in the situation that you’re describing.

For example, if for some reason there is extremely good weather for the season or somehow all of the seeds that you use for a crop happen to spontaneously evolve and begin producing a much higher yield, what happens is that clearly more crops can be supplied at every single given price and you should be able to predict that a supply curve would then shift to the right based on that. 

On the other hand, there is evaluation, which is a little bit trickier.

Same with the other assessment objective, we know what that looks like for the IGCSE and A levels as well.

Evaluation, in the context of IGCSE/A Level economics, means being able to evaluate economic information and data, distinguish between economic analysis and unreasoned statements, recognize the uncertainties of outcomes of economic decisions and events, and communicate economic thinking in a logical manner. 

Think of evaluation as trying to decide if your choices make sense, the impacts of your choices on other people, how the choice could play out under different situations whether in the short-term or the long-term, and how your choice could affect different people or parties, amongst other things. 

In both cases, you are thinking and reasoning about choices across time frames, considering how choices affect others, yourself, and thinking about how scarce resources are used, provided, and distributed throughout our society. 

If this seems a little vague, it is often because you may not be thinking about the choices and the occurrences that may happen in our society and world from different points of view, or thinking deeply about how to understand the choices that we face in life.

That is natural because often times the world teaches us to take things as given. We are presented with a million different choices on a day-to-day basis and are so overwhelmed with them that it often becomes easy just to make choices all day. Well, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that economics trains you to participate in, and I think that it’s valuable to learn about it for that reason. Because it is relevant to everyone.

Now you might say that thinking about choice doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be learning about economics, and I totally respect that. But the framework that economics gives for thinking about choice I think is something that is definitely worthwhile to think about, so long as we live life on this planet and scarcity remains a real and lived out facet of human experience. 

Till the next one!

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Blog Economics Economy Reflections

Education and Economics: The Linkage and the Grand Design.

Victor Tan
 

Hello Sepupus one and all! 

Fun little blog post today. I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a while but a lot of syllabus planning and a whole range of other things got in the way.

But here we discuss for you right now the relationship between education and economics.

Whether you realize it or not, these two are linked with one another in an inextricable fashion, and it doesn’t matter that you don’t take economics at all because it remains true.

In this blog post, I hope to show you the outlines of the picture and help you understand how everything connects together in what some might say is a grand design, but what others might very easily and rightfully say is just “how the world works”.

Ready? Let’s go!

Now it’s no secret that in this blog you’re going to find a whole range of maximum value packed resources for education. Specifically you’ve got a range of different resources for IB, IGCSE, A-levels and everything out there.

Some of you out there who are of the opinion that education shouldn’t be linked to a particular syllabus, shouldn’t be linked to curricula, want to abandon your college degrees right now and go out and become heroes of the new liberal universe. Well you might want to read this and read it closely. 

When we talk about education, it is easy to just think of it as a process of making people learn, and indeed, that’s very much what it is.

Education is for training. 

In search of that training, students enter classrooms by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, and the millions, depending on whether you’re talking about the scale of a single classroom, a school, a country, or in turn, the world, to get training on language, mathematics, the sciences, history, and any number of other things in the service of an educational program, whether that of a nation aiming to shape its identity and build up a competent generation able to compete in the world or a private initiative that aims for the same, getting that parents will seek the very best possible outcomes with the resources that they invest into as they test out their philosophy of what is correct, proper, and necessary for the whole advancement of a child. 

Isn’t it wonderful that people are so dedicated to self-improvement? 

That they would all automatically and out of the goodness of their own hearts direct their kids to go through academic torture all in the name of gaining wonderful skills in the modern world for their self-empowerment? 

Well, you might think that, but in most parts of modern society—no matter what country you live in nowadays—If you have children below the age of 18, and you don’t send them to school and have no valid reason, you will be fined, you may be arrested, and child and social services may arrest you — this is because 

Education is not just training; it is also legally required.

In other words? The state takes an interest in whether you train your child or not; negligence of your child’s education is in fact against the law. 

Is it just a matter of the law though?

Well, as it turns out, no. That’s just one part of it. Because if parents were just coerced to bring their kids into schools against their will, you could imagine there being an entire generation of people just malingering, doing the bare minimum in order to help their kids not become prison liabilities for them.

The reality, however, is infinitely more complex and interesting than that. 

Rather than just doing the bare minimum, parents engage in incredibly complex stances to ensure that their children not only enter the education system but thrive within it by an act of willing volition.

But before you come up with your fanciful speculations about what is and what is not, no, it is not by pure altruism that this happens and it is not on account of a mere game.

Education not only trains, but it also certifies.

This one has a college degree – good! He has certain basic skills! Wow! This one graduated from a top university. Amazing! He must be really smart! Wow, this one reads Sepupunomics and also took IG, A-levels and IB economics. He must surely know a lot about economics!

What’s the corollary of that? 

Education not only certifies but it facilitates selection. 

It is probably easiest to show you what I mean with an example. 

Wow! We have so many qualified scholarship applicants, but only one scholarship to give. Hey! She got 10 A*s for her IGCSEs and we have one scholarship and everyone got 9A*s and one A and only 20 minutes to decide before clock out at 5pm. Let’s pick her!

Hey! We need some really smart people to work on our very sensitive project and we only have one hour to get through all the resumes before saving the world from Thanos! What do we do? 

Oh, the University of Chicago is renowned for smart people – hire him! (Sorry had to glaze my alma mater there LOL) 

And what’s the corollary of all that? 

Beyond teaching you about choice, giving you inspiration, cultivating the way that you think, make decisions, articulate yourself, and develop skills and develop skills that are important not only for functioning in the adult world but also in day-to-day life, education also shapes how other people make choices about you — Not only by certifying you but also providing mechanisms for training and assessing you across all relevant dimensions, which is what educational programs like the IGCSE A-levels, IB, and the whole smorgasbord of different economics courses you may encounter later in university may present to you, to not even speak about the ways that people can make inferences about whether you are educated or you are not from the way that you speak, the way that you articulate yourself, the topics that you raise, and the ideas that you communicate with the world. 

On these dual levels then, and in respect to the scarcity that we all share in both of time and money and a whole range of other resources that none of us have an infinite amount of. 

Education is inextricably linked with the economics that you are studying — Either formally if you’re taking one of the educational programs I mentioned earlier or otherwise or informally if you are just reading this and nodding along. 

Isn’t it lovely and meta to think about how by studying economics you learn about choice, and right now in reading this blog post you’re learning about how you are learning about choice? 

It’s almost like that John Green novel about turtles all the way down, except now this is economics and we are talking about choices all the way down and how they all take part in a common framework that can’t be separated from society and the real world as it stands. 

Whether it’s for training and you can’t get out of it because of the law, you’re seeking certification or in turn trying to be selected. It’s clear that education interfaces with economics in all too many critical ways. 

We would not pay the doctor who has no medical degree, nor would we hire someone who doesn’t have the right skills. It doesn’t make sense on both of those counts, and in both counts, the ostensible problem is a lack of education, whether in providing the certification that the doctor can actually perform the operation or in the vibe check that affirms that the person who’s trying to get a job from you is actually someone worth while speaking to or listening to. 

When we move beyond that abstraction, it becomes easier to understand. 

If you pay this doctor and not an educated doctor, you lose your money — Not only might it be the case that your disease won’t be cured, but if he prescribes you the wrong medicine or does the wrong kind of treatment, you could become even more ill and in the worst case die. If you hire someone who doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the learning a bit of someone who needs to master a very difficult field in a very short amount of time, the money that you pay out every single month to put them in the job that you might put them in would actively be a drain on company expenses with no measurable benefit. 

Look through and understand our economy and the way that we provide and receive services, instruction, training, and guidance in all of its forms, and there you will see — In every industry and in every way, the dynamics of scarcity, choice, education, and decision come into play in a symphony that even if you cannot directly tease apart, you engage in playing a role, even if you are not conscious of it.

Alright, and that’s all for today. I’ll see you guys in the next one! 

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