The Sepupunomics of Racial Discrimination – Part 1.

Victor Tan
 

Sepupus, it’s been a minute! Haven’t been posting videos for a while because I was working on Sepupunomics (read: To serve you!), but here we are with a brand new update featuring some of our acquaintances from PAS that’s giving ✨racial discrimination ✨, which has been completely fair game for economics since Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination.

Now, why am I writing this?

Essentially, Malaysia got its very first Malaysian Chinese three-star general in the country (Congratulations, Datuk Johnny Lim!), and then immediately, as with most problems in Malaysia… PAS.

PAS’s Zaharudin Mohammad, who is also an in-law of PAS president and communism accuser Hadi Awang, came out and started undertaking wild speculations about Chinese prime ministers and the lot, feeding into the racial frenzy, imaginary fear of oppression, and rabble-rousing that the party is so famous for using in lieu of any sort of measurable, tangible economic success or semblance of intelligent decision making.

Speaking of intelligent decision making, seems like even though he tried deleting his Facebook post, Zaharudin didn’t make the intelligent decision of removing his Instagram post, which I reproduce here.

Meanwhile, he is just casually saying now that what he wrote was taken out of context.

I find that interesting. How and in what way was it taken out of context?

How do you even take something out of context when you established the context very clearly, and in what way was it not related to the context? Is there genuinely no relation? I wonder.

Well, if it was not related to the context because he was just writing in an incomprehensible way while expecting his piece to somehow go viral or go completely off into the stratosphere, I think that he’s got something else coming there – I also find it funny how he proceeded to delete the Facebook post but left the Instagram post intact. If he forgot, then he’s incompetent. If he left it up, then I suppose it’s pretty obvious that he’s just intentionally baiting us. Neither is a good sign.

Update: He tried to come up with a justification. He also cropped the picture and tried to hide the fact that he misspelled “My Second Home” and cannot even get simple facts correct lmao.

But is this just a Zaharudin thing?

Before you ask about whether discrimination exists in Malaysia and before you meet any Malaysians who ask if you are crazy for asking this question…

Yes, discrimination 100% exists and it is a widespread thing – you can already see it in the comments below.

Oh, did you need a trigger warning? Here’s your trigger warning.

Now, confront reality.

What did you learn from that wonderful sampling of comments?

These are real comments from people who are not Zaharudin.

These are people who seem to have all these suspicions and hears about Chinese people and who will mock Chinese people, lie about Chinese people, express paranoia about Chinese people or about people from other races, and thrive in calling Chinese people communists whether that’s true or not, while casually suggesting that Malaysians are communists and do not deserve their positions.

The thing is, whether they even understand what communism is is beyond a convenient label for Chinese people deeply suspect, and frankly, this is just scratching the surfaceNot even close.

How is this related to Economics?

Discrimination is deeply relevant to Economics, given that discrimination is the differential treatment of individuals or groups based on perceived group membership, rather than individual merit.

Discrimination shapes how resources are allocated in our society by others, and it also shapes our view of ourselves and what seems logical for us to do when we ourselves allocate resources, whether we invest our time into an endeavor, our money into a business, or our presence within a country.

So, what does it mean when people and the politicians that they elect support, favour, and facilitate discrimination with no qualms or compunction?

Politicians or elected representatives are in charge of constituencies. They decide how resources will be allocated for their people, how they will fight for their people, and how in turn they will fight in order to push forward the nation as a whole. In deciding intelligently or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be how the nation’s resources income from taxation dividends and everything else will end up giving Malaysia the best possible future.

If you elect people like this, they are the ones who are going to make decisions about how government budgets will be spent.

They will be the ones planning out what’s going to happen in the country, and they will be the ones who decide on the long-term vision of your country’s development.

Now here’s a question for you:

How confident do you feel about leaders like Mr. Zaharudin in terms of how they could potentially steer Malaysia as a country?

Let me be frank here, I am not confident in them at all.

Just look at this person. He cannot write properly, he can barely articulate himself, and he features in this beautiful little graphic here raising question after question about familial ownership and affiliation… And that’s even leaving aside the fact of his casual discrimination and the way that affects the country as a whole.

The unfortunate thing about Malaysia though is that people’s utility functions and the way that they make their decisions, at least in aggregate and within certain sub-classes of people within Malaysia, is such that people like this individual are likely to come to the top not necessarily due to any particular merit but instead because he happens to fit the correct religious profile.

Apparently, this is a sufficient condition – no need for ethics, no need for administrative skill, no need for anything beyond a qualification from a mediocre religious school…It also helps if they discriminate against the correct people while appealing to the weaker part of the population that somehow thinks that they are constantly persecuted or need to thrive and fight against colonialism even though it isn’t there in the same process becoming colonizers themselves while pretending that that’s not what they’re doing.

The unfortunate thing about democracy is that if enough people choose individuals like this to lead a country and if their propaganda effort succeeds, which we can at least partly see with some of these people in the heartlands of Malaysia with people who are less educated, then that’s probably what’s going to happen unless there is a realization that there is a danger in the first place on a wide scale, beyond any echo chamber, any language community, any platform – which means that if you merely leave this here and don’t talk about it, it will die as an issue unless you start discussing it.

Having said that, we are not completely blind on this or committed only to just raving about our personal opinions – there is a little bit of economics research about discrimination, most of it is done outside of Malaysia, and what is done in Malaysia concerns the private sector, not the public sector, the military, or otherwise.

Beyond Greg, Emily, Lakisha, and Jamal, we have our very own Muhammad Abdul Khalid and Lee Hwok Aun, who feature in the study of this extremely interesting topic with Discrimination of High Degrees; It is possible to study, understand, comprehend, and perhaps address this issue and the toxic subcultures that have come up around it.

I’ll have more to say about that, but for now, here’s a new video to enjoy – Apparently, Chinese People Cannot Defend Malaysia!

Discrimination is a fascinating topic, so expect more posts on this topic soon!

Meanwhile… Do you think that people with religious credentials should be leading Malaysia?

And what kind of future would Malaysia have economically if people like these were to presume to lead?

Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Cambridge Economics 9708 Paper 2 and Paper 4 sample answers are out!

Victor Tan
 

Sepupus! 

Those of you who are taking A-levels, listen up! 

There are now sample responses for both Paper 2 and Paper 4 in the Premium Memberships section, and you will find them here!

Go ahead and make use of them and conquer and bathe in the blood of your enemies do your very best to learn the patterns that you need to succeed and achieve that scholarship that UMS, that university admission that you’ve always dreamt of!

The sample answers are tailored to give you a sense of the highest performing essay scripts for the exam across modalities and they include the relevant diagrams and justifications; they are a resource designed to help you achieve the highest possible marks with the least possible effort. If you just take the time to look through them, practice seeing if you can reproduce such a level of response, and then repeat.

Each response is tailored to the official mark schemes and materials which were developed by Cambridge, and they are your perfect companion to conquer A-Level economics! 

I think most of you are aware that A-levels economics is where it already starts getting hard. Writing analyses isn’t easy, and neither is getting ideas. 

Well, hopefully, reading sepupunomics has given you a little bit of insight here and there, and picking up our premium reports as well gives you lots of insight into plenty of issues which you may never have thought about before! 

As with the IGCSE sample responses, these aren’t meant to be used through copying and doing nothing else, but instead should be used wisely. There are a lot more examples and ideas here, and I hope that you will find this valuable and useful. 

Hopefully you will get a sense of how to answer these essay questions appropriately and also the kinds of things you need to do in order to target the highest possible scores!

Learn lots and sign up! 

Yours,

Sepupu. 

Malaysia’s Woke Malay e-Commerce Rule and the Sad Economics of Policy U-Turns: A Sepupunomics Analysis

Victor Tan
 

Sepupus, whether we like it or not, government policy affects every single one of us. If it is good, government policy presumably can be good, helpful, and desirable for us. But when I see things like this recent move brought forth by Malaysia’s Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living, I really have to think back to that old Milton Friedman adage.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

In this case, though, it is actually worse.

Here we have a whole government deciding that all e-commerce listings have to be in Malay and deciding to do it all in blitz regulation announced on June 20th, presumably because some uneducated politician decided that he wanted to become the most Malay, the most heroic, the most nationalist person in the entire world, planet, country, civilization, universe.

Result? Policy cancelled by June 23rd.

Now, what is the problem in this case?

Oh, there isn’t a problem, there are multiple problems.

I think that most of you who are reading this are wise and you have a sense of what’s going wrong. But anyway, why don’t we list them?

How about performative woke virtue signaling about language and national identity as if that is going to help people become more nationalistic or loyal because some idiot wants to create a career?

What about introducing regulation and U-turning at the speed of light the moment people get angry?

What about never ever once or even for a single moment of your poorly-researched life considering that anything could go wrong because you are incapable and incompetent, and you are so used to the addiction of what the baptism that you cannot imagine ever just introducing something and then getting it right?

I’m sure that there are some good policies from our government once in a while, but I think that our policymakers need to understand this: Mistakes are costly and they are much more largely and asymmetrically evaluated as disastrous than good things.

In very simple terms that I think that we can all understand, mistakes and turning back indicate a lack of political stability, which in turn directly drops demand for Malaysian currency because people are wary of investing in things that just continually change; under exchange rate determination theory (which clearly you’re not expected to understand in detail or in full but are most welcome to), a drop in demand for currency ceteris paribus (which means ‘all things held equal’, and that we’ll talk more about later) leads to a drop in the exchange rate value – if this were an economics exam for A Levels or IB, you could analyze it like this. (Free membership required)

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Alright, I hope you enjoyed that analysis. More of that to come later, likely as a case study or sample commentary for the International Baccalaureate Economics IA.

Here’s my point.

Pandering to so-called national identity without reference to the market or what would be desirable or beneficial for the market as opposed to meaningless and ultimately useless things is not likely to be beneficial for anyone, whether from a cultural and linguistic perspective or from the perspective of actually making Malaysia a slightly better place. Instead, it will make people think that Malaysia is a basket case – Not that they didn’t already think it was, given its corruption scandals, language policy flip-flops, religious sabre-rattling, and hundreds of different flavors of identity politics and politics combined with religion that reflect an immature political and economic culture.

There is no scenario whereby this would make most people any happier, nor would it actually increase sales from e-commerce; instead, it is likely to decrease them. It would also impose unnecessary costs upon e-commerce sellers and users in the first place. This is the reason why the government had to U-turn – because they had to spend time, money, and effort dealing with this kind of nonsense.

It is shocking to me that there are still politicians in this country who would try this kind of thing without learning from experience.

It is like dying in a video game and then proceeding to die repeatedly in the exact same way without ever learning anything over and over again thinking that somehow you could do the same thing in order to try to claim victory, either because you were unable to read history or you were too stupid to recognize patterns.

Well, here’s a pattern for you, one observed by Albert Einstein himself.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

There is a chance that that didn’t actually come from Albert Einstein though I cannot confirm that he did not say it, but anyway…

Woke policies are not how you redeem the pride of your country. They are the way to destroy it over and over again until there is nothing left, and egotistical politicians with pet projects to try to make their names by so-called being heroes for the country are not a gift to the nation. They are parasites upon it. And if allowed to run high carnival with no questioning from the public, they will casually break the country.

I am sure that some woke politicians would like to take a different tack and would like to celebrate how nationalistic, how patriotic, how wonderful they are in their attempt to assert the identity of this place and somehow prove that we are no longer under colonialism because that is absolutely what they need to do in becoming the heroes of the Global South and heroes for their generation.

To that, I say, rather than taking a page from woke people who were unsuccessful in everything they did, it seems more logical to me to take what Lee Hsien Loong had once suggested or hinted at in his 2015 S Rajaratnam lecture, which is well worth a watch.

If your country does not have itself together, if its things are not in order, if it is not doing well, it can say a million different things but nobody will ever listen. It is nice to preach justice and talk about how beautiful, wonderful, and amazing you are, but at the end of the day, if you cannot even handle simple and basic things, then there is no point in your talking because people will not listen to you.

It is natural and understandable that that is so.

After all, you cannot give what you do not have, and if what you do not have is the basic common sense to be able to realise that you should not be dealing with this kind of woke policy, it beggars belief as to how it is that you could ever proclaim that you are a hero for justice, or anything worthy of emulation for anything other than a coincidence of geography and the good fortune of natural resources.

How lucky Malaysia is to have these. With these kinds of leaders, if they had inherited Singapore instead, it is incomprehensible how they could have ever survived.

I will be writing a series of IB Diploma sample IA commentaries soon, and this will be one of the many case studies. Please look forward to it and make sure to bookmark this page, RSS feed it, or track it by signing up for our newsletter to make sure that you don’t miss out on everything that’s going on. Of course, signing up for a premium membership if you don’t have one already is a great idea.

Thank you for reading, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one!

Sepupu.