How can the government use our money to throw parties for public servants? 😱🏛️👨🏻💼
- Preface 📖
- The Efficiency Of Parties 🎉🎊
- Conclusion
- AI Assistant Review 🧠
- A Plea For Progress In Public Perception
Preface 📖
Recently I got to be part of the Change Of Command (COC) event for Singapore’s Armour Formation. It’s the last major event I’ll experience before I get discharged from full-time service in 2 months. The COC event comprised of a parade and a reception, and most guests were high-ranking members of the army.
The atmosphere at the reception was joyful. There were several buffet lines, and multiple stalls serving food on demand. Food was of good quality and variety. A live band with DJs and a singer was present. The singer sang an impressive variety of songs in multiple languages for several hours. In the makeshift family room, kids who did not know one another played games. During the event I helped out at the bar counter, serving free drinks to guests. I think we served over a thousand cans of beer. The place was bustling with laughter and conversation. Overall, the guests received a well-planned reception without being excessively lavish.
As everything was being set up and we were anticipating the arrival of the first guests, a colleague (NSF) lamented that taxpayers’ money was being spent on “such things”, presumably implying that he felt the event was a wasteful use of taxation funds. The inefficiencies of government bureaucracy are well-known. But in this case my colleague betrayed a parochial perception of efficiency.
The Efficiency Of Parties 🎉
Yet this facile take on the value of the event is understandable. Why is the government spending good money on food and beverages? With so many competing uses of public funds, how are these “added perks” and “extra privileges” warranted? Is this not a prodigal abuse of money on something that is nothing more than a frivolous and unfruitful party?
Defence Ⅰ 🍻
First we note the utility directly provided to the participants of the event. This consequence is the most immediate, yet for some reason often overlooked, or at least discounted. For some reason, some people expect civil servants to live more ascetic lives.
The guests enjoyed themselves, taking a Tuesday night away from work or family to meet colleagues from other units, over some food, snacks and alcohol, in an atmosphere that was vibrant and buzzing. Though my branchmates and I had to carry out tasks until 11pm, I enjoyed the event and it was memorable, adding flavour to the often-mundane and regimental military life. Our superiors allowed us to take food before the guests arrived and we could drink and consume largely at our own discretion.
Defence Ⅱ 💲
Is this event an additional perk of the job of an army regular? For me, as I am conscripted, this event is a bonus. I would be where I am regardless. But for a regular who voluntarily exchanged his/her labour for the compensation (in the widest sense) the job provides, the benefits of such events are not an extra dividend, because the benefits are part of what a regular is minimally willing to accept for the job. Of course, we can only say this with absolute certainty under some idealised assumptions. But we can reasonably expect the approximate result in practice. This leads us to contend that without such events, the army has to offer better terms of contract, for instance in the form of more generous monetary remuneration, to maintain their ability to attract and retain workers, thus offsetting the direct fiscal savings of not holding such events, all else being equal. Ultimately, the monetary costs of the event are not as substantial as they might have on first impression appeared.
Defence Ⅲ 🤝
Thirdly, but not least, this event brought together regulars from different units and branches of the army together as organisers, executers or guests. Such an event, via multiple routes, builds relationships and rapport. For instance I saw roughly a dozen warrant officers of different ranks and appointments hold meetings, discussing how to ensure the parade ran smoothly. Talk about their work was interspersed with casual conversation and chortles. Through processes like this, networks are expanded, reducing degrees of separation. This makes regulars more efficient when carrying out their own tasks, or when conducting activities across units, increasing productivity and work quality. From my experience in carrying out tasks, on multiple occasions a superior would get in touch with a contact from another unit for assistance. For example, we may loan equipment from a unit that is currently in recess, or not at peak operational capacity. Help often goes the other way too. This sharing of equipment reduces overall logistical load and hence cost. On the whole, the importance of good working relationships must be emphasised. Between militaries evenly-matched in hardware, wars are won by superior coordination.
Recapitulation
Hence the costs of such events almost certainly get recouped. The benefits are also reaped over an extended period, and they add up to a substantial amount. Consider how private companies, which are often modelled as profit-maximising entities and may have stronger incentives for budgetary prudence, also organise celebrations for its employees. Such celebrations may come partly from benevolence and generosity, but the ubiquity and opulence of some of these private-sector events surely evidence their practical value too. It would be difficult to quantify precisely, but, rather than being an extravagant dissipation of public funds, it is not implausible for the COC reception to be one of the most efficient uses of taxpayers’ money.
Conclusion
In many situations, we would do well to look beyond what is immediately visible and cast a wider view of something’s consequence. Many people may fail to appreciate the ramifications of tariffs, subsidies or the minimum wage, beyond their plain first-order effects.
In the 19th century, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”. A very apt title for the book, in which he offered the famous polemic we now know as the “broken window fallacy”. Through elucidating “what is not seen”, the parable of the broken window confutes the notion that damages, such as a broken window, boost the economy by stimulating industry.
Maybe we will end this post with the opening to that book:
“In the sphere of economics an action, a habit, an institution or a law engenders not just one effect but a series of effects. Of these effects only the first is immediate; it is revealed simultaneously with its cause, it is seen. The others merely occur successively, they are not seen; we are lucky if we foresee them.
The entire difference between a bad and a good Economist is apparent here. A bad one relies on the visible effect while the good one takes account both of the effect one can see and of those one must foresee.
However, the difference between these is huge, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. From which it follows that a bad Economist will pursue a small current benefit that is followed by a large disadvantage in the future, while a true Economist will pursue a large benefit in the future at the risk of suffering a small disadvantage immediately.
This distinction is also true, moreover, for hygiene and the moral code. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are those that follow. Examples of this are debauchery, laziness and prodigality. So when a man, touched by some effect that can be seen, has not yet learnt to discern those that are not seen, he gives way to disastrous habits, not just through inclination but deliberately.
This explains the inexorably painful evolution of the human race. Ignorance surrounds its cradle; it therefore makes up its mind with regards to its acts according to their initial consequences, the only ones it is able to see originally. It is only in the long run that it learns to take account of the others. Two masters, very different from one another, teach it this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience governs effectively but brutally. It teaches us all the effects of an action by having us feel them and we cannot fail to end up learning that fire burns, by burning ourselves. For this rough teacher, I would like, as far as possible to substitute a gentler one: foresight. This is why I will be seeking the consequences of certain economic phenomena by opposing those that are not seen to those that are seen.”
AI Assistant Review 🧠
I used my website builder’s AI Assistant for the first time, to review my post’s contents up to this point. I was stunned. This is what it generated:
“The content provides a thorough defence of using public funds for events like the Change Of Command (COC) in Singapore’s military. The arguments presented are well-supported and highlight the benefits of such events, including the enjoyment of participants, the importance of building relationships, and the long-term efficiency gains. The post effectively counters the perception that these events are wasteful expenditures. Good job!”
This AI managed to summarise, using its own words, the background of the issue and the main points of my position. Granted, my structure of headings assisted the AI in this respect, but it’s still impressive. It rightly avoided the excerpt I copied-and-pasted from Bastiat. It used such an encouraging tone, which I must admit caused a temporary rise in my serotonin levels.
AI is frightening but we must somehow learn to adapt to it.
Reflections
Summarising ideas is a high-order human skill, one that requires proficiency in a composite of basic faculties.
But AI can now summarise entire research papers, content notes and audio recordings pretty well. Is making students craft summaries in school still relevant? We will encounter a deeper conundrum of normativity in examining this issue. To what extent do we value the skills development attained through summary-writing, independent of the practical utility of summary-composition itself, in which AI surpasses most humans? Policymaking is getting increasingly trickier normatively. We would need to first consider the positive question of whether there are substitutes to summary-writing that train similar basic competencies, and if those skills are still relevant.
I guess that at some educational strata summary-writing could be phased out or given less pre-eminence soon.
A Plea For Progress In Public Perception
Bastiat’s core idea is relevant in an age of widespread voting rights, but prevalent parochialism. Even for societies without suffrage, the idea can be useful in cultivating a thoughtful and discerning people.
Of course, it is not always plain and simple, to determine what is classified as “that which is seen” and what “that which is not seen”. These are a function of a people’s collective subjective perception, which itself is made up of each individual’s different understanding. Moreover, we will not conceive the full gamut of consequences, nor would we know with certitude how to differentiate all of them among the 2 categories. There could be a case to be made that a dichotomous split does not exist at all. But these are not the point. We don’t need to know the substantive consequences of every policy or incident. (That’s not possible. The most well-learned people on Earth do not and will not know everything in their own field, and disagree vehemently amongst one another on positive affairs.) We just need to have at least the awareness, discipline and literacy to know that such things as “that which is not seen” lurk, and adjust our approaches to interpretation, methods of judgement, and perceptions.
BLOGOPUS 
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