I moved to Singapore in January 2010. It has been nine months now, and I can finally say that I know Singapore “a bit”.
Today, on “Today” free newspaper, they write an article called “Challenge for Singapore is to grow pool of entrepreneurs: MM Lee”.
**Minister Mentor Lee **is the founding father of Singapore.
And he’s right. It’s a challenge.
This is what he said during the Russia-Singapore Business Forum yesterday: “We’re largely Chinese and Indians. Both Chinese and Indians, the best go into Government, they don’t go into enterprise.”
I think he’s right, and I also think that this problem is easily fixable: give an INSTANT Visa to any graduate from selected Universities that requests it, or from any US/EU University, or from specific nationalities (EU/US/Iceland/Switzerland/Russia/Australia/New Zealand) to start with.
You might ask them to pay, say, 2,000 SGD (Singapore Dollars), or 5,000 SGD, if you think that too many people are going to apply. Or give it for free to the first 10,000 applicants.
That’s an easy way to increase the non-Indian and non-Chinese population, and bring more entrepreneurship in Singapore.
Otherwise, these people will look somewhere else, and go somewhere else.
Simple things work better.
As an off-topic, I’d also like to mention something else that MM Lee said, answering the question “Are you happy?”: “A person who’s happy all the time, I think won’t make much progress”.
Not true. I’ll explain in a longer post on happiness.