Population policy has touched every family in our island republic. Anecdotally I can recall the anguish of families who badly wanted more children but submitted to the carrots and sticks of the party-state. The many who obeyed in good faith also served to further give credence to the notion that citizens' behaviour could be modified at will by bureaucratic fiat employing the correct mix of incentives/disincentives. I have also heard the smoldering resentment from families who were penalized for having too many children. Embers that burst into flame anew when the government started offering baby bonuses without even an apology to them. I believe that the current official position runs something like: "Yes, we made a u-turn but our policy was correct at the time."

To his credit, Prof Saw manages to maintains a calm and scholarly tone throughout the book. Nonetheless it was hard to read it without emotion welling up. This, after all, is a study into the exercise of naked power over the genitals and coitus of my parents' generation that makes the current implementation of pronatalist policies look positively huggable; the study cannot help but evoke memories of how "excess" siblings were penalized or haunting possibilities of that "extra" brother or sister that our parents wanted but never had.

One argument for "strong" (i.e. illiberal authoritarian) government is that it can decide on and implement policy changes more quickly; it is less constrained by (irrational and backwardly conservative) public opinion, non-government organizations, the media, opposition parties etc. The implication of Prof Saw's book is that this was clearly not the case for Singapore's population policy.

On pages 160-1, he details how he and other academics became worried about the potential problems that could come from the fertility rate staying below the total fertility replacement level of 2.1 for too long. Their concerns were expressed in the 1977 Report of the Singapore Family Planning and Population Board, a paper at the 1979 National Academy of Science-Singapore Science Centre Singapore Towards the Year 2000 seminar and his 1980 book Population Control for Zero Growth in Singapore which called for the review and abolition of the antinatalist policies of the government.

A high-level Inter-Ministerial Population Committee was finally established in Dec 1984 and submitted its recommendations in Jan 1987. In the meantime, Prof Saw had two articles arguing his case published in the Sunday Times on 15 June and 6 July 1986 and then Acting Minister for Health Yeo Cheow Tong called for suggestions from the public on 24 July 1986. "Have Three Or More If You Can Afford It" were finally announced by then First DPM Goh Chok Tong on 1 Mar 1987 and Finance Minister Richard Hu on 4 Mar 1987 but antinatalist measures remained in place to prevent excessive fertility increase among the poor and less-educated.

This might be cited as a case of what Ngiam Tong Dow calls the Civil Service flying on autopilot but, as a former civil servant, I would just like to say that the Civil Service exists to carry out the policies of the elected government and obey the legislation enacted by Parliament. Civil servants may have varying degrees of discretion but they cannot independently kill major sacred cow policies - only their political masters (with their electoral mandate and accountability) can sign such death warrants. But they do have the ability and duty to highlight problems to their ministers. If the relevant documents are ever declassified, it will fascinating to see what the various ministries (including MINDEF with its 18+ year projections on the SAF's estab/holding) were advising.

There are plenty of other interesting nuggets in Prof Saw's book (e.g. Ch 9 "Uplifting Fertility of Better-Educated Women" and Appendix A with then-PM Lee Kuan Yew's 1983 National Day Rally speech that was a shocking reminder of his attitude towards women and belief in eugenics - this speech is not listed in the National Archives Stars database of 1,949 speeches by MM Lee) but as this post is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the book, I won't be going into them. However I do encourage readers of this post to give this erudite work a look - if you are Singaporean, it is most definitely relevant to your past, present and future.

A final two comparative points. Firstly, the worldwide consensus at the time was heavily antinatalist. Demographers were largely concerned at how developing countries were entering stage two of the demographic transition model and were not moving into stage three quickly enough with Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb represented the zeitgeist; I briefly surveyed 6 other books on this topic published from 1957 to 1976 and they were unanimous in aiming their research towards producing policy prescriptions for fertility reduction - the only exception was Alfred Sauvy's General Theory of Population (Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p.232 where he says: "Malthusianism is a kind of atrophy of the creative spirit."

However he seemed to be a rather eccentric maverick Frenchman railing a global consensus that saw the United Nations designating 1974 as World Population Year, firmly of the view that "rapid population growth was not only a hindrance to the economic and social development of less developed countries but also, if present rates of increase were to continue, a threat to the well-being, and possibly even the survival, of both rich and poor countries." Richard Symonds and Michael Carder, The United Nations and the Population Question: 1945-70 (Sussex University Press, 1973), pp.186-7.

Secondly, Singapore is not alone. The Financial Times Weekend magazine (2006-07-08/9, pp.24-25) just published a story on Shin Dong-jin, Head of South Korea's Low Population Department. The article is rich with irony. Mr Shin started out his career working to get the fertility rate down from 4.53 to 2.1 by 1990. This was achieved in 1988 and continued to fall to 1.59 in 1990 whereupon the South Korean government changed tack (whereas the Singapore government took a much longer time in response to similar data). Even so, South Korea's birth rate is currently 1.08 (Singapore's 2004 figure is 1.24 - Singapore Dept of Statistics PDF). And Mr Shin's 28 year old daughter does not plan to get married anytime soon.