NASA Report: Too Many Failures with Faster, Better, Cheaper"
Having a slogan linked to the Mars disasters is not so auspicious. However, "cheaper, better, faster" is not something new in Singapore. It has been practiced by the PAP govt for the past 2 decades - cheaper workers, better pay for elites and faster price hikes. The PAP has diversified its interests and it policy decisions clearly show this. Worker's Party MP Low once asked the PAP ministers to peg their pay as a multiple of the lowest earning 20% of the workforce to align their interests with those with the greatest need for improvement. The PAP refused and chose to peg their salaries to the highest earnings in various professions. The result is ballooning income gap - a constant stream of pro-business policies, regressive taxation and shifting cost burdens from govt to ordinary Singaporeans to lower corporate tax. When you have a govt driven by such mis-incentives, you sometimes wished they were not so efficient...so efficient at hiking prices, eliminating subsidies and thinking of the next method of squeezing Singaporeans.
The "cheaper, better, faster" strategy like NASA's creates risks and passes them to ordinary Singaporeans. Because of the income gap, the faster we go with this economy (artificial steroids = massive foreign worker influx) the faster many Singaporeans fall towards the poverty line...hence Mr. Brown's famous article "Singaporeans are fed, up with progress!". We are also fed up with a govt that refuses to the interests of Singaporeans ahead of its other interests and it rewards itself handsomely for doing so.