Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

This piece was published in the Sunday Times on 26 October 2003, before the whole NKF ‘peanuts’ scandal broke:

26 October 2003
It Pays to Think About Monkey Business
by Colin Goh

As a cartoonist who draws a strip about animals, I often redraw the faces of people I meet in my mind to fit their nearest animal counterpart.  So when Dubya came to visit Singapore, I couldn’t help but think of chimps. And in doing so, I couldn’t help but recall a phrase that’s been popular these past few years: if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Because as we all know, the US president – the world’s most powerful man – apparently draws less pay than our esteemed Ministers.  (According to a 2002 US Office of Personnal Management report, Dubya gets around S$522,000 a year, while the Straits Times reported on 24th May, 2003 that Ministers have a starting salary between $605,000 and $968,000 a year). So by justifying high pay, are we seriously suggesting that running Singapore is tougher than running the entire world, or maybe that Dubya lacks our Ministers’ abilities because he draws less?

Which again brings to my mind two recent seemingly unconnected events which together make profound statements about monkeys, pay and ourselves.

The first is the resignation of Richard Grasso as Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, after a public uproar about his $180 million pay package.

The second event, which happened the very same day that Grasso resigned, was the release of a study by two primatologists, Sarah Brosnan and Frans B.M. de Waal, where pairs of female capuchin monkeys were trained to give the scientists pebbles in exchange for slices of cucumber.

But one day, one monkey received a grape instead, while the rest got cucumbers as usual.  What happened was unexpected. The monkeys who got cucumbers stopped eating them, and 40% even stopped handing over pebbles.

Things got lagi teruk when the scientists gave one monkey in each pair a grape, even though they’d done nothing deserving. This time, the whole monkey market collapsed; 80% of the monkeys just threw away their pebbles, ceasing trade entirely.

What’s the moral of the story? It’s not that monkeys are simply sharers by instinct.  The monkeys who got grapes refused to share. (Try it yourself: go to the zoo for breakfast with Ah Meng, try to grab some of her fruit and see if she goes bananas.) The monkeys weren’t annoyed simply by unequal distribution, but by the unfairness of it.

This isn’t limited to monkeys. There’s a similar human experiment where two people are given $100 to split. One person gets to decide the split, e.g. 70-30, 50-50, etc. But if the other person refuses the proposed split, both walk away empty-handed. Guess what? Most people prefer to scupper the deal rather than let someone walk off with what they think is too much.

Is this, as we say in Hokkien, chao kuan?  Not necessarily.  Economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis think this phenomenon, called “strong reciprocity”, makes the whole system fairer, because it gives the proposer an incentive to propose more equitable splits.

Why not let the free market decide what the job pays? Well, Richard Grasso argued that too, though his pay wasn’t determined by the market – it was set by a bunch of his kawan-kawan.  He got grapes, and everyone else turned sour. Would the NYSE have collapsed if Grasso was given the equivalent of cucumbers? Has it collapsed now that he’s gone?

The lesson of Grasso and the Monkeys is that for the system to function, we need to believe that the system hasn’t been unfairly skewed in a particular party’s favour, even if this isn’t completely rational.

Someone recently said he was fed up with people carping about our leaders’ high pay, and how they’d get paid so much better in the private sector, with less aggro to boot.

Well, the free market decides private sector pay, and if you aren’t performing down it goes.  Leaving aside notions of the rewards of public service and attaining legislative influence, that’s not the same with the public sector.  Though it’s pegged to the top private sector professions, the public sector doesn’t just serve those professions, does it? So in all fairness, it should reflect the rest of us chimps too.

Maybe it’s true that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.  Trouble is, if you’re paying an entire basket of fruit and you’re still getting monkeys (who only hand you back cucumbers), then maybe we’re entitled to go a little ape.

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