Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 21 September 2008:
Sunday Times 21 September 2008
Long Time Coming
by Colin Goh in New York

Wah, things must be jittery back home in Singapore if so many of you have emailed to ask how I feel about Wall Street’s recent financial earthquake, whose aftershocks are being felt worldwide.

Basically, while I think what’s happened is appalling, I can’t say I’m surprised.   Two events have shaped my perspective.

The first was coming to New York to do my postgraduate law degree at Columbia University.  The approach there was strikingly different from what I’d been used to in England and Singapore, which was essentially about analyzing the specific instances of a case and how it fit within the language of specific statutes and existing judicial interpretations.  In Columbia, however, my professors unfailingly examined the law’s political origins and implications as well.  This was revelatory.  It was like attending my first dissection, and I learned how laws are shaped by bloody combat as much as intellectual debate.

The second event was the dotcom bubble. I’d arrived during the dotcom boom, and with my curiosity piqued, I enrolled for a bunch of tech-related law courses, as well as a class in entrepreneurship and technology at Columbia Business School.

The B-School class essentially involved creating and evaluating tech startups, and it exposed me to a completely different paradigm. As a lawyer, I was trained to anticipate anything that could possibly go wrong and build the appropriate fortifications.  As an entrepreneur, I was told to take risks and just roll with whatever punches came my way.  You can’t predict everything anyway, so as my old BMT sergeant used to bellow in Hokkien, “Ka ka lai! Meng kia! Long tio ooh sia!” (“Come forward bravely! Be unafraid! If you hit something, it’ll make a sound!”)

This freewheeling attitude was very appealing, and after graduating, I decided to jump on the dotcom bandwagon. (It helped that at the time, all the law firms who were willing to hire me also wanted to post me to ulu places like Beijing or Dubai. In hindsight… oh, never mind.)  And it was exciting – until the tech bubble burst, and my startup went spiralling down the cistern of history.

Still, despite the failure, my experience was very valuable: I learned important things about myself – like what I really, really wanted to do was creative work.  Meanwhile, it also left me some skills to help make pursuing that a workable career option – like how to write business plans, and raise investment.

But it also made me realize that for all America’s hyperbole about its free market, it doesn’t really exist. Access to information and resources is always unequal, but worse, that it’s often by design, usually of those who have the money to get it and hoard it first.

This means meritocracy is, by and large, a fiction. We like to think of products that succeed in the market as being proven the best, but that’s simply untrue.  It might just have had a bigger marketing budget, or a more influential political lobby, or that existing yardsticks are skewed in its favour. Ask yourself why electric cars still haven’t replaced our present gas-guzzling machines, or how certain people got into office.

What my law and dotcom experiences taught me is that we always have to question the construction of our gospels, and that we have to fight constantly for a level playing field.

So it was depressing to see the US go down a very odd path over the next 8 years: you’d think fairness would be a goal of free marketers, but instead, the people who declaimed the benefits of the free market the loudest were paradoxically those who’d been manoeuvring the most behind the scenes to consolidate their power and stifle challengers. They wanted a licence to make money any way they could, and to justify its excesses with some self-serving pseudo-Darwinian nonsense: essentially, it’s a good thing for me to victimize you, because it helps you evolve.  Meanwhile, they’re the ones trying to prevent people from really thinking about complex issues by plying them with material distractions or forcing them to take pointless positions over nebulous concepts like patriotism or religiosity. To me, the current cataclysm is just America’s chickens finally coming home to roost for all the greed and hypocrisy.

I believe, however, that America still has a lot going for it, and that it’s premature to write her eulogy. For all America’s flaws, her rivals for global domination have even worse records on freedom.  At least Americans are allowed, every four years, to make a change.  In theory, anyway.

So the future hinges on whether Americans will really learn their lessons, or whether they’ll choose to be fooled, as someone has said, by the application of cosmetics on livestock.

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