Singaporean wins global essay competition
SINGAPOREAN Bryan Tan, who is one of the three winners of the St Gallen Symposium’s annual global essay competition, feels that more Singaporean graduate and post-graduate students can participate in it. This year’s essay question will be announced in September 2022.
The three authors are collectively referred to as the winners of the global essay competition, but are individually ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd by the jury. His essay finished in 3rd place. A total prize money of 20,000 Swiss francs (S$28,999) was shared between the three winners.
“I first learnt about the St Gallen Symposium back in 2015. During that year’s symposium, then Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam was interviewed by BBC’s Stephen Sackur to critical acclaim. I watched the recording of the interview which was making its rounds on social media and subsequently read up more about the history and format of the St Gallen Symposium,” says Tan.
“I also found out that a global essay competition was held annually but as it was only open to graduate and postgraduate students, it left a fleeting impression on me as a junior college student back then. However, in January this year, a conversation with a friend reminded me that I was actually eligible for this year’s essay competition as a graduate student, which prompted me to revisit its website after seven years to find out more.”
The theme for this year’s symposium was Collaborative Advantage and it called for essays to explore areas where a new inter-generational contract is required to preserve inter-generational fairness. “I felt strongly about the question and several ideas came to mind. I felt that it would be worthwhile consolidating my thoughts in an essay. Separately, I learnt that authors of the top 100 essays are invited to attend the St Gallen Symposium as Leaders of Tomorrow. The prospect of meeting future and current leaders from all over the world at the symposium was exciting,” says Tan.
His immediate response to the essay question was that he could possibly investigate a specific area in which inter-generational fairness is already threatened, such as the areas of climate change or the welfare state.
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However, given that such challenges are similarly faced by governments worldwide, he felt it would be more meaningful to consider this question from a systemic level.
“My essay’s overarching idea asserts that most democracies globally lack the political capital to formulate long-term policies, as the government of the day is fundamentally incentivised to benefit the largest voting cohort which helps keep them in power in the next election,” says Tan.
Over the last century, demographic transition caused by falling birth rates and rising life expectancy has invariably inversed the population pyramid.
This means that the older generation is now the most dominant cohort at the polls in most developed economies.
“The combination of both effects means that the youths of today face an uphill task in re-negotiating inter-generational contracts via the ballot box as they are likely to be consistently outvoted by the older, more sizeable cohorts...
“Therefore, in my essay entitled Mitigating The Inter-generational Democratic Deficit: A New Inter-generational Contract In Political Governance, I outlined the aforementioned challenges and called for the (i) improvement of pre- and post-policy assessments; (ii) codification of political commitment to upholding inter-generational fairness; and (iii) an increase in age diversity in policymaking,” he says.
Tan says that the symposium provided him the opportunity to learn from like-minded peers of the same generation and provided the platform to freely interact with current business and political leaders who see the world very differently with the experience that they have.
Tan graduated with a BA Economics (Hons) from the University of Cambridge in 2020 and just recently graduated with a Masters in China Studies from Yenching Academy of Peking University.
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