In January 2000, I was a trainee teacher at the National Institute of Education (NIE). On Wednesdays at 9am we had Pedagogy of English Literature classes. Once, a classmate—let’s call him Richard—entered the classroom red-faced and agitated, more than 45 minutes late. “Death to Hello Kitty!” he boomed, charging in. Turns out, the line for the McDonald’s Hello Kitty giveaway was so long that it blocked the bus exit at the Jurong East interchange, obstructing buses from leaving the bays.
Our lecturer, to her credit, didn’t blink an eye. She smiled empathetically, waved Richard to a seat, and carried on with how to make Julius Caesar interesting to fourteen-year-olds (TL;DR: it’s hard).
The rest of us couldn’t wait to hear the details at break—the meandering lines he’d watched from the upper deck of his bus, the shoving and pushing he saw, and how excruciating it was sitting in an idling non-air conditioned bus for 45 minutes while people lined up for a pair of stuffed cats. Nobody in that queue, presumably, spared a thought for the buses stuck outside it, or the trainee teacher on the upper deck trying to get to a 9am class.
The people who wanted the Hello Kitty dolls—the ones who queued, waited, and paid S$4.50 on top of their Happy Meals—got exactly what they signed up for. But Richard, who didn’t want a stuffed toy, also had to pay a price: 45 minutes of being stuck, and a missed lesson on whether casting Mel Gibson as Julius Caesar would make kids appreciate it more.
Economists would say that Richard’s plight was an externality: he experienced a cost created by a transaction between two parties he was not a part of.
Richard’s externality was a visible one—a queue, a bus, 45 minutes. You can see it, you can count it. A lot of what we think of as externalities are like that: pollution drifting from factories to residential neighbourhoods, second-hand smoke, the 6.30pm traffic situation on the PIE. These are all things your senses pick up.
Not every externality is this obliging.
My mother is not a physician. But she has a strong view of what makes a good doctor. A good doctor, in her mind, is someone who prescribes her antibiotics. Regardless of her ailment, she believes that antibiotics are the strongest—and therefore the best—medicine out there. By extension, good doctors would know to dispense it to her. And “bad” doctors are those who tell her to sleep it off with some painkillers and vitamins.
What my mother can’t see, though, is that every course of antibiotics, necessary or not, puts a small amount of pressure on the bacteria it attacks, helping it get better at resisting antibiotics in the future. Enough people asking for enough unnecessary prescriptions, enough doctors relenting rather than arguing, and at some point, without us knowing or seeing, a drug that used to work stops working and a superbug has evolved. This will not affect my mother—she’s already recovered and moved on, but this will come at the expense of someone she will never meet, with an infection that has nothing to do with her at all.
Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign, launched in 1979, is worth thinking about in the same vein. The policy made a reasonable calculation at the time: promoting one shared Chinese language over several distinct ones had perceived economic and administrative advantages, and by most accounts, it worked.
What it maybe didn’t account for was the cost, paid decades later, by people who weren’t even born at the time the policy was launched. Some have argued Singapore is only now confronting that cost in full, sparked unexpectedly by a Chinese film. When “Dear You” was screened in Teochew in Singapore earlier this year, it drew crowds (and controversy) in a way its Malaysian and Hong Kong releases didn’t. People went, some barely able to understand the dialect, and came out saying it was just the mere hearing of this language—not any particular scene—that moved them deeply. NTU sociolinguist Tan Ying Ying described the reaction as a “grief for a language that is dying”. In a way, while the transaction was between a government and the generation it governed in 1979, the bill continues to be paid by a generation that had not existed then to object.
I was a toddler in 1979 and went to primary school in the 1980s. I am also Teochew. While my Mandarin is passable, my command of the Teochew language is abysmal—limited only to ordering braised duck and asking my Teochew relatives whether they’ve had their dinner. I tried getting tickets to the Teochew version of “Dear You” but still haven’t managed to. I have seen clips online though and heard the dialogue in its original language. It’s strange how a language I don’t speak sounds like home. I think that’s me feeling the grief.
But loss isn’t the whole picture. If I can lose something as intangible as a language without ever noticing it happening, then somewhere, I’ve probably also been given things—just as silently, just as unnoticed. Some externalities take; others provide.
Bees aren’t usually thought of as providers, not much beyond vats of honey anyway. They fly, they buzz, they sting, feeding themselves without a thought for anyone else. Pollen goes where it goes as an afterthought.
In Jumla, a remote district in western Nepal reachable only by a single mountain road, researchers spent a year finding out what that afterthought was actually worth. They tracked diets, harvests, and income across ten villages, and counted individual pollen grains on the fuzzy bodies of bees. The bees, meanwhile, just kept doing what they’ve always done—flying from flower to flower because that’s what bees do. They are oblivious to the fact that somewhere in Jumla, a villager is getting more than a fifth of her vitamins A, E, and folate, and a farmer nearly half his income, from their seemingly frivolous flying.
Jumla isn’t a special case. Globally, pollination is estimated to add somewhere between US$195bn (S$269bn) and US$657bn (S$907bn) a year to the food we grow. This is roughly one in three bites of food we eat. It is, by any measure, one of the largest unconscious transactions ever made. The bees don't know this, of course—they're just moving from flower to flower.
Not everything like this is happening somewhere far away, though. Maju Forest, in Clementi, grew on land cleared in 1963 for a railway line. The intention wasn’t to plant a forest—it was to lay track. But the railway fell quiet through the 1990s and nobody came back to clear the land a second time. Left alone for the next thirty years, it grew into what it is today: teeming with 286 recorded plant species, 113 animal species, and the return of the Sunda pangolin, one of the most heavily trafficked mammals on Earth.
For decades, this was a straightforward gift, same as the bees. The forest’s existence became a kind of public good, the way clean air or clean water is: something Singaporeans got to benefit from, whether they ever set foot in it. It’s the later generations who got to enjoy the biodiversity that neglect created.
That gift is now being taken back. Together with Gillman Forest, Maju Forest will be redeveloped for housing. HDB’s own environmental assessment rates the biodiversity impact as “Major Negative”, even after mitigation. The government has said redevelopment will proceed, though the final plans aren’t yet settled. This is a different decision, made for entirely different reasons, by people who once again won’t be the ones who will feel the grief.
Clementi isn’t far from that bus interchange in Jurong East. Nepal is. But an externality needs only one transaction and a bystander, wherever and whomever that happens to be.
I think of Richard sometimes, usually when I’m stuck in traffic behind a double-decker bus, or when someone mentions the great Hello Kitty giveaway of 2000. I haven’t seen him since, and I don’t even know if he remembers that morning the way I do. What I do know is that because of Hello Kitty and the queue that blocked his bus, he missed learning whether we thought Mel Gibson would make a great Julius Caesar.
Serene Koh is a behavioural scientist and director of the Behavioural Insights Team in Singapore. She also teaches behavioural science at the National University of Singapore.
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