As the USA inches its way out of its financial meltdown, further crippled by the Eurozone debt crisis, the finance sector that once fed its staff with million dollar bonuses seems to be the last place people are hoping for a piece of the economic pie. Instead, many have started considering having stable jobs as opposed to high paying "hire-and-fire" jobs that give workers sleepless nights filled with the unease and fear from being put out of the jobs they loathe dragging themselves to on Monday mornings. With the exception of high salaries, the public service has become one of the most desirable workplaces, especially in the battered Eurozone. Youths in Spain now see the public service as a great place to work because or decent albeit stagnant pay, and little fear of being laid off. This is what I would like to voice my opinion on in this blog post.
The civil service is the organisation that manages the very issues that affect the lives of all who are related to the nation in one way or the other. The movement of capital, of corporations, and people depend on the policies they enact and the performance of each ministry. Competent leaders are able to set the path that a nation should pursue in order to best satisfy the material and spiritual needs and wants of its citizens and residents. That is why the need for the brightest minds to run nations is ever present.
That need is not being satisfied today. The civil service is increasingly being seen as a sanctuary for incompetent men and women who would not survive in the wilderness of the corporate world. In Greece, where unemployment rate among youths is notoriously high, many youths have expressed interest in the civil service for reasons such as job stability. Meanwhile, competent minds who are confident of their prospects in the corporate world which offers incredible paychecks and bonuses see a future in the civil service as a cap on their potential to achieve their definition of success, the most famous of measurements being the "5 Cs". Combining these 2, we should be expecting a brain drain from the civil service to the corporate world. How then, are we supposed to expect nations to continue being efficient when those with the potential to empower nations have been lost to the new nations of the 21st century, the multinational corporations that now fill up more than half of the list of the world's largest economies.
There is no silver bullet for reversing this trend. In fact, I do not think there is a solution at all. There have been nations that tried innovative ways throughout the course of history. In ancient China, it was preached to one and all that scholars, who more often than not work in the courts or civil servants, were at the top of the hierarchy. In many nations, entering politics is seen as a way to gain attention. In Singapore, the Public Service Commission Scholarships and other government scholarships are given out to the best students who share the inspired vision of the nation's leaders. This is done in hopes that students would be assimilated into the public service before corporations offering the excesses of the material world begin their race to arm themselves with the best human capital to ride out the shocks that define our volatile global economic climate today.
These have produced both failures and successes that have highlighted the imperfections they all possess. In ancient China, corruption was widespread as civil servants succumbed to their greed, which the government failed to satisfy unlike the business world. Some democratic nations have produced governors who failed to deliver promises because they were selected in a system that made politicians, rather than policies the centre of attraction (which is the reason why some politicians even decided to join politics). In Singapore, the high profile cases of civil servants being involved in scandals involving money (recall the NParks purchase of foldable bicycles) and lust (former PSC scholars in the Civil Defence force) serve as a reminder that even systems incorporating strong incentives and disincentives cannot cover all grounds.
Still, I believe the Singapore system has best achieved its objectives. Combining incentives of high income and scholarships to snap up the best minds, it has created a system in which the most capable desire to serve the nations albeit for possibly twisted reasons. But the outcome has been relatively positive in certain areas. Economic growth has been robust over the years, and Singapore was rated the most dynamic economy in Newsweek in 2010. However, on social issues, a better means of selecting capable men should be considered, seeing as the issues involved are starkly different from those handled by technocrats of the corporate world.
