An axiomatic marker of a healthy society, especially a democratic one, seems to be when politicians know what the masses want and when the bulk of society can be counted on to understand what their governments say, although one has a degree of respect for the likes of Lee Kuan Yew, the former Singaporean prime minister, for being honest about their contempt for the thoughts of the common man. “I have never been overconcerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls,” Lee once said. “I think a leader who is, is a weak leader.”
Thus, a good public opinion survey should be worthy of your time, and I spent half a day last week going through the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute’s “Youth and Civic Engagement in Southeast Asia: A Survey of Undergraduates in Six Countries,” which was released in early January.
I admit to stumbling across this study somewhat late in the day, and my attention was only drawn to it by an article in a Philippine newspaper that reported on the study’s finding that “at least one in four Filipino college students are willing to accept a non-democratic form of governance.” That figure is, in itself, worthy of a brief interlude, and the findings were much more dire than the Manila headlines writers imagined.
Indeed, around a quarter of Filipino undergraduates, as well as a similar proportion of their peers in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, said that “under certain circumstances, a nondemocratic government is acceptable.” Moreover, only 51 percent of the Southeast Asian youths polled said that democracy is the best system of governance available – and this regional percentage was tilted by the Malaysians. In fact, less than half of the Indonesian, Filipino, Thai, and Vietnamese undergraduates thought democracy was superior.
Moving onto the topic at hand, the reader who has the survey open can turn to page 31. The question asked on this page was, “What Is Your Attitude Towards the Following Statement, ‘The Government Should Raise Taxes on the Rich for the Welfare of the Economically Disadvantaged’?”
Most Southeast Asian students, it found, were in favor of increasing taxes on the rich to support the poor. Less than a fifth were against it. All in all, then, Southeast Asia’s undergraduates are broadly aligned with fellow youngsters elsewhere in the world, although one imagines the percentages would be higher in Europe and Latin America. An OECD poll in 2018 found that more than half of people in developed countries were in favor when asked: “Should the government tax the rich more than they currently do in order to support the poor?”
But the Vietnamese responses stood out. More youngsters from one of the world’s five remaining communist states were more opposed to the redistribution of wealth through taxes than their peers in uber-capitalist Singapore or Malaysia. Around 23 percent of Vietnamese undergraduates were outright opposed to raising taxes on the rich to help the poor. By comparison, only 11-12 percent of youths in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand were against it. Despite 84 percent of the Vietnamese respondents saying they were concerned or very concerned about the widening socio-economic gap and rising income disparity, only 35 percent agreed with higher taxes on the rich, again much lower than their Southeast Asian peers.
Interestingly, around 29 percent of Vietnamese youths were “neutral” in this case. I’m not quite sure what neutrality means when being asked about whether something should or shouldn’t happen. What it probably means is I don’t care, which is likely also the case for the 13 percent of Vietnamese who ticked the “Don’t know/No answer” box. To put it in another way, over 40 percent of the Vietnamese undergrads either couldn’t be bothered to tick a box or simply didn’t care when asked whether their government should raise taxes on the rich to assist the poor, and 23 percent were expressly against it. So much for “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Was this apparent contradiction an anti-government statement? Probably not; 68 percent of these same Vietnamese undergrads saw their country’s political situation as good or very good, second only to Singaporeans in this survey, and 83 percent (the highest of the six nationalities) thought their government was concerned about the young. Was it because they were afraid of speaking their mind? Yet 68 percent of them said they thought people could express their political views in Vietnam without fear (a shocking finding in itself).
No, it was simply because they didn’t see the state as being responsible for wealth redistribution, at least not in a direct way through taxes. Zhexun Mo, an economist, recently performed two surveys in China and found a similar thing. In an interview, Mo noted,
We found that when we primed our respondents with representative ways of getting rich in the 1990s and 2000s reform era – relatively less merit-based ways of getting rich, and more luck-based, whether it was through housing speculation or compensation for the demolition of your old houses, or inheriting a family firm – the respondents’ support for redistribution was significantly reduced.
Surprised by the results, he repeated the survey with a larger cohort of respondents, yet he found the same thing. He reasoned that,
respondents were perceiving the reform era ways of getting rich as redistribution in itself. Respondents who were treated with stories of people getting rich were more likely to think that reforms have benefited [people like] them, and that economic reforms in China over the past four decades have benefited individuals who were previously poor. The stories were seen as scenarios of individuals who were previously stuck in a poverty trap, and the economic reforms enabled them to become rich. From the point of view of the Chinese respondents to our survey, the reforms were a form of redistribution. As such, when we ask policy questions about the government’s responsibility to reduce the income gap in China, they are less in favor of that, because they think de facto redistribution has already been achieved by the economic reforms.
All of which is to say, as Mo put it,
What we observe in our experiment is that people think that individuals getting rewarded in the economic growth process itself – that kind of distribution – is much more important than directly taking money away from the rich to give to the poor.
