Malaya – the _

[3008] About those coconut trees in Kam Raslan’s Malayan Spy

Travelling is a great way to learn about the world, but it is not the only one. Conversations, books, radio, television and the internet could teach us that too. The ease of access and richness of information today allow us to create accurate mental images of foreign places. Nothing beats being there but apps like Google Earth or simply image searches will show us how places like London or Nairobi or Lima look like. This is something we take for granted.

I am reminded so upon reading a striking paragraph in Kam Raslan’s Malayan Spy. The context: it is the early 1950s. The protagonist of the novel, Hamid, is a Malay student living in London and he is on his way to visit a friend in rural England. He has read about that version of England before but up to that point, he has only experienced the country as London the metropole and Malaya the colony. He has never seen the English kampongs. Not even a picture or a drawing it seems.

Malayan Spy by Kam Raslan

He has to rely on words to picture it in his mind. To create a mental image of English ruralness, he imports his home environs—tropical trees, Malayan motifs—into spaces left undescribed by proses written in pages of books he has read of England.

As the train leaves the city behind and enters a different England, Hamid is surprised to find that England does not look at all the way he had imagined it to be. He thought his had a good mental image to rely on, with had coconut trees swaying over meadows and farms, towering among oak trees.

Imagine expecting to see coconut trees in the cold and dreary rural England. It sounds ridiculous but the whole thing fits well into the general idea that Hamid is a silly Malay boy. Malayan Spy after all is a work of comedy.

But is it really silly of him to import Malayan motifs to imagine the English kampongs? In absence of information, we rely on things we know best. If we were in his shoes without the modern communication convenience and knowledge, I bet most modern Malaysians would do the same: imagining coconut trees swaying by an open field of lalangs.

[2910] Few lessons from post-war 1940s Malayan supply-side crisis

We are experiencing a supply-side crisis. The lockdown is inducing labor shortage, and it has the potential of exerting lasting damage on the economy if not handled properly.

It seems to me that the last time Malaysia or any of its components had a supply crisis was in the 1940s during World War II and during the immediate post-war period. Productions of various kinds were devastated, leaving many without jobs and forced into subsistence. The war not only destroyed productive capacity, but also suppressed demand.

The end of the war brought demand back up quickly. Unlike demand however, production took time to get back to speed. Wars had destroyed all the equipment, and killed off many that worked at the mines, plantations, factories and shops. Rebuilding those and reemploying the workers took time.

That meant massive unemployment in the meantime.

Massive unemployment also meant employers had great bargaining power: wage growth was weak if any. Faced with unemployment, weak wage growth and spiking prices, social discontent was prevalent. This was one of many reasons the communist movement gained sympathy among the masses: industrial sabotage became a norm which worsened efforts to restore production.

There are a few lessons to take from the economics of post-war 1940s. Disrupted supply chain in the form of business failures and labor shedding took time to recover, and could not move as fast as demand. When demand returned with supply failing to do the same, that demand went unfulfilled. This led to massive shortages and subsequently, massive inflation. Never mind the social issues and the complex 1940s political situation.

In this sense, the negative economic effects of the war lasted beyond the war.

Coming back to today, our mines, plantations, shops, offices and other facilities obviously do not suffer similar war devastation. And the social reality is different and undeniably more stable though racial tension that originated from the war continues to linger.

But our current supply-side crisis, now lengthened to 4 weeks, is heightening the risk of business failures and job loss. That means reduced potential and once the crisis is over and demand back up, that reduced potential means shortages and significantly higher inflation, and higher prolonged unemployment. Growth could be depressed for some time until the potential returns to its pre-crisis period. The negative economic effects of this supply-side crisis would last beyond the actual crisis.

This is why we need to protect the potential now. Prevent business failures. Protect jobs. This is so that once the crisis is done, we could press on the demand paddle right away without having to wait for some time to repair the supply transmission. We do not have to suffer a lasting effect of this crisis.