Race politics dominates Malaysia and our deplorable politics have us Malaysians as Bumiputras, Chinese, Indians and others.<\/p>\n
At the center of it all is Malay politics.\u00a0Yet, public statistics on Malay welfare are imprecise. This is true for household income and expenditure surveys conducted and published by the Department of Statistics. The surveys are the most comprehensive snapshots we have on the welfare of Malaysian households.<\/p>\n
It is imprecise because the best we have\u00a0to describe\u00a0Malay welfare are not Malay statistics, but Bumiputra statistics.<\/p>\n
The way the statistics is presented (or even measured) strengthens the flawed notion that the Bumiputras are Malays. Yet, we know the Bumiputras comprise not just the Malays but also the Orang Aslis in the Peninsula, and the Borneo natives.<\/p>\n
Foreigners in particular are guilty of this but more unforgivably, so do the locals.\u00a0When ethno-nationalist Malays want to back their\u00a0point with hard data for instance, they would go to the household surveys and cite the Bumiputra figures as proofs, casually suggesting all Bumiputras are Malays with no hesitation as if there is nothing wrong with the statistics.<\/p>\n
Our contemporary politics also means the recognition is not merely a pedantic concern. Sarawak parties especially\u00a0are\u00a0becoming increasingly important nationally, possibly convincing the federal government to spend more money there.<\/p>\n
How can this be relevant? For example, I would like to know change in\u00a0welfare of those\u00a0Borneo native households as federal spending increases. It is not enough to claim they would do better because of the spending. We need data and it is certainly not enough with the Bumiputra net cast so widely.<\/p>\n
So, as far as the category Bumiputra is concerned, I think it should be broken into its finer\u00a0components to allow us to\u00a0see\u00a0exactly the state of various groups’ welfare.<\/p>\n
After all, is it not ironic that for all the centrality of Malay politics, statistics on Malay welfare is not available on its own? We can know the income of the median Chinese and Indian households but we cannot know the median for Malay families.\u00a0To belabor the point, what we know instead are Bumiputra statistics, which are at best a proxy to the state of the Malays. And we know it is a proxy because we know the Malays make-up the majority within the group. How big a majority? Interesting question, is it not?<\/p>\n
And we also know how mean and median behave mathematically. Change in population will change both easily.<\/p>\n
I have a lingering suspicion that the Malays are doing better than the reported Bumiputra average\/median.\u00a0My suspicion is based on the fact most Malays live in the Peninsula\u00a0while\u00a0the statistics\u00a0show the Peninsula as a geographic group does better than the Malaysian Borneo (even\u00a0when\u00a0certain states such as Kelantan can do worse than Sarawak). The only way to conclusively address the suspicion is to look at\u00a0the Bumiputra components\u00a0cleverer than what we have been doing so far.<\/p>\n
At the very least, regardless of my\u00a0suspicion, improvement in reported welfare statistics with the Bumiputra category split into its constitutions can lead to better public debates and better policies. Without the split, we are forever condemned to\u00a0debate from imprecise premises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Race politics dominates Malaysia and our deplorable politics have us Malaysians as Bumiputras, Chinese, Indians and others. At the center of it all is Malay politics.\u00a0Yet, public statistics on Malay welfare are imprecise. This is true for household income and expenditure surveys conducted and published by the Department of Statistics. The surveys are the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[941,1565,444,751,1377],"class_list":["post-15038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-society","tag-bumiputras","tag-household-income-survey","tag-malays","tag-statistics","tag-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15038"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15324,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15038\/revisions\/15324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maddruid.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}