In 2020 and beyond, social welfare as a policy area will become more significant than it has ever been. This follows a natural socioeconomic trajectory of countries aiming to attain and even exceed the benchmark for qualifying as a developed economy.

The health of a given nation is often measured by its wealth gauged from preset macroeconomic markers, such as its gross domestic products by the year.

This is a useful tool, but this singularity is a myopic econometric approach which misses out on more important markers for evaluating a country’s actual wellbeing in the long run, such as the Human Development Index, Happiness Index et. al., as it discounts the fact that wealth expressed in purely mathematical terms simply explains away the economic aspects of the country’s growth (or decline) while neglecting the social aspects defining it.

The reason is quite simple - too often quantifiable variables are given gratuitous weight in policy analyses due to what has been colloquially known in academia as “scientific snobbery”, which dismisses social variables as hogwash, not scholastically rigorous and therefore not worthy of scientific attention.

The evidence of this permeates the public service in Malaysia. The Prime Minister’s Department has its designated ‘Economic Planning Unit’, which is all good until you realise that it could have been more politically correct to also establish a ‘Social Planning Unit’.

As a corollary, the job of integrating sociological theories and considerations into Malaysia’s public policies has been relegated to the esotericism of academics duped into the parochial thinking that their opinions are not based on solid empirical evidence.

It is trite to say that a nation is as strong as its weakest link. In Malaysia, social ills and institutional neglect impede progress because our social policy areas are weak, perhaps not on paper but in their one-dimensional executions.

We have foreign beggars in the streets of Kuala Lumpur competing with our pre-existing homemade counterparts for market shares. One in Masjid Jamek even suffers from leprosy, a disease once we thought eradicated. We have ministers allegedly advocating child marriage with rapists, a higher education fund that charges dangerously exorbitant interest rates on student debts, a culture of looking at Nepalese contract workers as beneath it.

The list goes on and in 2050, the future looks like it is better designed for rich people with rude grandchildren and poor mental health, with absolutely no niches for heterogeneity and equitable justice.

Our third sector players, as they work in areas that our policymakers cannot reach because of red tapes and our famous bureaucracy, are in dire need of empowerment. We need to appreciate their criticism as an aspect of the democratic check and balance calling out for our united attention to a specific area as a boon.

Social entrepreneurship greatly undervalued

Social entrepreneurship is currently in its babyhood in Malaysia and we have greatly undervalued its worth in complementing existing public policies. It has been proven to be a viable, long-term solution to a multitude of social issues such as unemployment and pollution in many countries.

Our policy approaches have also always been ailed by the ‘myth of the community’, essentially the erroneous premise that our target groups are necessarily cohesive and ergo similar in terms of needs.

We are thrilled to assume that a poor kampung community must therefore need money, so we distribute money equally among them and declare world peace. We try to abolish vernacular schools on the ineffectual hypothesis that it is the very scourge against national cohesiveness, so we give undue preponderance to a more uniform schooling system. We launch low-cost housing projects while ensuring our buyers also launch a career as real estate entrepreneurs.

The examples are bounteous in this land, yet we seem to spectacularly fail to grasp the importance of highlighting the obvious nuances decorating this beautiful social canvass we call Malaysia.

Perhaps, instituting a Social Planning Unit is not a far-fetched idea after all.

MORIS DERI is a student majoring in government studies and public policy.