Commerce, tax, labour – three institutions, three sources of frustration. How may we address this?

The pursuit for a lasting institutional happiness may be a long shot and somehow we’re used to short-lived expectations.

The readiness in settling for what’s already known is very attractive, if not mandatory. But wait – this need not be so. Things can change and indeed have improved.

To illustrate, recent reform activities within the e-government (or ditigial government) context have garnered a lot of praise.

Among other things, we can register commerical enterprises online, we can apply for foreign worker quotas online and, if all goes well, the online handling of VAT refunds will be another good addition.

Supporters of e-government promise so much joy once we’re done migrating paper-based transactions to the internet, thereby greatly speeding things up.

But here lies the ultimate dilemma. While people traditionally believe that happiness is created through human interactions, e-government typically reduces them and creates a separate version of its own – e-happiness.

Singapore’s e-government is known to be the most successful in Asia, having managed to deliver over 90 per cent of public services online since 2001.

Keys to its success are now well known – strong and visionary leadership, effective strategic planning, development of information infrastructure, bridging the ditigal divide among the population and seamless process integration among public agencies.

But in spite of a very efficient government, Singaporeans are not the happiest people.

They rank 34th in the World Happiness Report 2019 and could have the highest rate of depression in Asia.

The point is, at the end of the day, there is hardly any direct link between hi-tech government and people’s happiness.

This calls for a fundamental rethinking – how to strike the right balance between digitising government services and keeping people happy?

Any attempt to answer a question of this magnitude will defeat the allowable length of this article unless we agree to see things in their simplest form.

Indeed, I ask, what do people actually need? In fact, just a few things – good meals, good jobs, a good night’s sleep and good relationships.

Anything else is a surplus and, thus, unnecessary.

A person who possesses all these must be a deeply happy person.

Public policies could positively affect the first three by regulating food security and food safety, investing in job skills and creating business friendly systems, and seriously tackling crime.

This is why people in the Scandinavian and Nordic region countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) regularly top the list in good-government related surveys and consider themselves very happy with government services.

But they are not necessarily happy at home. The divorce rates in the Scandinavian countries are among the highest in the world.

In Denmark, half of the marriages end in divorce, facilitated by an easy online process which issues divorce certificates in less than a week.

Clearly a nightmare from sociological and psychological viewpoints.

As a remedy, from April this year a new Danish divorce law imposes upon couples with children an obligatory course and a three-month reflection period before their divorce certificate will be granted.

As we can see, what Denmark and Singapore have in common are their very efficient governments which very heavily invest in digitisation.

And, want it or not, they also happen to share high levels of personal family unhappiness among their populations.

This implied more-digital-but-less-happiness scenario has now become a visible symptom in the developing world too.

In the past, when people used to spend more time together the divorce rate in Cambodia was very low. Our grandparents and parents did spend their lifetime together.

But things have changed quickly, especially over the past 10 years.

As Cambodians spend less time together and more time online instead, everyone now talks about a friend who is divorced.

While e-government is consuming the hearts and souls of reformists, we must keep reminding ourselves that digitisation can be disastrous as it definitely takes away sacred human interactions. E-happiness is no substitute for real happiness.

As our high school kids already struggle to finish one-page essays, public policies on preserving human interactions and facilitating more family time must remain a priority.

But, more precisely, each of us must do our part. State intervention in the education sector won’t be effective unless we put away our electronic devices and begin helping our children with their homework.

Dr Virak Prum, LLB, LLM, received a PhD in International Development from Japan’s Nagoya University in 2006.