“This is what inequality looks like” - Teo You Yenn

Chapter 1. Step 1 - Disrupt the Narrative

- Singapore should be one where prosperity is shared among all citizens - right now the
narrative of prosperity and “climbing upward” is dominated by those who did, and
championed by the government. This narrative, instead of functioning as a shared vision
that all Singaporeans can share (something like an “american dream” to showcase the
social mobility), functions to further alienate those who are left behind, constantly looked
down upon and berated by predetermined definitions of success
- Although the government prides itself in equalising opportunities and not outcomes, the
meritocratic system advocates mobility only in rare circumstances, and fails to
acknowledge the integral role which existing financial and social status (social context)
has in dictating the likely path of attaining success as defined by meritocracy.
- Rather than increasing social mobility, meritocracy instead legitimises the existing
hierarchy and further entrench it by propagating its definition of success
- More than just having financial strain, families that find themselves on the lower end of
the social hierarchy are constantly berated by perceptions of lesser worth and stagnation
in a growing metropolis. In a nation where the state-propagated narrative of a swift
transformation from a resource-barren colony to triumphant gold-standard society is
deeply entrenched within us, it only compounds the deflating effect this has on those
who don’t fit into the meritocratically designed definition of success. (Dignity of the lower-
income)
- This narrative needs to be disrupted, with the traditional sphere of success broadened to
accommodate a wider, more inclusive and tolerant society where income disparity is less
of an issue
- Normalisation often connotes subconscious familiarity and comfort, but when these
normalised circumstances are not fulfilled, they become poignantly conscious, to the
degree of pervasively berating

Chapter 2. Everyday Lives

- Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world - a statistic that
many of us take pride in, but this is yet another narrative - one that compounds the
alienation of those who do not own a home
- HDB Rental flats are not clustered and segregated - they are interspersed within blocks
of owned flats. The narrative and ubiquity of home ownership is a dream for those who
rent, but for them the stability, certainty and security attributed to home ownership is
often never fulfilled.
- The high density in rental blocks due to the relatively small sizes of rental flats breed
issues - pest infestations and avenues for argument are rampant, while more trash and
garbage is generated, and with that more unsanitary areas.
- The banners that HDB select for rental flats and owned flats often differ - rental flats
would have message warning against committing crimes and other undesirable
behaviour (taking loans from loan sharks), while owned flats have pleasant, benign
messages encouraging residents to adopt a healthy lifestyle. This discrimination echoes
 the thread of segregating rental flats and owned flats, ironically made even more
apparent by HDB’s attempt to incorporate them (by clustering them together). The idea
of a narrative that alienates the poor - not only does the ubiquity in home ownership
isolate the poor and constantly remind them of what they are unable to afford,
consumerism performs the same function (can’t afford to buy themselves or their
children consumer goods), and even if they remain invisible to the high-income, the
reverse is definitely not true, and kids from these families are poignantly made aware of
this, and the sense of lesser worth is ingrained in their infancy
- The small spaces often mean having less personal space - no bedrooms for parents nor
children, only common spaces for them to interact in

“Our notions about possibilities, desires, sense of self, are deeply shaped by the society
in which we live. In Singapore, there is an extremely strong sense that there is a singular,
‘normal’ route in life”

“While the low-income are often invisible to the higher-income in these spaces, the
reserve is obviously not possible for the worker whose jobs are to serve.”

Chapter 3. Work-Life Balance should not be a Class Privilege

- Parenting is a prime manifestation of the difference between social classes in their
workplace
- Parenting is time-consuming; planning for parenting is an issue for families earning a
stable income, and even more so for low-income families who desperately need the
money to feed their children, and are unable to sacrifice their jobs to take care of their
children
- With uncertain working hours (often ad-hoc work), planning for childcare services is
inconvenient, and often means that their children would have to learn to survive alone
from a young age.
- Inability to afford maids, full-day childcare services also adds a permeating fear and
worry for their children while at work - and inability to guide them with their homework
also causes constant stress, compounded by children making comparisons with their
peers in school
- Low-wage work is scrutinised - its nature has to change, and fights for bridging the
gender pay gap and between other minority groups almost universally omit the varying
circumstances that exist within classes, and the needs of these low-income people are
not addressed nor privileged

“they care greatly for their children, and they have poor options rather than make poor
decisions”

“They are generous in circumstance where it is not easy to be generous, where being
generous entails real sacrifice”
 “She will continue to feel like she is doing everything for her kids and that is still not
enough”

“triumphed in spite of unconducive conditions”

Chapter 4. I Want My Children to be better than me

- Two starkly different methods of parenting produce two starkly different results - and
labelling them as ‘different’ is unsatisfactory since the system rewards and privileges one
outcome over the other
- Streaming, under the guise of catering to different learning abilities and peculiarities,
disproportionately features ethnic majorities, and children hailing from high
socioeconomic status in elite schools
- unequal concepts in civic engagement also encourages higher-track students to be
groomed to become civic agents, while lower-track students are prepared to be obedient
citizens
- High stakes education entails that interactions with children are often made unpleasant
- Even highly-educated parents face trouble helping their children with homework, much
less uneducated parents
- Campaigning for parents to be more knowledgeable and involved in their children’s
education is not class-neutral
- “Cultural Capital” - hidden skills that are rewarded in schools that are transferred from
parents to children that are not taught or explicitly graded - socialising them in ways of
speaking, relating to authority figures, and understanding things like art and music
- Higher-educated parents would have the means and ability to teach their children before
entering Primary 1, while lower-income parents usually are unable to, which transfers a
persistent sense of inability to their children, such that they resist going to school
- An irrational outcome ensues - schools that profess to train as many children as possible
to be contributing members of society not only reward precocity, but treat it almost as a
prerequisite for success, when exposure in school should be sufficient
- We should all care about this deeply embedded inequality - human potential that can be
used for the betterment of society is wasted, and we all rely on each other’s children to
spearhead the future

“For higher-class parents, their children tend to be ‘projects’, [with intricate plans to]
fulfill their potential. For the working class and the poor, parenting is more about ‘the
accomplishment of natural growth.”

“How are children are branded in schools, the information parents get from schools
about how they compare vis-a-vis other children - these shape our conceptions of our
children and what they are capable of.”

“We who have the power to make choices disproportionately shape outcomes and limit
options for people who don't have the power to make choices.”
Chapter 5. Growing up without Class Protection
- Parenting, unlike in the wild, is not merely transactional. Kids have shifting needs over
the course of their lifetime, with almost every phase needing supervision and guidance,
and fulfilling these needs become an issue for low-income parents
- Having less time with their children due to the nature of their jobs (usually needing to
work on weekends and holiday periods), entails apportioning less interaction and leisure
time with children, and less fond memories of their relationships and cohesiveness within
the family unit
- Having lesser education means that parental authority is rather contradicting - needing
to instill their children with the adequate qualities, yet telling them to study hard and
obtain education unlike themselves (“don’t be like me”) is a heartwarming and nuanced
predicament that children are unlikely to fully comprehend
- Not having the financial ability to provide for their children’s daily needs also forces their
children to find other means of procuring income (part time work), and low-income
parents’ authority is further undermined by their children’s lack of reliance on them. This
extends to the physical aspect of home, whereby a lack of space forces children to study
and partake in social activities outside of home, thus further entrenching the perception
of a divided, and interdependent family unit rather than a parent-dependent one.
- The family unit is stressed in the making of policy - from housing to healthcare to
retirement support and education, there is a heavy presumption that family is the first
line of support, yet nothing is done to ensure that a reasonable family life is not a class
privilege

“To be young to be restless and somewhat misunderstood. It is to have certain

understandings about the world and the energy and desire to partake in it and then to
face frustrations at one’s lack of power to do so fully. To be young and middle-class is to
be able to delay autonomy, to hold off responsibility toward others, to be given the
benefit of the doubt when one makes mistakes, to have timelearn, to live under parental
protection until one is ready to fly. Youth from low-income families do not have the
luxury of time to ride this stage out.”

Chapter 6. Differentiated Deservedness

- The state does not guarantee access to all public goods (healthcare, retirement and care
needs), and steady wage work is needed to procure these services with their incomes.
- The undercurrent of stressing the need to continually earn wage through work and
maintain a traditional marriage is present in the state’s welfare policies, which also breed
stigmatisation through heavily regulated and means tested aid
- Subsidies for services are dependent on being and staying married; less support is
given to single, unmarried mothers, and unmarried men and women find it harder to
obtain public housing, and cannot form a ‘family nucleus’ to apply for public housing.
Employment is also a need to continually pay for housing, which is compounded by the
existence of CPF, which is individualistic and based on the wage that one earns
throughout their lifetime
 - Rigid policies are implemented to prevent free-riders from taking advantage of such
programs, and are marketed as there to help the exceptionally needy - thereby creating
a stigma against applying for these programs, which is not helped by the stringent
criteria and reviews that occur every 3-6 months (narrowly targeted)
- Differentiated implies that the government is categorising the privileging certain
categories not natural or intuitive to societal segregation, but rather subtly yet forcibly
entrenching them through the use of public policy (having a heterosexual marriage,
having stable employment, graduating from university etc)
- Schemes have been implemented (such as the workforce income supplement) to
subsidize companies payroll when they retain older and low-wage workers and when
workers attend training programs
- CPF Life and Medishield Life represent an exception that features universalism -
providing some income in old-age commensurate with income while working, and
medical insurance that aims to insure all citizens and permanent residents
- The ghettoization of poverty - with programs and schemes to help the ‘needy’ being
framed as ‘charity’ detaches the issue and the challenges faced by a small minority from
the broader political economy from which it was produced

“Within the existing logic of market participation and purchase of needs, as long as
endemically low wages and workers’ exploitation are missing from the discussion, and
as long as ‘family’ is unquestionably accepted as a singular thing, it will appear that
people who cannot meet their needs are ‘failures’, exceptions who ‘fall through the
cracks’.”

“Our shared discourse includes this claim that in Singapore, we are not as individualistic
as the West. We put society above self. But, this ideal of our country is everyday
challenged by the other ethos we face living in Singapore: no one owes you a living and
it’s everyone for themselves. This has too become our culture.”

“Importantly, it frames public interventions as ‘charity’, as ‘help’ - in other words, beyond

public responsibility - and recipients rather than as members of society with rights to
certain basic levels of well-being and security.”

“What we have in this mode of governance is not just a state against a cohesive society,
but a society split apart by varied and possibly competing interests; a society made up
of members who are deeply individualised and embedded in a context where citizens
accept that some people are more deserving and others less so.”

Chapter 7. Needs, Wants and Dignity

“We long for things because we long to belong”

Chapter 8. Dignity is like Clean Air

 - Symbolically, Singaporeans are painted the narrative that as long as they work, the state
provides enough opportunities to meet their needs, and poverty is highly exceptional
- Although there is no poverty line, social policies aimed at the poor designate their target
group as those households earning below $1,900 per month or $650 per capita. This,
along with other means-tested criteria concerned with income, employability and familial
conditions mark out a very small number of households as ‘needy’.
- Institutions conceived to aid those in need are more concerned with trouble-shooting for
their own catalog of success, which means generating solutions without necessarily
reframing how problems have been defined.
- Social workers in Singapore have the heart, passion and generosity to serve, and do
profoundly touch the lives of those that they interact with - but that only have access to a
limited range of schemes and programs that the government has apportioned to the low-
income, which are limited, conditional and finite.
- To qualify for a small sum of money, people have to subject themselves to sustained
scrutiny and discipline - suffering and poverty is tolerated in Singapore
- KPIs for social workers encourage them to close cases to represent that they have
gotten families out of the system - this simplifies the issue of poverty and being low-
income, as the more obvious issues may have been resolved, but numerous other facets
in this multifarious entity are still brewing in the undercurrent of these families’ lives, and
these cases are never truly closed.
- MSF delegates money to the various branches that aid those in need based on their
compliance to MSF’s policy assumptions and priorities - this makes suffering tolerable to
the alternative - no help at all (institutionalised suffering)

“I realised that when we say we cannot see poverty in Singapore, it is partly because its
manifestations are masked and partly because we do not look.”

“Dignity is like clean air, you do not notice its absence unless it is in short supply”

“Social service providing organisations and workers operate fundamentally within a

world where resources are understood and experienced as limited”

“Rather than aid as long-term solution, the aid is a patch, a quick fix, and meant and
understood to be enough only to tide over short-term crises”

“Aim to help people help themselves”

“Respect that is conditional on narrow practices can easily be withheld. I think it is

different, qualitatively, from the respect that is given and received between people who
believe in the inherent worth and integrity of other human beings”

“The precarity of dignity needs at first glance looks like something that affects only
those with low income, but on second scrutiny appears to be a condition everyone is in”
Chapter 9. Airing Dirty Laundry

“This nationalism - willing to ignore problems to protect pride; able to overlook

complexities in order to satisfy momentary pleasures of being “winners”; insisting on
seeing society through narrow lenses in order to justify complacency - is as stifling to
progress as it is dangerous to social harmony.”

Chapter 10. A Memo on Race

- Race is a social construct - constructed by people who believed that certain properties
bind them, while willfully forgetting the specific carving of boundaries and precise acts of
power that perpetuate the imbalance between people who believe themselves to be
different
- Categorisation, discrimination, segregation and ghettoization
- Singaporeans believe that race entails genetic differences that inform different
orientations, cultural practice and sensibilities, which includes orientation toward
economic activity.
- Differences among low-income Chinese and low-income Malays are little - they face
similar issues, and share much less with their high-income Chinese counterparts than
with Malays, Indians in their social class
- Class location is more significant than racial categories
- She does not have the answer to why there is a disproportionate amount of low-income
families who are Malay rather than Chinese, she believes that it is not in the jurisdiction
of her research and findings to adequate address this phenomenon, but nonetheless
admits its importance and relevance when addressing income inequality.

“‘Race’ is not a static, universal fact - what principles are used to establish group
boundaries , how it comes to be meaningful, and what effects it has on people’s lives
change with time and vary across time.”

“Taking ‘racial’ difference as the starting point, without unpacking what the differences
are, how differences have come about and how they are perpetuated, push us as a
society to continually highlight differences without necessarily interrogating and
questioning them.”

Chapter 11. Now What?

“Inequality is damaging for social cohesion and detrimental to political harmony and
function.”

“The knowledge that exists about inequality begins from a very simple point: there is a
high level of inequality in Singapore. To begin to learn, one must be able to hear that and
then to resist the inner urge to defend and explain away that empirical fact.”
 “First, we have to do what we can wherever we happen to be located; all acts are
meaningful as long as we take them. Second, what effect we ultimately have will be
because we do not act alone.”