I am very late to this book because it has been hyped as THE book on inequality and poverty in Singapore and in general, I’m afraid of reading books that are too hyped. But my recent devotional series has been focused on inequality and injustice, and that prompted me to start learning more about inequality in my own country.

This is What Inequality Looks Like is Teo You Yenn’s effort at translating her ethnographic studies of the poor in Singapore into a collection of essays that are understandable to the wider public. Through her descriptions of different people that she meets, she makes the case that the Singapore story and the Singapore system is not working for everyone, and there is, in fact, a group that is being left behind.

This argument is not hard to understand or even to agree with, especially for those who have thought about the Singapore story. The Singapore story casts us as a group of underdogs who went from third-world to first-world in one generation, fuelled by an openness to business, an insistence of meritocracy over race-based values (this is contrasted against one of our bigger neighbours), and a pragmatic and “kiasu” (scared to lose) spirit. The story has much to admire – it is true that we have transformed ourselves tremendously in the first fifty years (Singapore turned 59 in August but we became prosperous before), it is true that our students test the highest, and having experienced the difference between Singapore, Malaysia, and French paperwork as it makes its way through the government, I cannot help but appreciate the Singapore efficiency.

But at the same time, the Singapore story has pushed us into hypercompetitiveness, where stress becomes a major factor in our lives. The government has recently scrapped the Gifted Education Program because parents were sending their kids to enrichment classes in order to have the prestige of testing into a program meant for naturally gifted kids. If there’s a competition, we want to win, no matter the costs (and the costs can be our health).

Knowing all this, it’s not hard to accept Teo You Yenn’s proposition that the Singapore story (which she describes in Chapter 1 of the book), is flawed. But the book itself is not perfect. My biggest issue with the book is that with such a stirring picture of the inequality, Yenn never actually puts forth an alternative model to the Singapore story. She seems keenly aware that the hyperfocus on meritocracy and capitalism doesn’t work, but she also doesn’t push back. In fact, in her essay on Differentiated Deservedness, she casts all Singaporeans as customers and says:

“Can customers think about other customers? No. We can’t.”

What I read from that is a raising of the hands “I can’t help. I am more fortunate but there is nothing I can do to change it.” And that probably arises from the fact that Yenn sees this as systemic, that perhaps if we change our welfare to make it easier to access (she spends a chapter talking about how means testing is insulting to the dignity of those who receive it), that if lower-income people can buy all the luxury goods they want, then we will solve the problem.

But will we? I don’t think so. If the problem is the Singapore story, then the solution lies in changing the Singapore story. Why are people looking to consumption as social markers and to “one-up” each other (there was even a piece recently about how mooncake boxes are now status symbols), then giving people more will not solve the problem long-term. It is going to get them to want more.

And to add to it, even if you call wants “dignity needs”, I don’t think most taxpayers will be happy to pay more taxes in order for others to be able to have overseas holidays (the Minimum Income Standard, Yenn co-authors, includes a 4 Day 3 Night overseas holiday in their budget when considering what is the basic necessity for a family of four), a perm twice a year, or even for them to go to the movies twice a month. Incidentally, I’m not a fan of the MIS website – it took a lot of digging to find the budget lists (link to partial, you’ll need to go to the 2019 report to access the rest of the items) – the full report for 2023 does not link directly to the items that the researches are including in their basket when calculating for minimum income, instead linking to the homepage of the website. This feels a bit disingenuous, as though they are hoping that the reader does not go through the items in the basket but assumes that everything inside is a “necessity”.

In other words, I do not believe that the solution to the problem is more stuff. Instead, I think that if the problem is that the Singapore worldview/story is no longer working for us, then the whole of Singapore will need to move from a competitive, status-obsessed one to a more equitable and generous one. This will involve those from the middle to upper class radically changing the way they value people and others while systems are changed for fairer, more equitable pay. It is a lot harder work than what Yenn implies but since she did say that the problem was at a root level in chapter one, it makes no sense to me that she takes the easy way out of implying a solution of more welfare with fewer means testing at the end.

I was also hoping that Yenn would draw more deeply from Asian thinkers. There are a lot of Singaporean academics cited, but it’s pretty clear to me that how we structure our society has been heavily influenced by Asian philosophies like Confucianism (which emphasises the five relationships and has responsibilities for both the “higher” and “lower” ranking people – probably a reason why we insist on people proving that they need help) and yet… there is no mention of how traditional Asian philosophies might have informed the systems that we live in. Yenn brushes off criticism of herself as “you liberal, western-educated elites” but it is true, she even cites a Berkeley class as having “radically and permanently altered the way I understood “race”” in the opening to the last chapter. I suspect this is why she has not drawn on Malay, Indian, and Chinese cultures and the way they have traditionally structured their society in her discussion of why our culture is a certain way.

The rest of the quibbles that I have with the book are relatively minor and related to things that didn’t quite make sense to me. For example:

• Yenn talks about how childcare cannot meet the needs of low-income parents, without seeming to realise that set hours are for the benefit of the childcare workers themselves – if centers were to open later, the staff would have to work later or there would have to be shifts and the problem itself is not solved, it’s just pushed to another set of workers.
• Yenn also mentions the lack of work flexibility for lower-income workers to prioritise their children, but she gives no consideration or discussion to the industries they work in; if they are in front-line or manufacturing, or any other shift-based industry, there is really very little way to build in flexibility (especially for manufacturing! In my experience, the machines cannot run if the team falls below a certain number and we definitely have already built in buffers in Singapore/Malaysia, unlike places like Taiwan or mainland China). Not all industries have the same flexibility that white-collar jobs can provide but this wasn’t acknowledged at all.
• In another case early in the book, she talks about the damaging effects of crime-prevention messaging being so prevalent in low-income neighbourhoods, and then talks about how people complain about shoes being stolen and how bicycles and scooters are at risk of theft without seeming to think that these messages might be needed.
• In the chapter on Differentiated Deservedness, she talks about how the CPF “is not set up to have societal-wide transfers – either intergenerational or cross-class” and that CPF is not adequate without personal savings. The implication that I understood while reading is that one reason the system is failing lower-income people is that systems like CPF do not transfer wealth across class. But that is the beauty of CPF! Having spent time in Japan (and having had to do courses on the Japanese pension system), my classmates and I came away with an appreciation of an individualised system like the CPF in an ageing society (which Singapore and Japan both are) – this relieves the burden on the young; many of my peers will be paying into a system that will not pay them the same amount when they are retired (due to demographic changes) because the money is not theirs and they rightly feel this is unfair.

In the end, I found myself agreeing with the basic premise of the book (that the Singapore story is not perfect) but also disagreeing with the implied solutions and ultimately finding myself underwhelmed. This is a good book, but it is not the last word on the subject (which Yenn herself recognises). Instead, this should have been positioned as the first book in a conversation on what Singapore wishes to become and how she wants to get there.