SINGAPORE (Aug 26): Sociologist Teo You Yenn and social policy professor Ng Kok Hoe have been championing the causes of the underprivileged in Singapore. Teo’s book This is What Inequality Looks Like, published at the start of 2018, sparked a national conversation on inequality, coinciding with President Halimah Yacob’s May address to Parliament when she said Singapore had to tackle inequality and forge an inclusive nation. Ng had in 2017 studied the homeless population in Singapore and is currently working on a national count of those found sleeping on the streets. Together, Teo and Ng are part of a four-member research team that conducted focus groups with Singaporeans and found that an elderly person would need $1,379 a month for a basic standard of living in the country.
The Edge Singapore picked their brains on policy in the city state and their hopes as the country turns 54.
Ng Kok Hoe
Assistant professor
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
Singapore has developed rapidly in the 54 years since independence. What are some of the most significant policies so far?
The most significant social policies are the Central Provident Fund and public housing. Between them, they address all the major social needs in income security, housing, health and even education, to some extent. They have come to define the way we think and speak about social needs in our society, making it commonplace to regard social well-being as something to be achieved by individuals through work participation and wealth accumulation, rather than by society as a whole through risk-pooling and redistribution. They are also significant because they bear the hallmark of what is known as a neoliberal style of social welfare, where state intervention is extensive, but often aimed at upholding the logic and mechanisms of the free market. To understand the CPF and public housing is, in many ways, to understand Singapore’s approach to social welfare.
What policies would you want to introduce or change, and in what way?
The first is public rental housing for low-income persons. There are many challenges in this policy area — the housing stock is insufficient, space is inadequate and the rules of access are not consistently rational and transparent. For instance, the income ceiling to qualify for rental housing was last revised 16 years ago, in 2003. If I could suggest one reform, it would be to improve housing security for families with young children, and elderly tenants. Tenancies are currently two to three years, creating uncertainty and worry for residents. To create a stable housing environment for children and encourage long-term planning, families can be issued tenancies that expire only when the oldest child reaches working age. For very poor elderly tenants whose financial situations are unlikely to change, their tenancies should be until the end of life.
Second, while conducting research recently on elderly household budgets, I was struck by the anxiety that older people often have regarding healthcare. The research participants expressed concern about chronic health conditions, about falls and losing physical mobility, and about becoming a burden to their children and families. They were also very worried about healthcare costs. We have a fairly sophisticated system of healthcare financing that mixes subsidies, out-of-pocket payments, insurance and targeted assistance. Yet, elderly people continue to worry that their savings are not enough or that the insurance coverage will not be adequate. One reform we can consider is to make all healthcare and long-term care free near the end of life, for instance — the last two years of life, according to projected average life expectancies for each cohort. This will bring peace of mind to the oldest Singaporeans, and also simplify the administration of healthcare financing compared with the wide range of different schemes currently available.
Do Singaporeans have the guts and passion of our pioneers and founding leaders?
In my teaching and research, I have had the opportunity to meet many young people with a deep commitment to causes they care about, who devote their time to projects that they believe will make our society stronger and our community kinder. At the same time, people face many pressures to do well in competitive educational and career environments, where stakes are high because of poor social mobility and worrying levels of inequality. A social welfare system that elevates individual, over collective, responsibility also naturally makes personal financial accumulation a priority. These pressures and priorities present a significant barrier to engagement with public causes and the development of shared identities with those outside one’s immediate family and social circles. In other words, they work against the imagination, spirit and solidarity that we have come to associate with our nation’s early years.
What are your hopes and dreams for the country going into the next 50, 100, 200 years?
I hope that, as a country, we can become more accepting of our differences with one another, because a diverse society has a greater range of talents and strengths, and will be more generous and caring towards all its members. I hope that we will be less insecure about our individual and collective futures, because a clear vision of our long-term future can only arise from assurance and optimism, not anxiety and fear. Finally, I wish that we will find the confidence to be more open towards different ways of engaging the public when making important decisions that affect people’s lives. Participation, not just leadership, will define where we are headed in the next 50 years.
Teo You Yenn
Associate professor and head of sociology
Nanyang Technological University
Given where we are today, what do you think are the most important issues facing Singapore today and tomorrow?
Inequality is the central issue of our times, and it’s connected to many others. Societies with wide income and wealth inequalities, such as Singapore, face numerous risks. Risks within individual families: Some people cannot adequately meet present needs and many live with long-term insecurity and precarity. Risks to society: Cohesion and solidarity are difficult to maintain when people have strongly conflicting interests and see that rewards from a society’s wealth are unevenly distributed.
These risks affect and are affected by employment relations, state-society relations and political cultures. The social, economic and political are always interconnected. Economic inequality often also leads to inequality in the political arena, where the economically dominant have a disproportionate and louder political voice. So, there are deep risks to democracy, meaning ordinary members of society may not be properly represented in key decisions. Today, globally, we can see how inequality is wreaking havoc in many places.
To speak of contemporary challenges today, one has to mention the climate crisis. And here, too, inequality matters. The negative effects of climate change are disproportionately borne by marginalised groups. Decisions that could turn things about are stymied partly by the erosion of democratic processes and the impasse in the major powers of the world, both of which are linked to the polarisation of societies, owing to intense inequalities.
What policies would you want to introduce or change, and in what way?
Work and family are two major aspects of people’s lives. To improve material wellbeing, and to mitigate inequalities, this is where attention has to lie.
People need to earn a living wage so that they can meet their needs and have some buffer for emergencies. We need to increase wages at the bottom and the middle, and ensure that incomes at the top do not increase disproportionately rapidly as they have over the past decades.
People who work and have caregiving responsibilities need conditions that allow them to do both well. This means adequate time off, access to a certain degree of control over schedules, and protective measures so that they are not disadvantaged in the workplace and the job market. Also, the current quality of care or education is highly linked to parents’ capacity to pay. We need to break that link.
Given that our starting point today is of significant income and wealth inequality, there is no avoiding redistribution. Over this past year, after reading my book, many philanthropists have told me they too think we have an urgent problem. Philanthropists, of course, want to give, but this solution can create another set of inequalities: Who decides what are worthy uses of money, and what are not? Societal-wide redistribution is more efficient and fairer. A state that transparently and consistently applies wealth and income taxation, and uses those pooled resources in ways that benefit society as a whole, is better than numerous uncoordinated responses shaped by a few individuals whose jobs and expertise do not lie in the evaluation of societal-wide needs.
Do Singaporeans have the guts and passion of our pioneers and founding leaders?
I see in the responses to my work a great deal of heart, a lot of wisdom, and diverse ideas. I also see, over the past few years, a lot of people trying to carve out spaces to do what they can, in whatever capacity they’re in, to mitigate inequalities. But they fear offending the government. People look over their shoulders when they express scepticism about policies, worry about losing funding for their organisations, worry about punishments — sometimes in a paranoid way, other times with good reason. A democratic society needs a robust civil society with the ability to think creatively and speak critically. So, the question really isn’t about Singaporeans and our passions per se, but about whether the political field is sufficiently open. In my opinion, it is not.
What are your hopes and dreams for the country going into the next 50, 100, 200 years?
Some of my answers to your earlier questions allude to my hopes about improving the well-being of those whose needs are unmet and mitigating inequality so that decision-making is not so concentrated in a class.
But I think the question of hopes and dreams shouldn’t just be answered by people located in certain parts of society — whether academics or philanthropists or civil servants or politicians. And, here, process matters: How will the hopes and dreams of many different ordinary members of society be drawn out, heard and then pieced together? Put another way, how will the hoping and dreaming be done? What space can we try to create so that it’s not just people with relative power who get to say what Singapore is and should be? And in the context of a diverse society, how can we create a sense of solidarity so we can have some shared dreams about the next 50, 100, 200 years? I guess I dream that the dreaming will be done in a more open, democratic and truly inclusive way.
