Singapore: who do you blame for this mess then?

I recently came across an article that had been shared on social media, attacking Singaporean actress Michelle Chong - oh my, why would anyone hate Singapore's favourite comedian? Well, it seems she has been accused of having a lack of empathy for the working class, for those who are struggling to make ends meet and she is guilty of elite privilege. Now that article was written by an Alex Tan who described all the ways the working class in Singapore are struggling and how awful Chong is for not feeling any compassion for them - Chong had made a comment on how an interior designer she engaged did not take pride in their work and did a shoddy job. It did surprise me that Tan chose to attack Chong in this manner for to simple reasons: firstly, Chong isn't responsible for the hardships that the working class in Singapore face today and secondly, even if Chong did express great sympathy for them on social media, so what? Talk is cheap, it wouldn't have made the slightest bit of interest. I found it rather hard to make sense of Tan's article - it was written in very good English but overall, it failed to make any sense. Then I realized what was going on, so let's take a step back first.

Why blame Michelle Chong in this case?

A popular exercise used by gatekeepers is to present a group of candidates with a problematic situation and see how they present their arguments in a group discussion. There isn't a right or wrong answer in such exercises, the gatekeepers are far more interested in seeing how persuasive the candidates are, if they know how to listen to others in a group, if they are natural born leaders who can get the attention of the others or if they struggle to get their voices heard in a group like that. It is a great communication exercise. So here's the story I like to use: a woman is having an affair, her husband works the night shift, so she sneaks out after her husband goes to work to see her lover and makes sure she gets home before he returns home at six in the morning. One night, she leaves her lover's house only to find a madman standing on a bridge, blocking her way home. There is a boatman waiting near the bridge, but he demands a hundred dollars to take the woman across the river on his boat and she didn't have that kind of money. Fearing what her husband's anger should he find out she had been sneaking out to see a lover, she takes her chances and dashes across the bridge. The madman grabs her and pushes her over the bridge - she falls into the river and drowns. So, amongst the five characters involved in the story (the wife, the husband, the lover, the boatman and the madman), in your group, please discuss amongst yourselves and decide who is most and who is least responsible for the wife's death.

So let me give the case study in Alex Tan's article a similar treatment: the working class in Singapore are struggling to make ends meet even if Singapore is currently the world's third richest country. So in Singapore, the GDP per capita is rising (and is currently the third highest in the world), the economy is growing, the currency is getting stronger, some people are clearly getting richer whilst the working class is stagnating or finding it harder and harder to make ends meet as prices keep rising year on year. Like the drowned wife from the first case study, there is clearly a victim here but who is ultimately responsible for the victim's plight? Whilst Alex Tan clearly felt that rich people like Michelle Chong are to be criticized for not feeling any compassion for those struggling in Singapore, I don't agree with him - as in the story of the drowned wife, everyone is in some way responsible but clearly some people are a lot more responsible than others. I have identified five parties in this story and will argue how each party bears some responsibility for the victim's plight.

1. The elites in Singapore

Let's start with the elites of which Michelle Chong epitomizes. She is a celebrity, a highly successful actress, one of the most popular in Singapore and clearly she makes a lot of money. Could she be accused of being uncaring, unsympathetic or selfish? Perhaps - but what are our expectations of her, as a celebrity? Do we put our celebrities on a pedestal, expecting them to be our moral compass and become role models for our young children? Or do we recognize that they are just human and are no way different from the rest of us when it comes to the issue of moral responsibilities? Should Michelle Chong perhaps be donating part of her wealth to poorer Singaporeans struggling to make ends meet, or should she be using her many characters on The Noose to highlight the hardships faced by the working class in Singapore? Whilst either of those gestures may be nice (and who is to say she doesn't contribute her share to charity), you may be confusing her for a government minister whose job is to improve the lives of working class Singaporeans who are struggling to make ends meet. Why not criticize the minister of education for not providing the working class a decent education that allows them to get better paid work? Why not blame the minister of man power for flooding the local job market with millions of foreign workers? Why not blame the minister of trade & industry for not providing enough decent jobs for the working class in Singapore? I could go on - but you get the idea: our dear Michelle Chong is an actress, a film maker and a comedian, it is not her job to improve the lives of the working class in Singapore.

Are the elites complicit in the status quo, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Well, that's where government can step in and make a difference. In the West, the rich face far higher income tax than their counterparts in Singapore -  the government plays the pat of Robin Hood, they rob tax the rich and redistribute that wealth to the poor through public spending. Now whether or not that is a better system is another argument for another day (it has its pros and cons), but Singapore is on the other end of the scale whereby the rich pay far less tax and the government has a far more laissez-faire attitude when it comes to the free market. Countries like Hong Kong and Singapore argue in favour of the 'trickle down effect' model - allow rich people to keep more of their earnings through lower taxation and they will be able to spend more, thus that allows the wealth to trickle down through the free market and create more jobs. Conversely, if you tax rich people too much, you remove their incentive to work if they realize that a lot of their income will simply go on income tax, so it is higher income tax is highly detrimental to the productivity to the most talented, most productive individuals in our economy who are adding the most value, generating the most revenue. No, such people should be encouraged to do what they do best and generate more wealth, more value, more profits without worrying about petty 'Robin Hood' style taxation. Neither models have delivered ideal results in the real world, there will always be winners and losers which each system; so can we really blame the Singaporean elites simply for benefiting from being a part of such a system? No, I don't think so as that has more to do with the system rather than the behaviour of the elites. 

Can you blame the elites for merely benefiting from the situation?

As I said previously, even if someone like Michelle Chong expressed great sympathy for the poor, well, what is she going to do about it? Start a charity to help them? Donate part of her wealth to the underprivileged? Start employing more unskilled, working class Singaporeans in her productions and pay them more? But why single her out for not doing enough to help the poor in Singapore? Why not go to a posh condominium in Singapore (take your pick, there are plenty), knock on every door and accuse each individual for not doing enough to help the poor, accusing them of 'elitist privilege' by living in such a nice condo? Let's look at the statistics behind the Gini coefficient, the measure of income inequality and I have chosen the CIA's list for the measure for this matter: actually Singapore is sitting at 39th on that list, which isn't too bad. The most unequal countries (Lesotho, South Africa, Central African Republic) are at the top of the list, whilst Finland wins as the fairest, most equal country by income distribution. But the Finnish income tax system is notorious - some of my Finnish friends are so fed up with the hideously high income tax they have to pay, by a state aggressively pursuing a 'Robin Hood' agenda that they have gone to work elsewhere like the UK or Sweden. It's not like the UK is some kind of tax haven, but when compared to the Finnish system, everything is relative! Given how practically all Finns speak English fluently and Finland has one of the best education systems in the world, there is a substantial Finnish expatriate community working in London. In the long run, this brain drain will become a problem for Finland.

What do the statistics tell us? Leaving it to the free market, hoping for the wealth to trickle down doesn't achieve a fairer society and doesn't address the issue of income inequality. The only way to truly achieve the 'Robin Hood' agenda is by a heavy handed left-wing government who regularly gets re-elected into government at each election, such as in Finland. If every single rich person makes a modest charitable donation (which they can easily afford), then sure it would automatically create a huge pot of money that could help the poor but let me use a simple analogy to show you why this doesn't work with human nature. Back when I was in primary school, after a PE lesson we had used some sports equipment to create a fun obstacle course - a girl fell down and needed a plaster so the teacher wanted to take her to the office to deal with that, the teacher casually said to us, "boys and girls, pick up the stuff on the floor and bring it all back to the PE store room, I'll be back in a minute." As some of us started to pick up the sports equipment, we realized some children had hung back - they thought, hey if the rest pick up the stuff, we don't need to do anything, let them do it, I don't want to do it if they're going to do it. So those who had already picked up the sports equipment thought, wait that's not fair - why should we do it whilst they don't? That led to arguments and when the teacher returned, the children were arguing amongst themselves and nothing had been moved. The only way the task could have been completed was under strict supervision by the teacher, who was rather angry at this point. So effectively, you have Alex Tan pointing the finger at Michelle Chong accusing her of not picking up the sports equipment - that mentality is no different. Or was it perhaps a bit naive of the teacher to have expected the immature children to have sorted this out amongst themselves?

2. The government (effectively, the PAP)

So if we conclude that the onus then lies with the government to redistribute the income, then why are they not doing more to help the poor then? Well, the short answer is tax: ask Singaporeans if they would be willing to pay Finnish-style income tax just to be able to provide a welfare state and the answer would be no - we're Singaporeans, we have never had a welfare state, why start now? Most people would say no to that because they are afraid they would be worse off - that need not necessarily be the case in fact, especially if they stand to stand to gain from some form of welfare payment but in Singapore, there's always someone worse off than you, someone poorer and more desperate than you. Poor, working class Singaporeans are scared into believing that if there is a slightest shift towards a welfare state, their taxes would rise just to help someone worse off than them and their already dire situation would become a lot worse. It is this mentality that results in this 'turkeys voting for Christmas' mentality - where the very people who will benefit from a welfare state continue to reject a welfare state. Is this situation unique to Singapore? Hardly - in America, the very people who would benefit from Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) have been amongst the most vocal in trying to get rid of it.

It is up to the government to make unpopular decisions sometimes for the good of the country - take the simple issue of taxation. If there was a referendum tomorrow about the cost of public transport and one of the choices would be to make it completely free (not a crazy idea at all- in Miami, there are a few buses and trains which are completely free). Voters would think, "that's a great idea, let someone else pay for it!" But who is going to pay for it? Would it affect the quality of the bus and train services? Is this sustainable in the long run even if some money could be found for such a scheme? Sometimes the only way to maintain or improve the quality of the service is to increase fares - that's a hugely unpopular decision no matter what country you are in but sometimes the government has no choice but to implement such a measure in order for public transport to work. Thus there is a delicate balance to be struck - the people need to trust the government enough for them to get away with making unpopular decisions, otherwise when the trust breaks down between the government and the people, there will be protests in the streets as is currently happening in Venezuela.

Clearly, in Singapore, the people have given the PAP a very strong mandate, with a decisive landslide victory at the last general elections. Ironically, the PAP hasn't lied about what they were going to do - they were very clear and honest about their plans to continue to grow the population till at least 6.9 million - even ten million and with birth rates being at a historic low, the only way that was going to be achieved was through an increase in foreign workers, mainly from China. The consequence of that policy was to increase the amount of competition for the working class in Singapore, with this influx of foreign workers willing to accept much lower pay for the same kind of work. So it was not like the PAP lied or deceived - they told the public exactly what their plans are and the public voted for them, so it seems unfair to place any blame on the PAP now on this issue because the voters had a chance to reject their policies and vote for the opposition, yet they didn't do that. It is an odd situation, but it arose because the quality of the opposition in Singapore is dire - as much as I dislike the PAP, this current cohort of opposition politicians do not inspire much confidence either. It was between the devil and the deep blue sea and most Singaporeans decided it was a case of better the devil you know. 

It seems I am reluctant to blame the PAP on this issue because they are a legitimately, democratically elected government and the voters got the government they voted for. What they have done however, is created such a toxic political situation that few Singaporeans want to get involved in politics - you get a few crazy people who want to start a revolution despite having no supporters (yes I am referring to Roy Ngerng) and others decide to either focus on their careers or just seek greener pastures abroad altogether given how hopeless the situation is in Singapore. This is a double edged sword - without a credible, effective opposition to vote for, risk-averse Singaporeans often choose to stick to the PAP at the ballot box. However, the other edge of the sword is that having effectively removed any kind of credible opposition, that means winning the elections for the PAP has become a walk in the park hence that means they no longer need to try very hard. Where do I even begin with this cohort of PAP politicians? They are inarticulate, they struggle with public speaking, they are crap at social media, they even dress badly - politicians in the West will take one look at them and gasp in disbelief at how clueless they are when it comes to PR. Without a credible opposition forcing the PAP to try much harder, Singaporeans will only end up with a mediocre government at best, unable to solve such problems.

3. Singaporean society as a whole

So if I am neither blaming the elites nor the PAP, I am now pointing my finger at Singaporean society as a whole and putting them on trial. After all, a lot of Singaporeans have this Asian mentality that the poor are only poor because they have not worked hard enough. This is once again, a double-edged sword - on one hand, there is this child-like, innocent hope that any child can succeed as long as they study hard and get good results. That is simply something we do not see in the West. Of course we know there are no guarantees in life, but what have you got to lose by trying even if the odds are stacked against you? But for those who do end up in poorly paid, manual work in Singapore, society does judge them rather harshly. Oh I remember this teacher in my primary who made this rather un-PC rant in the class, "if you don't study hard and do well for your exams, you will end up working as a bus driver or a taxi driver. Then your parents will be so ashamed of you, society will look down on you - you will bring shame to your family!" I can't remember if any of my classmates had parents who were either bus or taxi drivers, but that's the kind on harsh, cruel judgement that Singaporean passes on those who do not earn much. Such is the mentality: you should have studied harder and worked harder to get a better job. It's all your fault, so why the hell should I help you when you can't be asked to help yourself?

"If you don't study hard, you'll end up as a taxi driver!"

The obsession with academic achievement amongst Singaporeans is nothing new - but this obsession also reveals a dark underside to Singaporean mentality. Not all kids are straight-A scholar material, but as for those who are at best mediocre or even below average, parents bludgeon them through brutal hours of tuition and even inflict harsh punishments to force them to study a lot harder than their peers, in the hope that they can pass off as 'one of those smart kids' in a 打肿脸装胖子 gesture. Deep down inside, of course the parents know that their kids are at best mediocre but they are terribly afraid of anyone else finding out: yes there is an element of Asian parents 'losing face' for raising a mediocre child like that, but they also fear how their child would be treated in the job market in the future if their academic record shows them to be at the wrong end of the bell curve distribution. By that token, I do feel sorry for both the parents and the child (heck, my nephew is at a neighbourhood secondary school and is one such average teenager - good luck to him). Such is the nature of Singaporean society - you may not like this aspect of Singapore, but if you live in Singapore, there's nothing you can do about it. I do wonder if future Singaporean gatekeepers would look at my nephew's CV would judge him by his secondary school and assume that he's a lazy, ill-disciplined, flawed person at heart, someone who played too many computer games and couldn't even be asked to study for his PSLE exams. Contrast that to the situation in the UK where not a single employer has even asked about my degree.

Thus perhaps we can then put the blame on Singaporean society, on this aspect of Singaporean culture which does blame those at the bottom of the food chain for their own fate. Is this particularly harsh or even unfair? Let us look at another example to see how you feel about blaming someone for their predicament: imagine you noticed a fat man in a restaurant and he is huge. We're talking morbidly obese, like he has some serious health issues. Would you blame this person for his weight? Then his order arrives and he is eating a mountain of unhealthy food: a mountain of fried chicken, a huge steak, french fries, onion rings, garlic bread along with a huge jug of milkshake. There's probably enough food for 3 people on that table and he's eating it all by himself. How do you feel about his weight situation now? But what if his food arrived at the table and the waitress only brings him a green salad and a bottle of mineral water? He doesn't even touch the complimentary bread roll that the waitress has brought him with the salad. How do you feel about the situation now? You see, we can be very judgmental: if we see a fat person eating too much, we're most likely going to be condemn him for bringing his obesity on himself. But if we see a fat person dieting and trying to lose weight, we're far more sympathetic to their situation. On one hand, we all like to see people who are trying to help themselves, on the other hand, who are we to pass judgement on others, to decide who deserves compassion and who deserves scorn?

Our compassion is rarely unconditional.

So if this is the prevailing social attitude on the way poverty is judged in Singapore, one could argue that the government is merely reacting to the way Singaporean society feels on the issue. A democratically elected government would merely reflect the wishes of the electorate and would not doing anything unpopular that would go against the general consensus. The government's stance on offering little or no help to the working class who are struggling to make ends meet reflect the general attitude of the rest of society who view their poverty with disdain. But wait, the problem goes even deeper. Even the poor in Singapore feel ashamed of their situation - so ashamed that they would rather pretend they are not poor, to the point of refusing to ask for help because they are so afraid of being labeled poor by everyone else. I have an uncle who is unemployed and constantly asking my mother for money. I have already talked about him at length in a post back in 2012 and little has changed in the meantime, he is still unemployed and asking for money from various people. At least to his credit, he is shameless enough to 伸手要钱 - or as they say in America, "ain't too proud to beg", but his daughter (my cousin) is a different matter. She's much younger than me as my uncle is a lot younger than my mother.

Here's a story from some years back when she was still at a local poly. I heard from the grapevine that she is so embarrassed about her situation at home that she refused to ask for help - there was a scheme at her poly whereby she could apply for a bursary to help make ends meet. A kind teacher has passed her the forms discretely and she took the forms home, but actually writing done exactly how desperate her situation was, how poor her family was given both parents were unemployed on the forms turned out to be too traumatic for her - she was afraid that if the form landed up in the wrong hands, she would be ridiculed and ostracized by her peers. So in the end, she threw the forms away and would rather starve than to ask for help. I was mortified by her attitude - when you are struggling to make ends meet, pride is a luxury you cannot afford to have, you cannot be too proud to ask for help. Then again, her situation is so desperate only because her parents were good for nothing and it was not her fault at all that things were so difficult for her family. Such is the social stigma heaped on the poor who dare to ask for help with their desperate situations - I wonder how many cases there are just like my cousin where the poor are just too afraid to ask for help? And when this happens a lot, the government can turn around and say, "see? We have all these great schemes to help the poor but so few people applied for it - that goes to show that even working class Singaporeans are doing okay and we really don't need such schemes to help the poor. Don't blame the government, we've done everything we can already to help the poor. Alamak, we want to give them free money also they don't want to take - so what more do you expect us to do?"

4. The working class themselves

Following on from the previous point, would it therefore be apt to blame the working class themselves for not doing enough to help themselves? This would certainly be a very Singaporean attitude to take, given how Singaporeans are all to happy to condemn those who have not studied hard enough or have worked hard enough to get a better life for themselves in the land of opportunity where so many people have made their fortunes and have become incredibly rich. But allow me to be un-PC and make an important point: I don't think this is so much about class identity but more about IQ - not all humans are created equal and if you wanna give me the stupid bullshit about different people are good at different things, well you're just deceiving yourself. That is why some people end up making millions before they turn 30 whilst others are struggling to make ends meet whilst working some nasty job that pays peanuts. As a society, we owe it to the less privileged - ie. those born a lot more stupid than us - to help them by giving them a helping hand to lead more dignified lives by paying them enough and this misguided notion to treat everyone as equals simply ignores the huge inequalities in our abilities to earn money. Life is extremely unfair and the bell curve below clearly illustrates that.

Nonetheless, this theory also has its limitations. At what point do you draw the line? Do you start implementing compulsory IQ tests and offer handouts to those who have lower than average IQs? Do we start treating those with lower than average IQs like the disabled and how do you decide when someone is so stupid it should be recognized as a disability? Besides IQ, there are so many other factors that can affect one's ability to get a job and earn good money, such as one's soft skills and EQ. It just seems quite impossible to decide who is poor because they were born plain stupid and who is poor because they were lazy (but are otherwise perfectly intelligent people). Society is quite happy to help the former but would not want to help the latter. Even if you go into each poor person's story, on a case by case basis, you are always going to find evidence of this person having made some bad decisions or exercised some rather poor judgement that has led to their poverty - can you differentiate between the bad decisions made because of stupidity and those which they should be held responsible for because even if they are not particularly intelligent, they are still adults after all and should be held responsible for their actions? The BBC news report below would give you food for thought: it features a Malay mother with six children struggling to make ends meet, she is so poor she cannot even afford medicine for her sick daughter. Whose fault is it then? Should a woman like that have six children when she cannot even make ends meet, especially in a country where the government is going to offer little help to people in her situation?

5. Foreign workers

Oh a lot of Singaporeans blame the vast number of foreign workers who have come to Singapore in the last twenty years for the plight of the working class - this huge influx of workers who are willing to accept much lower pay have effectively depressed wages and that's bad news for the working class Singaporeans who have to compete with these foreign workers for the low-paid manual work at the bottom of the food chain. We have seen so many instances of Singaporeans taking out their frustrations at these foreign workers - most recently when a frustrated Malay-Singaporean man threw a huge tantrum on a bus when the PRC bus driver couldn't communicate efficiently with him in English, causing the driver to terminate the bus service when things got ugly. The fact is this huge influx of foreign workers have been in Singapore for many years already, trying to get rid of them now is like trying to shut the stable gates long after the horse has bolted. If Singaporeans didn't want to open the floodgates to let in all these foreign workers, then they really shouldn't have voted for the PAP government who were very honest about their policy on foreign workers. No, in this case, I think it is utterly ludicrous to blame the foreign workers who have come to Singapore in search of a better life. They have done nothing wrong. I don't blame the foreign workers, I don't even blame the PAP - I blame the people who voted for the PAP.

My conclusion

Going back to the original discussion about the drowned wife, most people I have subjected the test to actually blame her for putting herself in such a position in the first place and the arguments I've heard include she shouldn't have been having an affair in the first place or that she exercised extremely poor judgement in taking her chances with the madman on the bridge. Sure some people have put some blame on the husband for possibly being a violent, angry, even neglectful husband whilst others have blamed the boatman for his greed, in trying to profit from the unfortunate situation and not caring what happened to the wife. Some have also blamed the lover for not making sure that the wife got home safely after their encounter. But in most cases, the wife comes out bearing the most blame for her own death, followed by the husband, the boatman and then the lover. The madman is often let off the hook, because he is clinically insane and cannot be held accountable for his actions which led to the death of the wife. This exercise would surprise a lot of people who react angrily at the concept of 'victim blaming' - because most people do end up blaming the victim herself.

In this case, would I blame the victim - ie. the working class in Singapore for their own plight? Gosh, it is a hard one, but I would place the most blame on Singaporean society for their attitude towards poverty, then I would blame the working class themselves for often making poor choices that keep them locked in poverty. I would then blame the government for not doing enough to help the poor, then I would blame the elites for not showing enough compassion to those worse off than them in Singapore. Finally, the only party I would say is blame-free are the foreign workers - if you're not happy with the influx of foreign workers, you should either blame the government who let them in or the PAP supporters who gave the government the mandate to open the floodgates. So people like Michelle Chong only come fourth on my list, sure she could do more to help the poor but she is most certainly not the villain here and it is easy for Alex Tan to attack a celebrity like Michelle Chong, but is he willing to take on Singaporean society as a whole and challenge them for their judgmental attitudes for condemning the poor, or even confront the Singaporean government for not doing enough to help the poor?

The PAP were totally honest about their plans - you voted for this.

Sigh. You know me - I am not a fan of the PAP. Hell no. I don't like the PAP at all, but I also believe that the opposition movement do themselves a huge disservice when they try to circulate very poorly articles like this and try to make people like Michelle Chong look like the enemy when clearly, she is not. In fact, trying to paint one party as the villain and the working class as the victim grossly misrepresents the situation which is a lot more complex - neither the elites nor the PAP are the villains here, the whole situation mostly arose because of this attitude in Asian culture that blames poor people for their poverty (and stupid people for their stupidity). This lack of compassion for the poor is pretty endemic in Asian culture where the concept of the welfare state is rejected by every single country and only embraced by countries in the West with a completely different culture. If you must blame someone as the villain trapping the Singaporean working class in poverty, then the villain is indeed Asian culture. Trying to fix the problem without acknowledging the route cause of the problem is ignoring the elephant in the room and that perhaps, is probably why Alex Tan sucks as a writer and the States Times Review is a rather shit website. Where is their quality control? Do they have a decent editor? That's it from me on this issue - please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Many thanks for reading