Singaporeans upset over their social economic status

Hello again everyone. One of the reasons I love blogging is the way my readers bring interesting topics to my attention and I have to thank my reader Naomi for bringing this story to my attention. Some Singaporeans have been very offended by a secondary 3 social studies textbook which has divided Singaporeans into two basic categories: higher and lower SES (social-economic status). Now I am going to be blunt and point out that most people protested at this binary divide because they fell under the lower SES category and didn't want to be classified as such because they would rather perceive themselves to be in the higher SES category. Let's examine why people have gotten so worked up over this issue and see if we can understand why this has upset so many people. We will also see if the textbook's definitions stand up to scrutiny and if the ministry of education has let down the students. I must say though, having read the reactions online, I had a good laugh about it. Hey, I've lived 21 years in Britain and have had plenty of experience dealing with the British class system - so it is rather interesting that you Singaporeans have just began to deal with this issue.

Oooh many Singaporeans got very upset over this.

Turning to the protest about the social economic status furore, a lot of the people who protested were extremely offended in being classified as 'lower SES'  because yes they spoke Singlish and dialects in their daily conversations, yes they played football and basketball in their local HDB estates, they dined at hawker centers or at home instead of expensive restaurants and they took on part time jobs as students. However, I can already hear them defending their decisions: Singlish and other languages like Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese are an integral part of our social identity in Singapore. Using those languages doesn't mean we're low-class or uneducated, doctors and lawyers can use those languages too if they feel that expressing themselves in those languages is a part of their identity. Likewise, expressing a preference for football or basketball over tennis or golf doesn't mean you're low-class, it just means you like one sport over another. And who on earth eats all their meals at expensive restaurants? Even wealthy people dine at home all the time - they simply spend more on getting nicer food for their meals and eat their meals in a much nicer dining room, served by maids. And as for working part time, that's a very worthwhile thing to do - even rich families get their children to do work experience and internships during their school holidays as it is vital for their CV to demonstrate a wide variety of experiences. Thus it is overly simplistic to assume that students working part time are doing it purely for the money.

So yes, in short, it is very blunt to simply divide Singaporeans into two groups: lower and higher SES. When I covered the topic earlier this year, I divided Singaporeans into five groups (traditional poor working class, working class with money, the middle class, newly emerging elites and well-established elites) and even then, I did think: have I done the topic justice with just five categories? Notably, the BBC Great British Class Calculator had seven categories: precariat, traditional working class, emergent service workers, new affluent workers, new affluent workers, technical middle class, established middle class and elites. However, I realized that even if I came up with ten or even twenty categories, there will still be people who feel that they don't fit neatly into one category or the other and that us social scientists will have to come up with a new category that describes that more accurately. The problem is not with the methodology per se, but us simply accepting that the answers are never going to be perfect: even with my own classification system, my answers were spread across three categories (12 in well-established elites, 6 in newly emerging elites and 2 in the middle class), do you place me in the category where I have the most number of matches? Do you take an average Or do you allow me to self-define which category I think I should belong to? Or should it be so obvious, should we be splitting hairs over this?

Let's conduct a social experiment: imagine if we rounded up 100 random people for this experiment and they were given a choice between two categories. If they considered themselves amongst the top 50 in the group according to their intelligence, then they would tick the box 'clever'. If they didn't, then they had to tick the box 'stupid'. The results are predictable: practically everyone would tick the box 'clever' even though statistically, it should be roughly a 50-50 split. This is because of the kind of social stigma we would associate with a word like 'stupid' and few of us would gladly put ourselves in that category if we were given a choice. Likewise, if you were to repeat the experiment and the two choices now are higher or lower SES, again, most people would tick the higher option almost as a knee-jerk reaction. So imagine when you try to tell them that they have ticked the wrong box - ooh boy, they're going to be quite upset. Some social scientists call this the illusory superiority is a cognitive bias whereby a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities. So here's a great video by TED to explain the Dunning-Kruger, a more specific explanation of what is going on:

It does explain a lot: the fact is many people don't really understand the concept of social class or social economic status. They may have a vague idea of what it implies, but they have little clue as to what the methodology behind it may be. If I may quote the video above, "People lacking the knowledge and skill in a particular area suffer a double curse: first, they make mistakes and reach poor decisions. Those same knowledge gaps prevent them from catching their errors." We can see how this may apply in the field of learning a musical instrument or a sport like gymnastics, but what about one's social economic status? Well, let me give you an example. Last winter when my family visited me in London, my parents saw a shirt in a store which they said they wanted to buy for my brother-in-law, because it was a 'rather nice shade of blue and at a very reasonable price, this is something he can wear this to the office'. I then pointed out politely that the shirt was at best something for casual wear, because it certainly was not designed to be office wear and if you wore something like that to the office, you'll be sending out a lot of wrong signals from being utterly clueless about what social conventions are when it comes to office wear, what the current fashion trends are to whether you actually care what others think when they see what you wear. My parents certainly had huge gaps in their knowledge - that led to their poor decision in the first place, but secondly, until I told them why their choice was so bad, they had no idea at all that they had made a terrible decision and even tried to defend their choice. Note the double whammy here: nobody expected my parents to understand my brother-in-law's office dress code, but we expected my parents to perhaps ask me for my opinion (given that I am a working adult of about the same age) rather than just make a decision based on their very limited knowledge. Such is the Dunning-Kruger effect: people who don't know not even realizing that they don't know.

But perhaps we're over-analyzing it - perhaps there's no need for the Dunning-Kruger effect or illusory superiority to understand what is going on here. Many of us find it hard to acknowledge our shortcomings and will go to great lengths to convince ourselves otherwise. For example, if you want to feel thin, you just have to find a fat friend to compare yourself to and you'll feel relatively thinner. If you want to feel rich, then simply identify a friend who is poor and compare yourself to that friend. Quite simply, this is classic confirmation bias: some people will deliberately seek messages that confirm what they want to believe and manage to conveniently ignore evidence to the contrary. My mother believes that her English is excellent whilst I beg to differ: my mother speaks Singlish, she would say things like, "you got close the light or not?" instead of , "have you turned off the light?" Her justification for her claim to be excellent in English is the fact that many of her peers can barely string together a sentence in English (bear in mind the fact that my mother is in her mid-70s) hence in comparison to them, her English is much better and of course, that is true. But if I were to compare her to say, a younger person who would speak standard English rather than Singlish, then it will become clear that she's not really capable of speaking standard English. Does that bother her? No, not at all because she conveniently ignores evidence that is contrary to her long-held belief that her English is excellent. When we apply that same principle to the issue of SES in Singapore, not matter how poor you are, you can always find someone worse off than you, even if it means finding an example from another country. So when you compare yourself to someone who is worse off than you, then it is clear that you do have higher SES than this person. Such is the nature of people who seek confirmation bias.

This happens when people try to interpret the issue of SES from their personal perspective: am I better off or worse off than my close friends, neighbours and family members? Whilst that's a perfectly valid question of course, it doesn't really tell us the actual SES of a person. Let me give you an example: my friend Austin said to me the other day that he felt poor - when I clarified his situation, he wasn't badly off at all. He has a very good job in finance which commands a relatively high salary, but he was comparing himself to some other friends who are doing a lot better than him. So if you were to compare Austin to the average person in London, he's doing pretty well - but relative to the friends that Austin chose to compare himself with, he felt comparatively poor. This is why we really shouldn't allow people to define their own SES because they will subject themselves to different standards and benchmarks based on their personal circumstances and you just won't get any meaningful results. Is Austin rich or poor? Does my mother speak English well or not? The only sensible way to deal with such issues is to use a standard benchmark - such as by comparing Austin's salary to the average salary in London or the UK, or to let my mother sit for a GSCE O level English exam today and seeing how well she scores. That is not only a far more accurate way to measure the outcome, but also a much fairer way when looking at a much bigger cohort of people as you're subjecting all of them to the same standards to measure.

The moment you start dealing with the tricky issue of social economic status, there are bound to be people who are going to be upset when they find themselves at the bottom of the heap in - this has little to do with methodology, but everything to do with their sensitive feelings being hurt. My mother told me this story which left me shaking my head in disbelief: some years ago, one of her nieces (hence my cousin) qualified for a bursary at her school because her parents were unemployed. There were schemes to help students from low income family cope with their financial situation as the kids from rich families had access to everything from smart phones to laptops to the excellent tuition teachers. My cousin had none of that and the teacher was literally begging her, "please fill up this form, get the money and life will be a lot easier for you and your parents." My cousin took the form and sat on it for a few days, hoping that the teacher would forget about it. Her teacher pressed her for the form but each time she would make up an excuse. Eventually the deadline passed and it was clear my cousin would rather refuse the money than to have the shame associated with acknowledging her low social economic status. I found that quite hard to believe that she would choose this crazy notion of her 'pride' over something as pragmatic as a gift of cold, hard cash that came with no conditions (apart from having to fill up a form). Pride isn't going to buy you nice things at the mall, pride isn't going to fill your stomach when you're hungry or pay the bills - but this shows just the lengths people will go to just to assert that they are definitely NOT of lower SES.

Should people like my cousin be given help? Of course they should. But should we allow them to decide if they need or deserve help? I don't think so - because you will then have a situation where someone who is really needy saying no to help for all the wrong reasons, then you will have some rather wealthy but greedy people saying, "it's free money, only a fool would say no to free money, I'll gladly claim that I am needy just to get the free money." Thus we need some kind of system to evaluate the social economic status of individuals, because we need to correctly identify the right people whom we ought to help. To be fair to the textbook, the author did state that, "understanding SES is important because they help us understand societies better and enable governments to put in place more effective policies in dealing with health care, the rich-poor divide, aging, crime and education." The methodology in the textbook is blunt, to simply divide Singaporeans into two categories like that doesn't do the issue justice. Yet it doesn't change the fact that the government does need to deal with the issue of SES because we do need more effective policies in helping those of lower SES and bridging the gap between the rich and the poor. But if we are not even prepared to deal with the topic in a social studies textbook and talk about the poor amongst us, then how can we as a society face the complex challenges it presents?

But wait a minute, allow me to make a comparison to an app to came across recently. I remember looking at an app which was designed to introduce coding to children - I rolled my eyes in disbelief when I realized how simple it was, I became cynical instantly. Was this aimed at like eight year olds? Why it is so simple? I thought most kids would play with it for a maximum of five minutes and then get bored with it. It was then pointed out to me that yeah, it is aimed such young children - if we made it any more complex, then they would not be able to use it and they would lose interest in coding altogether if they feel it was unapproachable. The whole point of such a simple app was to make coding user-friendly for beginners and there's really nothing wrong with that, as long as there's something else that the child can then progress onto once they have outgrown that app. So are the critics taking the textbook a little bit too literally? Would they pick up a secondary 3 history textbook and criticize it for not doing WW2 justice? After all, secondary 3 students only learn a very limited amount of knowledge on each topic covered in their textbooks: they revisit these topics later on at A levels, at university where they get to explore them in much greater detail. So this is just an introduction to a complex topic - should the introduction be crucified for being too simple when introductions like that are by nature simple? Or has the author Rowan Luc really simplified the issue to the point where he has misrepresented a rather complex situation?

One of the biggest criticisms is the classification of HDB dwellers into the 'lower SES' category when 82% of Singaporeans live in HDB flats. The value of HDB flats vary widely, the older ones located far away from MRT stations often fetch a poor price, whilst the one of the nicer units at the Pinnacle could easily fetch over a million dollars. There's a huge difference between those who actually own their HDB flats (which could be valued at over a million dollars) and the penniless young adults who are still dependent on their parents to have a roof over their heads. By that token, an adult who has actually purchased his own HDB flat is significantly better off than say a penniless, unemployed young person living with his parents in a condominium. Should young people lucky enough to be born into rich families automatically be afforded higher SES status or should they have to prove themselves first before 'earning' that status? The textbook does go into some detail about five categories which would determine one's SES including: education level, income, type of job, ownership of wealth and lifestyle choices. In fact, apart from some of the glaring typos in the piece like, "Some of choice could include the following", nothing presented on that page is actually that controversial - these are pretty standard measures of SES, the author just hasn't adapted the content adequately to the context of Singapore.

There has been a lot of anger on Singaporean social media - mostly from people who resented the notion of being classes as 'lower SES' but likewise, there has been a backlash against that as well. After all, Singapore is an unequal society, there are rich people and poor people and this difference in wealth is very apparent in the way these people live their lives. Are there poorer people in Singapore? Of course, no one is pretending for a moment that everyone in Singapore is rich nor is the textbook advocating that the students should look down on those of a lower SES. The fact is social stratification does exist in Singapore and whilst the criteria may be blunt, your SES is essentially a function of your income (and wealth) and there is a strong correlation between your SES and your lifestyle. If you're not happy with your SES, then why take it out on a textbook when you should be asking far more difficult questions like why you have such low SES in the first place? Who is to be blamed for your low SES? Your parents for not having given you a decent upbringing? The education system for failing you prepare you for the working world? The government in failing to address the issue of social mobility? It then becomes a blame game - who can you blame? Would it be fair to blame someone for your lower SES? Or maybe there's nobody to blame at all, that you have to bear responsibility for your inability to accumulate the kind of wealth you need to attain higher SES? Are people willing to blame themselves at all?

What I do find interesting though is the fact that SES has been interpreted as class or 'social class' in this context and perhaps this is one of the first times when Singaporeans are beginning to talk about it. In England where I live, we have a much clearer definition of social class and it is very easy for us to know exactly which class you belong to based on subtle clues based on everything from the way you dress to the way you pronounce certain words. My impression was that Singapore was totally different in that there are no traditional social class boundaries and that your towkay millionaire may have pretty much the same mannerisms and accents as your HDB dweller who is struggling to make ends meet. But of course, societies do evolve and this is really the first time I am seeing Singaporeans kick up a big fuss over their social status - this is but the start of a debate about the issue. What should be the factors then when it comes to defining one's social economic status in Singapore? Should these factors be mainly based on income and wealth or should we also look at factors like academic achievements and lifestyle choices? Can we adapt the model of social class structures from another country like the UK and apply it to Singapore? Is this simply an exercise where we just have to apply the right methodology to arrive at the right answer, or will this debate require several more years, even decades to work itself out? So that's it from me for now. Do leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Many thanks for reading.