The working class with money: an analysis

Hi guys. I talked a lot about social class in Singapore in two of my recent posts - the first was when I tried to define social class in Singapore with my own fun survey (not to be treated too seriously) and the second was when I looked at the way Singaporeans still can't get their heads around the concept of class and social-economic status. Today I'm going to focus on one group that I found the most interesting in Singapore because that's the group that my parents belong to: I call it the 'working class with money'. So this group is interesting because they are not poor - they can be rather wealthy in fact, but they have a very different relationship with their wealth compared to say, families who had been wealthy for several generations. I estimate that this group is rather large in Singapore because there just aren't that many people who are genuinely poor (like struggling to make ends meet, pay the bills and put food on the table) - we're talking about those who have managed to accumulate a reasonable amount of wealth, they have money in the bank but still haven't quite acquired the mentality of what it is like to become properly middle class: so, they are the working class with money.

Do you know how to spend your wealth wisely?

So you have worked hard and accumulate some wealth - well what do you do with that money then? Let's look at the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Our most basic needs revolve around eating, drinking, having a roof over our head, having adequate clothing. Then at the next level, we'll address issues of safety: so for example, it's not just enough to have a place to call home, you want to live in a nice neighbourhood where you feel safe to walk down the street at night, where you are not likely to be a victim of crime. That would mean being willing to pay a lot more money to buy or rent a property in a nicer part of town, rather than simply go for the cheapest option available. Then we move onto more complex needs to do with esteem: us humans, we're social creatures, we crave respect, recognition, status and love from others. Now in the past, that traditionally meant having high social status in your local community whereby others held you in high esteem but in 2018, it could do with how many followers you have on Instagram and Twitter, how much influence you wield in the digital world. Then after that, you have the highest level of needs to do with self-actualization and self-transcendence: these needs are all about making yourself a better person and making the world a much better place.

Now to understand the relationship between poverty and needs, I want you to imagine a situation whereby you have to support a family on a very limited income, there just isn't enough money to make everyone happy so you have to say no to a lot of things that would be nice but are just not essential for survival. The money would go to cover the most basic needs like buying food and drink, paying the rent and then maybe paying the school fees for the children. Something like buying toys for the children would be seen as a waste of money when it could be spent on something a lot more essential like getting more food for the children when they are suffering from malnutrition and underweight. Now imagine if this same family has a bit more money now, we increase their income so that they have more than enough to pay for all their most basic needs and there is still some money left over - what do they spend that extra money on? That's when it gets interesting: do they spend it say on their children's education? Do they visit an expensive restaurant for a delicious meal? Do they treat themselves to a nice holiday abroad? Do they get some new furniture for the house? Do they treat themselves to some new clothes and shoes? Do they try to invest the money to make that wealth grow? Or do they save the money out of fear that there may be tough times ahead and it would be useful to have some savings just in case?

In the case of my family, yeah we pretty much found ourselves in that situation all throughout my childhood, being faced with these choices when my parents found themselves with enough money - yet they always chose to save the money or spend as little as possible. Take the example of something like ice cream - if my siblings and I asked if we could eat ice cream, we would get the cheapest brand from the supermarket so we were appeased whilst my parents would be satisfied they were still saving money by not wasting it on more expensive ice cream. Why did my parents behave as if they were very poor whilst actually earning enough to put away quite a lot of money in the bank each month as savings? Well, one explanation is that they both lived through WW2 and the very difficult years following the war - they knew what it was like to starve, my mother had seen her sister die during her childhood from illnesses that would have easily been cured today. It's not like my parents ever thought that war would break out again and they would need their savings to survive, but rather it is a lack of faith in their own abilities to continually generate enough income for the family. This was ironic as they worked as teachers all their lives and were never unemployed, but they went out of their way to try to make more money by giving tuition on the side and for a while, we even took in foreign students from Thailand and Malaysia who were as young as 10 or 11 years old. So these students would live with us and my parents would take care of them.

There's a good reason why you should be careful with money, spending beyond your would land you in debt and lead to a downward spiral that traps you in poverty. I'm not talking about being careless with money, I couldn't help but feel that my parents were almost obsessed with trying to spend as little as possible and save as much as possible. I don't even think know why they behave like that when it comes to money but I suppose most of their mindset can be attributed to their really tough childhood growing up in poverty when the limited amount of money had to be allocated very carefully. But what do you do when you are no longer poor and you do have some more money to spend even after you have taken care of the basic necessities? What kind of things do you spend that money on then? Well, in the case of my parents, they went for the things that they couldn't have in the past and they indulged - food, for example. But it was not like we were going to the most expensive restaurants in Singapore and having the finest cuisine available, no - my parents made sure there was always plenty of food on the table to the point where we were constantly throwing away a lot of left overs. The amount of rice and soup thrown away after each dinner was insane, but I realized that for my parents these were the staples they always ran out of during meal times when they were young, so they wanted to avoid that situation by always cooking too much rice and soup - but it wasn't just rice and soup, oh no.They would buy more vegetables than they needed and when they wilted or rotted because they weren't used, they would end up in the bin.

The amount of money they actually wasted through cooking too much was sizable if you actually added up all the food that ended up in the dustbin over the years. Now that would seem like irrational behaviour from people who were trying to save money - why would you literally throw money into the dustbin by cooking too much food? But here's the thing: poor people can get extremely defensive about their decisions, but it doesn't mean they are rational or they are any good at managing their money just because they get defensive. Well, that describes my parents - my parents are now both obese because of years of cooking way too much food, then trying to finish the food at the dinner table because it would be a waste to throw away perfectly good food. They would eat till they really couldn't take another bite then throw the rest of the food away. Here's the thing - we could have spent that same amount of money on finer cuts of meat, more expensive brands of products, more exotic fruits and vegetables, but no: my parents insisted on quantity rather than quality. The foods they consumed at mealtimes were extremely predictable and boring as they always stuck to the few dishes they liked. They would rather buy a vast quantity of the cheapest cut of beef that was tough and throwing a lot of it away than to buy a fine steak that was a lot more expensive with the same amount of money. The latter would have led to a more pleasurable experience overall, there would be no wastage; yet my parents saw the latter as a waste of money.

When I look at some of the terrible decisions my parents have made over the years when it came to spending on food and the amount of money they literally threw into the dustbin, my conclusion is that people like them know what to do when they are very poor and have very limited amounts of money - but the moment they earn enough to become middle class, they start making some very poor, very irrational decisions because they are still stuck in that 'survival' mindset. So like in the example of the beef, like good grief, I grew up hating beef because the only beef they would buy is the really cheap and tough cuts of beef but there was always a lot of it. It was only when I was older and I went to a rather nice restaurant with a friend then I realized, oh wow, good steaks can be so tender and delicious, not all beef taste like old shoes. But it goes a lot beyond food: that's just an example of how the working class with money can make terrible decisions when it comes to something as basic as that - let's take education for instance. Despite the fact that my parents were teachers, they didn't understand the purpose of education at all - they were so completely focused on what students scored for their exams and didn't really understand what it meant to truly benefit from the process of education.

Let's turn back the clock to the time when my mother was a child and her father was struggling to put food on the table. My grandfather was not educated so he did a variety of manual labour jobs to earn a living, he would return home from work each day totally exhausted from the hard labour and my mother and her siblings would be warned by my grandmother not to disturb my grandfather as he badly needed enough rest in order to get up the next morning to go do the same backbreaking hard work all over again. The hard labour took a massive toll on my grandfather's health and he died a few years after WW2, leaving my grandmother to bring up the family as a widow. So my grandmother went out and got manual jobs like cleaning and worked her fingers to the bone to bring up the family, leaving her always exhausted and as a child, my mother literally feared that if her parents ran out of energy and didn't get up one morning to go to work, the whole family would just starve to death. So when my mother started working, her health was poor and she had these horrible migraines. She defaulted to her parents' behaviour - once she had completed her work, she had to conserve as much energy as possible, get as much rest as possible to ensure that she could get up the next morning to go to work and take care of her family. Thus she would often use her migraine as an excuse not to take any interest in what her children did as she feared that if she spent the energy participating in it, it might just bring on a migraine - so it was just the fear of the migraine that stopped her from engaging anything new, beyond what was essential for survival.

Now when I present the story like that, it sounds reasonable, even noble, the way my parents and grandparents took care of their families: they were in survival mode, battling starvation during very difficult circumstances. When we became more comfortable financially, my parents still found it hard to snap out of this 'survival' mindset. My parents worked as primary school teachers and it meant that if they encountered something that wasn't demanded of them in their job, they would deem that as a waste of precious energy and refuse to engage it, out of fear that it would drain them of their limited energy and get in the way of them waking up in the morning to go to work. It was particularly frustrating for me as a child growing up in that family because they took very little interest in the things that I was pursuing: for example, I became fascinated with the French language and French culture when I was in the army but my parents didn't require any knowledge of either for their work in the primary school. So they completely ignored that new development in my life despite the fact that most parents would take some interest in what their children get up to - especially since I ended up studying and working in France. But no, they took zero interest not because they hated French people or me, but simply because they were in survival mode, conserving every last bit of their energy by avoiding things that were not essential.

Dealing with this mindset can be really frustrating to say the least for a very simple reason: my family isn't poor now - my parents were poor maybe 50 or 60 years ago but today my parents are retired with a lot of savings that they've put away, they have generous pensions from the government and they have three children who are earning a lot of money. Yet my father would spend hours, walking from shop to shop just to compare prices of groceries, all to save a dollar here and there. I can at best tolerate my father's behaviour but don't expect me to condone it - I think he should be spending his time on more meaningful activities to enrich himself. And besides, the reason why I don't spend ages running from one supermarket to another just to save 5% on the milk or the rice is because my time is precious - that time spent running around could be spent earning more money, studying, resting or socializing, all of which are worth so much more to me. My father just doesn't get it, there's a part of me that just wants to tell him how ridiculous he is but I know there's no point in criticizing him. He's so completely autistic and would just accuse me of being wasteful for not doing what he does. I know my sister would be like, "just leave it, if it makes him happy to visit five supermarkets to save 75 cents, then that's like his hobby. So just accept it lah, he is what he is - you're not going to change the way he is no matter what you say."

Here's the thing which I find utterly ridiculous: if our parents have been through a really difficult time, such as living through the war or enduring some terrible hardship, in Asian culture we somehow assume that they are going to become wiser and better for the experience - that assumption is based mostly on our assumption that older people are wiser because they have more experiences, thus we should always offer unconditional respect to our elders. But in my case, yeah my parents have been through a lot of hardship but they have been damaged by those difficult experiences and I still see how that hardship continues to make them irrational and impairs their judgement today. In fact, I know that my rather blunt assessment of the situation would have already offended a lot of people because I am speaking critically of my parents, like how dare I be so critical of them and not put them on a pedestal. Perhaps when my father was very young and had very little money, yeah then it made sense to be very careful with his money when shopping for groceries, but can you blame me for wishing he spent less time shopping for groceries and more time doing something more productive? It worries me when I envision him walking around Ang Mo Kio for hours with his bags of groceries at his age.

Do you offer your elders unconditional respect or do you judge them?

Fortunately, I didn't grow up with poverty - so I never really had that 'survival' mode in me, I've never gone hungry, I've never worried about being homeless or not being able to pay my school fees. This has led to me having major disagreements with my parents over my education: when I was growing up, everything had to be either relevant to my studies or it didn't have an intrinsic value. Then when I started working, they just assumed that everything I did was directly useful and relevant to my work - so when I started learning Hindi for example, they assumed that I needed it to do business with my Indian clients. On one hand, yes it takes them by surprise when I can speak some Hindi but on the other hand, the business language of India is still English given that Hindi is only spoken by about 54% of the population, so when a Hindi speaker from New Delhi meets a Bengali speaker from Calcutta, they default to English to understand each other. But really, I like learning new languages not so much because I can make more money from it but because I think it makes me a better person when I am more knowledgeable about other cultures. You can't put in financial value on something like 'wisdom' and 'knowledge' - but that's something people in 'survival' mode find very hard to understand.

When I was visiting my family in Singapore last year, I visited a mosque and whilst I was there, I struck up a friendly conversation with some of the staff there who were intrigued that this Chinese guy had visited the mosque and was keen to learn about Islam. When I told my parents about my visit to the mosque, they were thoroughly confused: what the hell was I doing there? Did I want to convert to Islam? Mosques are for Muslims, you cannot just wander in and visit if you're not one of them. I reassured them that whilst I had no intention to convert to Islam, I believed that learning more about Muslims and their religion made me a better person. That concept of knowledge somehow making me a better person just left my parents thoroughly perplexed - oh the irony, they are retired teachers.So my mother tried to make a connection that made sense to her, "so... if you want to do business with Muslims, then you will find it easier to talk to them if you know more about their religion, then you can make more money if you have Muslim clients, is that it?" No, of course not - whilst I do deal with Muslims all the time at work, my intention to learn more about Islam had no ulterior motive related to making money. This was knowledge for the sake of knowledge, a genuine thirst for understanding about the major religions of the world. The irony is that my peers would easily understand why I wanted to visit that mosque and many would gladly join me in that visit, but my parents have never set foot in a mosque and probably never will.

That's just one example about their attitude towards Islam: they are totally ignorant about most things that are not directly relevant to their lives in Ang Mo Kio. It is one thing if they are say, ignorant about French culture as France is halfway around the world from Singapore, but to remain totally ignorant about Islam and not have even the slightest bit of desire to understand more about Islam when there is a significant Muslim minority in Singapore, well that's just unacceptable. Yet in their minds, it makes complete sense. The only way I can explain it to younger people is through an example from the reality TV show Survivor - please see the short Youtube clip below if you're not familiar with it. Now in one of the earlier series, the tribes had to compete to win certain prizes that would be very useful in the camp. On offer were a number of things like rope, buckets, blankets, cooking oil, fresh fruit, fishing hooks, tea bags, soap, a Swiss army knife and cold beer. The exercise was set up to test the tribes' ability to make a group decision: they can't have everything on offer, they have won the right to take only a number of things from the basket  so they have to prioritize what was most important to the tribe and what they could do without. So for example, the cold beer may seem like a nice treat, but it was usually deemed not as vital as something like the fishing hooks or the Swiss army knife. A good wash with soap may be tempting, but is it as important as the blankets or the buckets? You must decide what is most important for your survival.

My parents had the same attitude when it came to knowledge - they prioritize knowledge into things that were vital and things they could do without. So the way they would rationalize their desire not to know anything about a topic would be simply checking if they would get into trouble if they didn't bother finding out about this topic? If it is not vital for their survival (eg. learning about France, or about Islam), they will gladly ignore it. So sometimes, they would be forced to learn about something new: so recently, my mother developed a condition on her feet known as plantar fasciitis - this affected her directly as she experienced some pain in her heels when she walked. Thus she had an immediate and urgent need to learn about plantar fasciitis in order to cope with the condition and reduce the discomfort - when you put her in a position like that, you'll be amazed how quickly the need forces her to absorb a lot of important information rather quickly as she has classified this as a survival need. So it is not that she is too stupid and old to learn new things (hey she can tell you everything there is to know about plantar fasciitis today), it's just that people like my parents just can't get out of that 'survival' mindset and are conditioned to reject new information in the name of survival - unless that new information is pertinent to their survival, which in the case of my mother's rather problematic heel condition, actually is.

People who have never had to worry about survival are far more willing to spend money on experiences that will nurture themselves without worrying too much about seeing an immediate return on their investment. Whereas the working class with money, well, sometimes they do not know what the heck to do with their money even if they encounter a windfall. There is a story that is so tragic it is funny: a working class couple in England won the lottery and proudly showed off the vast amounts of gold jewelry they bought to the media. Days after those photos appeared in the media, some robbers broke into their house at night, held the couple at knife point and stole over £11,000 of gold from them. Okay, it is a free world, if you have money you're free to spend it on whatever makes you happy, but spending that much on gold jewelry? Really? How about investing in your children's education or an experience like an exotic holiday that will widen your horizons? And as for sharing the pictures of their gold jewelry on social media - well, I say, that's just asking for trouble. If a celebrity like Kim Kardashian can be robbed in Paris despite having a huge security entourage, then I wouldn't recommend keeping a huge amount of valuables in your home - that would just make you a vulnerable target for thieves.

But that's the difference between the working class and the upper or middle class: those forced into survival mode would demand a more immediate return when they spend their money. So buying an expensive gold chain may give you some kind of immediate thrill when you put it on, feel the weight of it around your neck, take a picture and then show it off on social media with a cheeky message like, "hey bitches, check out my new gold chain! #'24ksolidgold." Whereas that same amount of money could have been spent on going to the opera in somewhere like the famous Teatro alla Scala in Milan - you would need to have invested in an education which did cultivate an appreciation for opera to begin with and the real pay off for such a trip would be when you meet someone who is both cultured and rich enough to do the same thing, then you could say something like,  "I was there for La Traviata back in March. I didn't have very good seats as it was all a last minute thing, I had a really busy week and I thought, I've truly earned myself a treat this weekend." That would be the kind of thing that you can do to establish you are someone's social equal during a business meeting in a way no amount of gold jewelry can because it is one thing to have money, but one thing money cannot buy is class.

In this example, the way that working class couple spent their lottery winnings demonstrates their perception of how they perceive wearing a chunky gold chain would make them better people, whilst someone from a more privileged background may spend that money on a cultural experience or even simply give that money away to charity in order to gain that same feeling of having made themselves better people. This is the highest level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: self-actualization or self-transcendence. I know a lot of people are going to hate me for saying this, but if buying a chunky gold chain is your wildest fantasy when money is no object, then oh boy, that just shows how uneducated and uncultured that working class couple was and their new found wealth wasn't going to change that at all. Given how poor they were, they had been concerned with very basic needs all their lives so even when their windfall gave them the luxury to explore other means to seek fulfillment and happiness for themselves and their children, they defaulted to the most crass expression of wealth possible: chunky gold jewelry. I actually felt a great sense of Schadenfreude when I read the story.

I did think about how I ought to end this piece: perhaps there should be some kind of education process, something to help working class people learn how to manage their wealth should they ever find themselves in a position where they realize, oh goodness me I'm now rich, what do I do with all this money so as it may benefit my family? But then again, hardly anybody is interested in teaching anyone that process because everyone thinks they know exactly how they want to spend their money and most people are willing to look the other way and say, "none of my business, I won't judge. That's your money and you're free to spend it anyway that makes you happy." There is a huge industry aimed at training and educating young people of course, but there's very little aimed at adults who want to improve themselves and that's mostly because most adults don't bothertrying to learn anything new after a certain age. And it's not like this information is 'secret', that information is out there for those who want to access it. Perhaps the issue can be addressed through education, so young students should be taught what they ought to aspire to, what they kind of experiences or possessions they should spend their money on when they do finally make some money - so taking your family to do something amazing like paragliding over the Alps will give them amazing memories to last a lifetime whilst buying chunky gold chains that you'll have to lock up in a safety deposit box will probably be a poor investment in comparison. Sure you can teach people such principles, but at the end of the day - you can bring a horse to water, but can you make it drink?

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? What does it take to change the mindset of the working class? Certainly the mere acquisition of wealth isn't enough to trigger off a fundamental change in their mentality to make them become middle class, so what does it take then? Is it something that cannot be changed or is this something that is a product of our education system? Or should we even try to make the working class with money more middle-class, why can't we just let them be whatever they want to be? Are we being too judgmental about them? How do we address the issue of social mobility then in this context? And what does self-actualization mean to you, what would you do tomorrow if you won the lottery? Let me know what you think, leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.