Putting all your eggs in one basket?

Hi guys, this is a draft and transcript of a podcast I have recorded so if you prefer to listen to this piece rather than to read it, please click here. A reader has asked me to comment on a piece he has seen on Youtube entitled Why Singapore's Success Is Becoming A Problem and it is on a Youtube Channel called Asian Boss. Now at first I was somewhat skeptical given that the presenter Stephen Park was a Korean guy with an American accent, will he actually know enough about Singapore to do this topic justice? I often have problems with foreigners judging Singapore as a society - they either put Singapore on a pedestal like it is some kind of miracle paradise on earth or they are way too harsh on Singaporean society without actually understanding the context of the underlying problems. Stephen Park seems to hit the nail on the head with his opening remark, why is it so hard to get rich in Singapore? That is against the backdrop of Singapore being 2nd richest country in the world according to latest 2025 figures from the IMF, young Singaporeans are being priced out of their own country as soaring property prices make home ownership further and further out of reach whilst salaries are simply not keeping pace with inflation. To be fair, I think Stephan Park actually did a pretty good job when it came to evaluating the current situation facing young Singaporeans and yes I would encourage you to watch that video despite it being 38 minutes long, but there is just one aspect of Singaporeans society that I don't think Stephen Park addressed and so I wanted to offer my insight. Think of this as an addendum or supplement to what Stephen Park has offered on his Youtube channel, please note I'm not disagreeing with him, I'm merely raising another point which I feel he hasn't covered but it is equally important and this is the kind of insight that I could offer as someone who was born in Singapore, grew up in Singapore and therefore I would understand Singaporean society a lot better. 

So in his video, Stephen Park talked about how rigid the Singaporean education is and whilst that will create a workforce that is going to obediently follow instructions and do as they are told, these are just the worker ants in the factories as opposed to the senior leaders who will have the foresight to innovate, invent and lead. Furthermore, this is coupled with a system whereby law and order is maintained with an iron fist, even minor offences are punished severely and this creates an atmosphere where people are afraid to be different, afraid to stand out and prefer to conform with the crowd. I recently did a podcast about Singaporean dissident Amos Yee, so I would invite you to have a listen to that if this is a topic that you find interesting. But this is where I think Stephen Park doesn't quite understand the psyche of Singaporean folks, you see - this faith that Singaporeans place in the government isn't some kind of brainwashing that you might encounter in a place like China or North Korea, instead this is a reaction by many older Singaporeans who witnessed how the government managed to eradicate poverty over the decades. When Singapore gained independence in 1965, it had a GDP per capita on par with the poorest African nations at the time - fast forward to today where it is the second richest country in the world, you have to give the government credit where credit is due and that is what a lot of Singaporeans have done. However, the devil is always in the detail: whilst the Singaporean government has indeed performed really well when it came to delivering economic growth, it hasn't delivered the same miracle when it comes to the education system - far from it. This is where there is a serious issue, a major problem that some Singaporeans have managed to identify and solve, but it is the kind of situation whereby if you're smart enough to deal with this problem, then your child is fine and if you're oblivious to how serious this problem is, then the odds are set against your poor child. 

The problem with the education system is the delivery mechanism - the poor quality of the teachers in Singapore is an issue. I have witnessed it first hand, at close quarters because both my parents were teachers (they are very old and are both retired now), but I have managed to see how the teaching profession has consistently failed to maintain standards and how terrible teachers get away with really poor performance. This is because of our Asian culture which blindly confers respect to people in certain positions of authority, such as teachers, politicians and community leaders. So if a teacher is lazy and the class performs badly in the exams as a result of the poor teaching, the teacher would get away with it and the students would instead be blamed for being lazy and ill-disciplined. This is further reinforced by the blind faith a lot of Singaporeans place in their government and thus the ministry of education is thus by extension an arm of the Singapore government. Whilst I have no doubt that the ministry of education in Singapore would hire the very best people to fill the positions at the top of their organization, when it comes to the ordinary teachers delivering the lessons in the school all over the country, the quality is a different story altogether. I don't want to condemn all teachers in Singapore just because I have had the misfortune of getting to know quite a lot of terrible ones, but it felt more like a lottery whether or not one would get a good teacher or not. There is no correlation between the quality of the school and the quality of the teachers - you see in Singapore, we have a streaming system to sort the intake of students. So the best schools would only admit the students with the best scores, kinda like how you need nothing short of straight As to even begin to consider applying to a top university like Oxford or Cambridge. Because of my excellent academic results, I went to some of the top schools in Singapore and still I somehow managed to encounter some truly dreadful teachers and there simply wasn't anything in the system to punish these teachers who did their jobs badly. There was absolutely no quality control when it came to their work performance and this was just the way things were there. 

I was in Singapore in October this year and I managed to catch up with some old classmates and please note that for the context of this case study, I went to some of the top schools in Singapore and so my former classmates are mostly very successful. We did this whole thing about, "so, what's Mark doing these days? Are you still in touch with June? I heard that Wai is the CEO of a very successful company". And when I mentioned the name of a former classmate whom I shall call Maria (not her real name), the story was like, "oh Maria is a secondary school teacher today." And my reaction was, "really? What went wrong? I remembered her to be so brilliant - how did she end up like that?" The story with Maria was that she had a career after university but then she got married and had twins; so she decided to take a few years out to become a full time mother and when she tried to reenter the workforce, she really struggled to find a job after having been a full time mother for so long and hence she settled for teaching when nothing else worked out. I'm not trying to suggest for a moment that Maria is a bad teacher (actually I have no idea if she would be a good teacher or not) but my point is that I wouldn't expect someone whom I remember to be bright and intelligent to end up teaching in the context of Singapore. Maria was making the best of bad situation, settling for a teaching career wasn't her first choice. 

You see, if you give a terrible teacher a class of really smart students in a top school in Singapore, the students would either just figure it all out for themselves or seek eternal help through the private tuition system, they would go onto perform really well and so the terrible teacher gets away with it - often  they will claim credit for the great performance of the class despite the fact that the students performed well in spite of their terrible teacher and not because of their terrible teacher. Conversely, if you place a terrible teacher in a mediocre school with below average students, the students will perform very poorly at the exams and the teacher will blame the students, making excuses like, "if you give me a class of baboons and monkeys, how do you expect me to deliver miracles?" Now don't get me wrong, what I have described can happen in any country from Sweden to Senegal to Sri Lanka - it is not a problem that is unique to Singapore. The problem however is the way Singaporean parents and students alike react to this situation - I have been lucky enough to have travelled and worked around the world, so I have been able to compare and contrast the way different societies react to this problem. Thus in other countries, people often recognize the shortfalls and problems in the education system; thus they will go out of their way to seek other means to prepare themselves to enter the working world and find ways to seeks skills that will impress prospective employers. In Europe for example, it is common for teenagers to have part-time jobs once they turn about 14 or 15. We're not just talking about doing a few weeks of work during the school holidays, we're talking about teenagers holding down a part time job whilst studying at high school. This is not just normal but considered essential in terms of gaining valuable skills for the working world that are simply not taught in the classroom environment. However, most Singaporean parents would be horrified at that thought and would assume that this time could be much better spent studying for the exams and that the working experience isn't that valuable. Therein lies the problem, Singaporean parents are putting all their eggs in one basket without even considering how to prepare their children for the working world by seeking other useful experiences outside the education system. Now that would not be such a problem if one could actually depend on the education system in Singapore but as I've explained, no you really shouldn't and cannot depend on this system - one needs to be a lot more realistic. 

Allow me to explain where this mindset comes from: I come from a poor, working class family and my parents knew they weren't able to provide everything I needed as a child. This was in sharp contrast to my friends and classmates from richer families who had access to all kinds of opportunities that I could have never accessed. My parents could have either accepted that they had failed as parents because of their poverty but that would have meant accepting some kind of personal responsibility - no, instead they had created this narrative that the Singaporean system was perfect, the government had built this foolproof system and that the government has provided everything we needed - all we had to do in this scenario was to simply follow the rules, obey the laws and be grateful to this government. This faith in the system is thus born out of a desire to create a benevolent big brother who will take care of us and provide us with everything we need. This may take the form of a caring government, a guardian angel or even some kind of god or deity who is on your side. So with that in mind, they sleep better at night in the belief that the government will take care of everything, that they have nothing to worry about. And if a student doesn't perform well within this perfect system, then they will always blame the individual for being lazy or ill-disciplined but they will never blame the system. Thus it is this very mindset that makes too many Singaporeans put all their eggs in the education basket in the firm belief that it is the best and only way for them to succeed and to become rich. Just to give you an idea about this mindset works in practice, when I was in secondary school, some of my friends at school were able to get some part time work at my classmate's father's company and I thought it would be a good idea to join them. My mother really hated the idea because  she thought that a good student should spend every spare minute revising and preparing for the exams - that I was too young to pick up useful skills to enter the working world in any case and so she vehemently refused to let me do that job. Now as to whether or not my friends who did that job really benefited from it is a moot point as I think they weren't trusted to do much there, but my point is that whilst parents in the West would've encouraged me to have taken that job, my mother had well and truly placed all her eggs in the education basket in refusing to even acknowledge the possible benefits that a part time job could have yielded. She had a form of tunnel vision that is common in Singapore. 

So if I didn't expect my future employers to care about the minute details about how I performed at school as a student, then I wouldn't bother trying to get full marks on every single assignment and I'd spend more of my time seeking a wide range of interesting experiences to broaden my horizons. But if I knew that I might be refused a dream job over a test I performed poorly in when I was in secondary school, then I would make a lot more sacrifices as a student to avoid that situation. Thus it is a question of whether or not employers in Singapore will actually put that much emphasis on your academic record or not when it comes to the recruitment process and there is a clear split. Some employers actually do that whilst others will focus on more important aspects like where you got your degree from and your work experience. I had this story online about a case in 2024 where an interview went badly wrong when an applicant was interrogated about why she had performed poorly in one exam during her O levels, presumably taken when she was 16 - it was a poor grade for her English. The interviewer used it as evidence to show that this candidate was too lazy to prepare for an important and thus possessed some kind of flaw in her character, whilst ignoring the fact that this candidate's English wasn't bad at all and that she was applying for a job as an accountant - thus her ability in English really wasn't all that relevant to the role she was applying for. So in this case, I'd tell the candidate to tell the interviewer to go fuck himself and walk out of the room with her head held high. It is a worst case scenario that can happen in Singapore yet Singaporeans seem to afraid of that worst case scenario that they haven't realized that the best response to that is to simply seek a far more reasonable employer instead. Thus I think the issue here is the way Singaporeans are unable and unwilling to stand up for themselves even when faced with a ludicrous situation like that - there is this acceptance of "well that's just the way things are here in Singapore so I can't change the system - why waste time even talking about it?" No one is asking you to start a revolution, I'm just asking you to stand up for yourself when you encounter injustice. 

This is really one of my pet hates when it comes to Singaporeans - you know the saying "two wrongs don't make a right?" It is so obvious but somehow, most Singaporeans don't get it. Take for example the issue of very long working hours in Singapore and even though most Singaporeans would love to have a much better work-life balance and an understanding employer, they usually just sigh and say, "it is like that in Singapore, that's just the way things are. All my friends here also face the same problem - so that means that this is normal in the context of Singapore." It is not like Singaporeans don't have the ability to try to find solutions to their problems but it is this type of mindset which makes them simply accept their fate, that they have to live with the problem instead of trying to solve it. These problems like long working hours are hardly unique to Singapore, no they affect many different countries around the world but the problem that is unique to Singapore is the lack of willingness by the local Singaporeans to actually try to find a solution. 

Finally, I want to address the question - is it hard to get rich in Singapore? This was one of the themes of the video that inspired this podcast and the simple answer I have for you is this: it is not any harder to get rich in Singapore compared to any big city in the world like London, San Francisco, Melbourne, Tokyo or Amsterdam. There isn't one magical place where money just grows on trees and you can get rich quickly. In fact getting rich is often down to mathematics: if you earn more than you spend, then you accumulate wealth and you can get rich. The more wealth you accumulate each month, the faster you become rich. But if you do something like have children, then it is going to cost you a lot of money every month to take care of those children and you will have to earn a lot more if you want to be both a parent and rich at the same time. So a single man with a modest income but has no children can become rich a lot faster than a father who earns a lot of money but has five children to bring up - you don't need to be an accountant to figure that one out. It is up to each individual to decide what brings them the most amount of happiness in life and what their priorities are, if they wish to start a family or not and how that would then impact on their quest to become rich. So by that token, it is no harder to get rich in Singapore than any other city in the world - that is down to the individual and not really the government. Okay that's it from me on this topic, thank you very much for reading and happy holidays everyone.