Over a thousand homeless people. Middle-class professionals losing their jobs, and then forced to queue at soup kitchens. Some 30 percent of working households earn less than the amount required to meet basic needs. Old aunties and uncles cleaning tables, sweeping streets, doing manual labour till the very end, their hunched backs an indictment of the system.

This isn’t some faraway backwater, but Singapore, our home. How is it that we’re also one of the world’s richest cities? 

Inequality is arguably the most important big-picture issue at stake in the upcoming general election (GE). It’s important to first understand how bad it is, then interrogate the capitalist’s mindset that might explain our stratified economy, and finally examine what the opposition is proposing to do about it, and the trade-offs involved.

How bad is income inequality? After taxes and transfers, it’s already high for the developed world. But it’s probably far worse than we know. As Jom has detailed, Singapore uses a suspect method of measuring it. The biggest problem is that unlike other countries, Singapore does not include income from investments in its measure, only that from work. This greatly underestimates the incomes of the rich, many of whom earn far more from their investments than their wages.