News this week included: an editorial by The Straits Times (thank you) calling for the Leader of the Opposition appointment rules to be formalised; a worrying trend of property agents putting up fake listings to lure buyers; illegal adoptive babies being smuggled from Indonesia; more young adults being diagnosed with cancer; HOME reiterating concerns over predatory recruitment practices trapping migrant workers in debt; Anthony Chen’s “We Are All Strangers”, the first Singaporean film to compete for the Berlinale’s Golden Bear; and Ratna Damayanti Taha, Epigram Book Prize winner.
Below are the issues we chose to explore in more depth.
Cutthroat competition corrodes cohesion. This was the core argument of one of the most revealing talks at Singapore Perspectives, the annual powwow organised by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), a government-adjacent think tank within NUS. Sociologist Vincent Chua charted 21,000 Singaporeans’ feelings of hope, community, and national pride in nine “waves” between 2001 and 2023, mapping them against three key drivers of competition: immigration, inflation, and inequality. Immigration, so it goes, pits people against each other for jobs, transport, and healthcare; inflation makes them compete to stay afloat; inequality stokes resentment (and perhaps the desire to get ahead with little regard for others).
All three surged during the “growth at all costs” decade from 2001 to 2011, pushing cohesion to a nadir until a sharp electoral setback forced the PAP to dam immigration and embrace redistribution. As the big three eased, competition softened and that frayed sense of Singaporean-ness partly recovered. Redistribution has expanded since 2019—lately via the administration’s “VCR” path—further narrowing income inequality. But immigration and inflation have risen again; Chua’s data shows a parallel rise in resentment, and thinning communal bonds. We’re not at 2011 levels yet but the trend is unmistakable.
That excessive competition can have negative consequences on society and the individual is not in itself a novel idea. Consider Margaret Heffernan’s 2014 book, A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition. But Chua’s analysis provides vital local context in a city that so valourises traditional concepts of merit and competition. It also gives empirical form to something perhaps most here have sensed intuitively: relentless competition atomises and alienates. As he put it, “market logic competes with communitarian logic…and when growth outpaces community, a market economy becomes a market society.”
Always, there will be factors beyond policy. Chua pointed out that the 2011-19 period also saw the passing of Lee Kuan Yew and Joseph Schooling’s Olympic gold. Both fostered unity and national identity, and in LKY’s case, a collective reflection. Meanwhile, post-2019 inflation is one of the pandemic’s grim legacies (its domestic sources have been the subject of robust debate), even though it has ebbed from its 2023 peak. Even so, Singapore’s political economy is the most powerful structural force shaping competition, and hence society. Chua noted that immigration is closely correlated with inflation. (Intensified, perhaps, by the active wooing of the ultra-rich.) While we (rightly) celebrate falling income equality, we refuse to even acknowledge, let alone measure, wealth inequality. The problem of course is that the juxtaposition is visible and visceral: sprawling landed houses and cosy HDBs; Bentleys and crowded buses and trains; wet markets and premium grocers; and countless other markers of daily life.
Dig deeper, and six decades of meritocracy have conditioned us to equate worth—our own and others’—with material success. With bungalows and Bentleys. This breeds what Chua called “relational inequality”, the hardest to dismantle because it means overhauling an entire culture. Considered thus, he says, the problem is less scientific than moral. What kind of society do we want? What kind of society is being foisted upon us? And where, between the two, will we eventually end up in one, two, or three decades?
