This Is What Inequality Looks Like

Teo You Yenn

5 ideas

1. Rental-flat parents measured against middle-class schooling

   Teo spent roughly three years with families in Singapore's one- and two-room public rental flats. Many parents worked shifts or irregular low-wage jobs, could not afford tuition, and were then judged by schools that assumed an adult would sign homework, drill spelling and attend meetings. Their children began primary school behind peers who had enrichment classes, and teachers and officials read this as parental neglect. The case shows how an ostensibly equal school system builds in unpaid middle-class parental labour and then treats its absence as a moral failing of poor families.

2. Differentiated deservedness in welfare design

   The state distributes help unequally by social category rather than by need. Citizens who follow approved paths, such as working, marrying and buying a flat, receive generous, dignified support like housing grants and tax reliefs. People who fall off those paths receive meagre, temporary, means-tested aid that requires repeated proof of effort. Because of this tiering, the poor experience the system as surveillance and humiliation, while the better-off experience the same system as entitlement.

3. Ask what's wrong with us, not them

   The habitual question about poor people, 'why don't they save, plan or study harder', treats poverty as the product of deficient individuals. Teo reverses the question to ask what institutions and the comfortable majority do that produces and sustains low-income lives. Inequality is a relationship: the advantages of the middle class, including cheap services, school edges and housing security, are bound up with the disadvantages of the poor.

4. Ideology of normalcy as sorting device

   Policy is organised around a scripted 'normal' life: stable employment, heterosexual marriage, buying a public flat, then raising children through the school system. Benefits, housing eligibility and social respect are tied to following this sequence in order. Families whose lives cannot fit it, such as those with divorce, informal work, illness or early parenthood, are marked as abnormal. That label then justifies giving them less.

5. Poverty in rich societies denies dignity

   In an affluent city, being poor is not mainly about starving. It means being unable to take part in ordinary social life, such as a child's school outing, a phone, or a birthday treat. It also means being exposed to constant judgement. Needs are therefore relative and social, and meritocratic, self-reliance rhetoric makes this deprivation feel deserved. The remedy is universal baselines of what everyone needs to live with dignity, rather than ever-narrower targeted aid.

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