dear friends in Singapore, this Friday BooksActually, our favourite indie bookstore in Tiong Bahru, will be open for 24 hours (see the Facebook event page). Kenny Leck and team have scheduled an interesting series of talk cock sessions and performances. At 8pm June 21st I will be on a panel alongside Kokila Annamalai and Sufian Hakim. We will explore the topic of “Ghosts & politics”. … Continue reading a conversation this Friday about ghosts & politics
Dear friends, I will be appearing at a Books Actually event on June 11th, where I will speak about both my books, Floating on a Malayan Breeze (see here) and Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus (see here). Session will be moderated by Jen Wei Ting, good friend and fellow UC Berkeley alumna. Books Actually is one of Singapore’s only independent bookstores. As you know … Continue reading June 11 event at Books Actually, Tiong Bahru, Singapore
This article was first published by Yahoo! See here.
Will Singaporeans be happy living in a country comprised of economic ghettoes? That was my enduring thought as I reviewed the animated rebuttals, common and official, to last week’s revelation by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, my former employer) that Singapore is the world’s most expensive city.
These sorts of surveys should be taken with a pinch of salt. Many subjective decisions influence the methodology. So it shouldn’t really matter that much who is Number 1, 2 or 5. Rather, they should be seen simply as indicative of a larger issue.
However, as we nationalistic Singaporeans tend to do, rather than asking “How can we raise wages (and hence spending power)?” or “How can we make Singapore more affordable?”, many rose in a spirited defence of our apparent affordability, seeking to poke holes in a survey that approximates and compares middle- to upper-income price baskets across major cities.
