On Ridout: This one really too much already
Is 40 times the basic standard of living "too much"? What about 100 times? Or 200 times?
You may have heard that two of Singapore’s Cabinet ministers live in rather big houses.
Much of importance has been said about the procedure and accountability questions raised by this situation. But I’ve also been thinking about the insistence, from a few commenters, that only the procedural aspects matter.
Some say that as long as the ministers didn’t get unfairly advantageous terms – if they didn’t misuse their powers or access to privileged information to install themselves – then nobody should sit in judgment of a residence that can comfortably house a football field, or two, or maybe more. If no corruption is involved, let the gold taps flow!
Underneath this is the idea that when it comes to personal consumption, as long as your purse is big enough, there is no such thing as too much.
A more refined version goes: maybe in principle too much exists, but we have no way of agreeing on what that looks like, so there’s an insurmountable definitional or benchmarking problem. Who gets to say where the line sits between reasonable and too much? Won’t this differ dramatically by individual taste and experience? If you set yourself up as an arbiter, is every one of your own possessions or enjoyments, beyond those needed for bare survival, open to charges of hypocrisy? And what does one do with a finding of too much, if we aren’t going to resurrect the (let’s be honest, failed) dreams of the grey 20th-century socialist republics?
Mulling over this, I found my mind turning to the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research, which tackles a question at the other end of the spectrum: what separates too little from enough? MIS involves in-depth discussions among members of the public, to establish consensus among ordinary Singaporeans about what amounts to a basic standard of living in Singapore today. Respondents together develop household budgets to satisfy those standards, explaining why and how each item meets needs.
First I looked for the quantitative findings, to help put the Ridout palaces in perspective. In 2019, the Singapore MIS team came up with a budget that would be enough at the time for an individual in exactly Vivian Balakrishnan’s and K Shanmugam’s present age bracket (55-64 years old): $1,721 per month. That number was based in part on a detailed itemised breakdown of items in the two-room HDB flat that was deemed to be enough housing for this individual. The cost of the flat itself formed a $152 component of the monthly budget.
That was for a person living alone. I don’t know the household configurations of these ministers, but we could also consider the MIS budgets for couples aged 65 and above (a tad older than our ministers): $182 a month for housing costs. Have they got dependent children in their homes? We could arbitrarily impute them two teenagers each – of differing genders to make the allowance more generous – and use the nifty MIS calculator (based on a 2021 MIS study on parent-child households) for a monthly housing cost of $1,295.
It's not wholly clear what the market values of monthly rent on the Ridout properties are, but I’ve seen estimates from $50,000 to $200,000. (I’ve also seen the figure $35,000, but that seems to assume that tenants have to invest further substantial amounts in renovation, fittings and plumbing to make the properties useable, so it seems a poor proxy for the comparable costs of housing.) If this range is correct, we’re looking at somewhere between 274 and 1,100 times the $182 monthly housing cost for an older couple, or 38 to 154 times the $1,295 housing budget for the parents with teenagers.
Let’s make a relatively conservative use of these numbers. If we take the housing that society considers to be enough for a basic standard of living in Singapore today, and multiply it by 40 times, is that too much? If we don’t want to definitively draw the line at having 5 or 10 times as much housing as you need, can we at least say 40 times has safely crossed it? What about 100 or 200 times?
Beyond numbers, there are interesting resonances between the current discussions and the qualitative findings of the MIS studies, as well as how they were received in public discussion. (I provided communications support to the team at the time, so I am reasonably well acquainted with this.)
Mostly, I think, people found the MIS findings intuitive and convincing. This is unsurprising, as the focus group methodology was designed precisely to elicit consensus from groups representing a swatch of Singapore society. But a few voices, including the Ministry of Finance (MOF), considered the budget too high. Among other things, they critiqued the inclusion of budgets for specific items they found contentious. How can “discretionary expenditure” on jewellery or a holiday, they asked, be part of a “basic standard of living”? (Researcher Ng Kok Hoe dissects the MOF statement here.)
Interestingly, nobody tended to contest the validity of the concept of too much. Excess, the unnecessary, luxury beyond meeting needs – these were self-evidently meaningful notions. People accepted that there were needs, and then there was an amount in excess of needs. The distinction didn’t meet any of the resistance that has come in the ministerial bungalow territory.
Perhaps this is partly because, although the researchers stressed they sought a single standard for the whole of society, and how it was to be financed was a separate question, never far from the public imagination around MIS was the idea of state support for poorer households. What was enough and what was too much kept becoming mixed up with the idea of where the money was to come from.
I recall also discussions about poverty in 2018, sparked in part by Teo You Yenn’s book, with an article notoriously headlined “$500 a month on cable TV and cigarettes and his family still wants aid?” When imagining a poorer household receiving aid, people have fewer qualms about going through budgetary line items with a magnifying glass, in a way which they are more reluctant to do with consumption financed by private wealth.
The qualitative MIS findings offer some useful insights here. They tell us that in Singapore today, many things that we might call little luxuries – enjoyments the loss of which might not exactly leave a physical scar – some home décor, smart clothes for special events, gifts for friends, dining out on occasion – are in fact basic needs. Without them, we cannot really belong to the community around us.
The MIS study uncovered a strong consensus in our society that a basic standard of living includes social participation, which means being able to do and access the things that are considered ordinary parts of life, and especially to maintain connections and commonality with friends, family and others around us.
Autonomy, choice and a sense of independence are critical to this. Decorations or gifts that you don’t get to choose – because you’re limited to the absolute cheapest thing in the store – don’t actually fulfil these needs. The MOF statement used the word “discretionary” to suggest that expenses were inessential, but this got it exactly backwards: these items were important precisely because they gave individuals the scope to exercise discretion. As people who have endured intensive gatekeeping to access welfare have reported time and again, it is exhausting and demeaning to have all your choices scrutinised and weighed up; to have no sphere to make decisions that are simply your own.
I think that some portion of the reluctance to declare that anything is too much comes from an innocent, charitable recognition that everyone deserves space for ordinary indulgences from time to time. You might see the perfect shoes to boost your daily running routine and want to treat yourself to them. Or maybe your favourite band comes to town for the first time ever, and you splash out on tickets. Nobody wants to have these spending choices audited. If, strictly speaking, no single one of these things is obviously a need, the freedom to at least sometimes do something like that, just for your own pleasure, very much is.
What I suggest, though, is that there is a stark difference between the everyday enjoyments that come out of the MIS level, or a median income, or frankly the income of quite a large majority of people in society – and consumption which involves a housing cost at 40 times (or 100 times or 200 times or more) the level of basic needs.
When we are looking at a private residence literally the size of a shopping mall, I don’t think we should worry that by asking if this is too much we are impinging unduly on someone else’s autonomy, belonging or sense of participation in society. Anything recognisable as a need is long past satisfaction in this case. The cup is not just full or somewhat overflowing – the entire kitchen is flooded. There is nothing petty about looking at this and seeing excess.
There is also a troubling worldview beneath the resistance both to defining enough and to acknowledging the possibility of too much.
This way of thinking doesn’t really see the people of Singapore as bound together, members of a commonwealth, sharing and negotiating values. From this perspective, each person looks around them and sees only a market. Money doesn’t just talk, it has the final word. Your needs are defined as what you can afford from your private purse.
A foundation of this view is that whatever people have managed to earn by wages or profit is rightfully theirs. This ignores, of course, that both wages and profit, and indeed cost and affordability (particularly when it comes to land and housing in Singapore), are deeply dependent on and interrelated with the existence of regulatory regimes. There is nothing natural or inevitable about any of their levels or contours. As many have pointed out, the market logic is especially confused in the case of ministers, who are paid from the public purse and whose value is ultimately set by (their own?) fiat.
Personally, I think that the state should serve society’s collective – negotiated, deliberated – values, and check the market accordingly. To me, it gets things backwards to say that a private wallet can ratify wildly disproportionate consumption. What’s troubling is precisely the existence of a wildly disproportionate wallet. It’s usually a sign that the state is not properly regulating the conditions of wages and profits, and is operating a system which (by design or failure) facilitates exploitation for profit.
Collecting wealth out of fear of insecurity is one thing – it’s hard to fault the wish to create a buffer zone for oneself and family against illness, accident or misfortune. (Though one must ask what the systems are – and who authored them – that make private wealth, rather than universal support, the answer to these contingencies.) Accumulation that goes far beyond this, to express itself in personal palaces, is different. It implies ignorance of economic injustice, or comfort with its fruits, or both. Not qualities I want in people making decisions for the public.
I want to register here another objection to an ethos of limitless private accumulation and consumption. Specifically, that it is harmful and unfair in a world of physical, biological and ecological constraints.
People ruled by market thinking assume, on some level, that infinite expansion is possible: don’t worry about how to split the pie, they say, think about how to grow it. When it comes to land in Singapore, the infeasibility of this is obvious. Land scarcity is cited as grounds for tearing down our precious remaining forest, for the bureaucratic nightmares foisted on single parents, for cramming twelve men into each dorm room. Taking vastly more than the share you need intensifies pressures that lead to others not having enough.
But across all resource types, not just land, the physical foundations of all our continuing well-being are threatened by overconsumption. The pie cannot grow indefinitely, because the size and condition of the kitchen set a hard limit. “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.” (I don’t know who to credit, as the internet is split as to who first said this.) Excessive consumption undermines our shared basis for well-being. It harms others.
This is not a distant or theoretical discussion, or one about a far future. The climate crisis, already killing people now, is disproportionately fuelled by overconsumption by the richest, who are essentially cutting themselves huge hunks of a worryingly finite – and shrinking – carbon budget pie.
Carbon aside, virtually every biological basis for humanity’s ongoing well-being faces serious risks because of excessive resource extraction, ultimately driven by overconsumption. Soil is at risk. Water is at risk. Pollinators are at risk. Fish stocks are at risk. And so on for all kinds of balances and processes that keep our lives and economies (to say nothing of the lives of other organisms) functioning. Global human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass. (You know about the situation with plastics, but did you know about textile waste?)
We are living in a shared space, with shared and limited resources. Consumption without limit means draining a biosphere that we all rely on, and cannot replace, and instead filling it with trash. If some draw down from the planetary account at very many times the level of others, that is an inequity which concerns us all.
I only just stumbled upon your work and I love it! Thanks for writing this! It's analogous to the CEO to regular worker pay ratio in the USA. Something like 277x for a Fortune 500 company or something ridiculous. And on a tangentially related note, it's obscene that parents have to crowdfund life-saving drugs for their babies in the case of Spinomuscular Atrophy in a country like Singapore, all because of our shamefully low tax rates.