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The Case For Incorporating Social Analysis Into Policy Design

Paul argues that policymakers need to move beyond numbers-driven, utilitarian logics of decision-making and incorporate a human-centered approach to policy-making. Drawing from Teo You Yenn’s seminal work on the need to understand issues like inequality as lived experiences rather than just statistical data, Paul considers the benefits of a social analysis approach and examines the ways in which it can be implemented in Singapore.

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Education Inequality Op-Ed Our Divided City Social Capital 

The Legitimization of Inequality

Meritocracy is generally celebrated as an ideology that promotes equality of opportunity, and hence, seen as just. Xuan Yee interrogates this view by exploring the moral, psychological, and intellectual ramifications of meritocracy when taken to its extreme. He argues that an unquestioned belief in meritocracy is dangerous, for it encourages the successful to justify their own moral deservingness of their position in society, and thus, legitimizes inequality.

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Education Inequality Op-Ed Our Divided City Social Capital 

The Limitations of Subject-Based Banding: What About Single-Stream Schools?

Much of the debate on MOE’s recent moves to integrate schoolmates of different academic streams via Subject-Based Banding (SBB) has focused on whether SBB will be effective, or what the implementation of SBB will look like. However, one underdiscussed aspect of MOE’s policy change is its lack of impact on single-stream schools. Izzah Haziqah Haris explores why this is a problem, and potential policy options to deal with this issue.

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Education Inequality Op-Ed Social Capital 

Love, Labour, and Loss: Decoding the ‘Migrant Worker’

‘Migrant workers’ is the typical term used to describe migrants who work in Singapore. But they are far more than just workers defined by their labour. Theophilus Kwek argues that we should move beyond the simple trope of ‘migrant workers’ in our discourse on migrant issues, as a first step to seeing them as people whose lives are just as full and fraught as our own, and treating them accordingly.

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