Dear reader,

“Singapore This Week”. In our weekly digest, we look at the latest protest against Singapore’s military ties to Israel; the commodification of mental health; the generational impact of childhood abuse; nationalist history being peddled again in Malaysia; fractional art ownership; the shocking unspooling of eFishery; and more.

Essay: “Why Singapore’s elderly continue to work—reserves and CPF demystified”. 

Why do so many of our senior citizens still endure low standards of living in such a “wealthy” country? If GIC gets to invest your CPF savings, and then makes a return of 6.9 percent per annum on its investments, why does CPF pay you a much lower rate? Why aren’t Singaporeans allowed to invest their CPF monies directly in higher-earning instruments, say a low-cost S&P 500 ETF?

Retirement adequacy is a concern for every human being. In Singapore, this is complicated by a few interweaving factors: a paternalistic state that forces you to save, but limits how you can invest it; a public housing market that once sucked in those forced savings amidst expectations of ever-rising prices, but now, facing the risk of lease decay, threatens to erode retirement nest eggs; and the lack of adequate social protections, which results in scores of elderly Singaporeans having to slog away till the day they drop. 

For most of our history, Singaporeans haven’t really questioned all of this. But in the past decade, as inequalities have worsened, the cost of living has spiked, and the flaws with the HDB system have risen to the fore, it’s become patently obvious that retirement security is for the few, while perpetual precarity is for the many.

But how do we begin to have an honest conversation about retirement if we don’t understand the system’s complexities? This week, Bobby Jayaraman, a global investor and author, breaks down the way the CPF and our reserves work. He does it through a series of FAQs, and includes concrete suggestions for how the government can improve the CPF system to bolster the individual savings of every Singaporean. It’s a different approach from our usual Jom essays, more of an explainer, so do reply and let us know what you think!

Like many of us, Bobby also believes the government’s excessive prudence is penalising those who’ve built this country. “[W]hy not use more of our ample reserves for social needs? After all, they were being saved for a rainy day and it is already pouring. The evidence is in plain sight. Many of our elderly continue to engage in physically taxing work to support themselves.” Read Bobby’s piece now to better understand what is being done with your money and savings. 

Relatedly, it’s great to see an essay dissecting a so-called “bread-and-butter” issue. One of the criticisms I sometimes get is that Jom doesn’t do enough of these pieces—instead, we have too much “artsy” and “woke” stuff, in the words of some dear friends.

I have a few responses to this. One is that we eventually want to have a magazine that puts out essays on a range of subjects every week. But it’s a slow process getting there: winning enough subscribers to earn enough so we can grow a team and pay decent salaries; cultivating the literary skills of Singaporean writers across disciplines and genres; building our reputation such that our access to interviewees improves; and so on. Thanks for being with us on this journey.

The second is that the very concept of “bread-and-butter” issues is contentious (hence the inverted commas). Creating such a category risks excluding issues that may be important to others. Meanwhile, it also ignores the intersection of these issues. Climate change, for instance, was once considered a preoccupation for some on the left. But it’s now clear that it’s deeply intertwined with numerous so-called “bread-and-butter” issues, whether land productivity, food inflation and cost of living, or the protection of our homes from fires and natural disasters. Our “artsy” and “woke” pieces often touch on the same, interconnected concerns—perhaps just in different ways.

My last, perhaps grumpy retort, is that even if I did succumb to the definitional boundaries of some homogeneous hierarchy of subjects, then of course Jom does “bread and butter”! We love “bread and butter”! And we’ve selected some of our favourites below.

Jom fikir,
Sudhir Vadaketh
Editor-in-chief, Jom

Behind Jom’s art, with Charmaine Poh

In order to illustrate the intricacies of Singapore’s fiscal policy-making, Jolene Tan painstakingly drew up a visual metaphor so that the everyday person would be able to understand its nuances. Through her use of perspective and colour, we can now see how conflicted the vulnerable in society, and particularly our seniors, must feel. Such illustrations go beyond editorial purposes; they are an important educational tool for our readers, and the public at large, to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the system.

Jom on “bread and butter”

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