Adrianna Tan
Dhevarajan Devadas, a Singapore historian, posted a link to this newspaper article from 1984 asking young people what they thought about the rapid economic growth we were experiencing
Then 26 year old Suratiman Sinthar was prescient: "he was confident Singapore could achieve the Swiss standard of living but warned "there was no point in a high standard of living if the cost of living got out of control".
https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/singmonitor19841213-1.2.5.11
SnoopJ
@skinnylatte fascinated by the abbreviation "S'poreans" which I have never seen before, but it is emminently sensible in print!
Adrianna Tan
By the time I was a teenager, I found the 'Swiss standard of living' kind of weird. 'Why do I want a Swiss standard of living? LIfe is pretty good here'
That was, however, the economic goal early on in our history especially after post-colonial independence. Now we have more expensive than Switzerland housing prices
Adrianna Tan
Relatedly, I just sent a family member a link to a really great job... in Switzerland... in their field and he was like, cool but I have to live in Switzerland? No thanks
LOL
Adrianna Tan
@loke lol, have you seen the GCBs. 20-50M omg
Elias Mårtenson
@skinnylatte What do you mean? Singapore houses are very cheap. Almost as cheap as cars. Someone recently shared a post about someone promoting a residential house (3 floors, so pretty big, I admit) but they did say it's really cheap. The asking price was 11 million.
Adrianna Tan
@boby_biq other than the food i don't think i can live somewhere with such strict paternalistic social controls. i might as well stay home.
Just Boby
@skinnylatte When I visited Switzerland I was so bored (Geneva) - could not wait to go back to France. 🙈
マリオ (Mario Menti)
@skinnylatte yes, one thing about Switzerland (I am Swiss) is that even though things are expensive, relative to average income they are actually a lot more affordable than (say) London, where salaries are much lower, but most things are similarly expensive.
Adrianna Tan
@anna @loke the lack of tenant protections and boomer singaporean landlords is truly horrific
Dr. Anna Latour
@loke @skinnylatte lol ya I remember when my landlord increased my rent from 2500 SGD/month to 3500 SGD/month. I told him that I couldn't afford that and would move out if he did that. He offered me a 100 SGD discount for the first month 🤦♀️
I also remember the first propertyguru email with the news that an HDB had sold for > 1 million.
Elias Mårtenson
@skinnylatte For anyone who hasn't experienced the property market here, here's an ad for a pretty regular house. Only 16.5 million:
Adrianna Tan
Adrianna Tan
Dr. Anna Latour
@skinnylatte @loke Ya, I ended up temporarily living with someone who was super abusive. Managed to find something marginally better after a few weeks, thankfully, but it made me feel super unsafe.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.