“What we do & do not do are shaped by our sense of how others are - shared understanding of right & wrong, good & bad, valuable & worthless.” SocietyIdentitySelf WorthSense Of Self Author:Teo You Yenn
“To confront inequality is to confront this incoherent ideology, & ultimately to confront ourselves, our incoherent selves.” TruthInequality Author:Teo You Yenn
“So much about being a woman who's had the good fortune to be offered some choices, and yet not good enough fortune to live in a world with gender equality, is about giving up some of what we want and making peace with not "having it all". Many women give up dreams and ideals as they patch together careers, marriage, children. My career-centrered path should not be read as a rejection of the domestic and care aspects of life.” Inequality Author:Teo You Yenn
“To understand why kids from low-income households do poorly in school, we would do well to understand what their lives at home are like. But we must also step back and situate their lives within the broader social context. This includes trying to understand whta material conditions are like for parents, what school experiences are like for kids, and finally and least often done, what higher-income families are doing for their kids. It is when we do all this that we can have a more complete and accurate understanding of how kids from low-income families, within this system, are compelled to play a game they cannot win because someone else is setting the rules.” Inequality Author:Teo You Yenn
“By virtue of rewarding precocity - expecting kids to be able to read and write when they begin Primary 1, for example - the school system values its role in sorting ahead of its role in teaching.” Inequality Author:Teo You Yenn
“In state discourse about poverty, notions about 'charity', and about those with more 'helping' those with less, have become increasingly salient. In tandem with this, a slew of new specialized agencies, programs and schemes, and personnel have been constructed to deal with'the needy'. This way of framing the problem of poverty isolates it - detaches the issues and challenges faced by a small minority of the population from those faced by everyone else. It dislodges the issue of poverty from the broader political economy in which it is produced. Importantly, it frames public intervention as 'charity', as 'help' - in other words, beyond public responsibility - and recipients as 'recipients' rather than as members of society with rights to certain basic levels of well-being and security.” Inequality Author:Teo You Yenn
“They worry that I am assigning too much blame to the system and not granting "agency" to the low-income. They want me to say more about this group and they want me to suggest the right "nudges" that would push people to behave in certain ways. They want to know: what can we do to help "empower" the low-income so that they can help themselves? The problem with this mindset - not of those who are powerless but those who are relatively powerful - is that power is not a frame of mind but a material condition. People sitting in positions of authority are powerful not because they feel empowered bu because they have power. Their feelings of empowerment are an outcome of their actual ownership of power, not the cause. One can think - and indeed many of the low-income people I speak with do this - "I can do this. I must try". But if one is in fact lacking in power - lacking in control over time; lacking in leverage in the labour market; lacking in bargaining power with managers, teachers, social workers, landlords, creditors - no amount of merely changing how they think about themselves will change these realities.” Inequality Author:Teo You Yenn
“To study poverty without inequality leads to tendencies to misrecognize structural issues for individual failings. On the other hand, to study inequality without poverty, particularly through focus only on trends and numbers, is to allow for research devoid of humanity insofar as we merely cite phenomenon without naming the injustices as enacted on real persons.” SingaporeSystems Author:Teo You Yenn
“The piece was about some of the challenges low-income parents face, about how they care greatly for their children, & about how they have poor options rather than make poor choices.” Family RelationshipsLow Income Author:Teo You Yenn