Centre for the Study of Social Inequality

The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) hosted its annual flagship Singapore Perspectives conference on 20 January 2025, focusing on the theme of “Community.” As the nation marks its 60th year of independence, SP2025 asks: What can bind us more strongly together as a people and a nation?

CSSI Director, Associate Professor Teo You Yenn, shared her insights during the session on Community and the Market. She argued that we should go beyond using “community” as mere rhetorical flourish and consider the virtues it embodies: relations of mutuality, interdependence, solidarity; the collective’s capacity for improving everyone’s wellbeing; egalitarian relationships and equality-enhancing processes among human equals. Given the central place business takes in our lives and society, and how much we are regularly subject to its will, we must ask: how do their practices—as employers, as inventors and producers and sellers, as trade partners, as lobbyists, as taxpayers—contribute to or harm the pursuit of the virtues of community? Read her full remarks here.