.got this in my mailbox today.

"Being an ideal Singaporean is hard. Singaporeans are implicated, on one side, by the state’s aggressive goals for national development, which demand from them ever-increasing productivity in full-time and formal employment and which require these in return for access to social goods.1 From the opposite direction, they are compelled through policies—which again involve social goods—to aspire to particular forms of families that are supposedly traditional but that in fact require all sorts of modern orientations and habits. Singaporeans are compelled through a series of state mechanisms to work hard, full time, for many years of their lives, and to do so while also marrying, having children, ensuring that their offspring are upwardly mobile in an increasingly competitive middle-class society, and eventually making sure that their elderly parents are cared for (preferably within their households) and that they themselves have enough money to live comfortably in old age."