Singapore’s citizens must carry on its powerful founding legacy and be stewards first, before being claimants on state benefits.
Key points at a glance:
- Public anxiety in Singapore is rising despite steady economic growth and good governance.
- Citizens worry about daily costs, caregiving burdens, and securing their children’s future.
- Government support is essential, but public funds cannot solve every personal challenge.
- Long-term national success requires citizens to act as active stewards, not passive claimants.
Singapore is not immune to the rising global dissatisfaction with government. This is so despite a robust recovery from COVID-19, continued economic strength and social stability. Singapore remains among the world’s most secure, prosperous, and capable societies.
Why do people remain dissatisfied? It may be a result of the proliferation of social media and the globalisation of information, leading to grievances that increasingly converge. Singaporeans worry about the cost of living, housing, caregiving, career prospects and social mobility. Will our children will inherit the same security and opportunity that earlier generations enjoyed?
These concerns are real. A serious country does not dismiss them, and a serious government cannot ignore them. But we should not therefore think that every grievance is evidence of state failure. Nor should we believe that every difficulty can be solved by a new subsidy, transfer, entitlement, or publicly funded scheme.
Do We Speak in Contributions or Claims?
I believe that a large part of the answer lies in how we have come to understand citizenship. Are we becoming more accustomed to making claims than to making contributions? Do we still understand citizenship as a relationship of reciprocal responsibility: between citizens and government, among citizens themselves, and between the present generation and those yet to come?
A successful society cannot endure if citizenship becomes only a language of claims. Rights and public support certainly matter—a government has obligations to its people. Yet citizenship also entails contribution, restraint, service, care for others, and an adult recognition that no benefit is costless.
Singapore’s prosperity arose from a different civic instinct: one in which citizens see themselves as stewards before claimants. We have traditionally understood ourselves as stakeholders and owners of this country: stewards of its future and guardians of a legacy built by previous generations through sacrifice, discipline, and foresight.
That ethic requires conscious renewal. In a Singapore Spotlight for the 2026 Legatum Prosperity Index, I argued that Singapore’s success arose from the interaction of economic freedom, development-first policies, societal strength, and institutions adapted to our particular history and circumstances.
To go further: How did Singaporeans’ particular understanding of citizenship form the basis for what we have achieved thus far? Perhaps it is largely because we know there are no free lunches, and that our national culture must value people as stakeholders, participants and contributors to nation-building.
In that spirit, we embrace ownership, long-term planning, and the capacity to act collectively when necessary—and avoid the sense that we are merely recipients of benefits.
Owners behave differently from claimants. Our City in a Garden cannot remain beautiful if we forget to tend to it.
Stewards of the Future
President John F Kennedy famously called on Americans to ask not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. He knew a country cannot remain strong if its people cease to see themselves as responsible for its future.
Singapore’s own social compact has always rested on that understanding. Citizens have every right to demand what only governments can provide, like common defence and protection of public safety. We should, however, not imagine government programmes as ‘costless’ or detached from the principle of reciprocal responsibility.
A small, open, multiracial, and cosmopolitan society cannot afford a politics in which citizens learn to see every frustration as proof that the state has failed them, or every policy decision as a contest between personal desire and government obligation.
That mentality corrodes the sense of common fate on which a country like ours depends. If we are not careful, we will produce talented citizens who do not realise that every demand on the state is ultimately a demand made of fellow citizens, national resources, or future generations.
Many Helping Hands
Singapore has long described itself as a ‘many helping hands’ society. That principle remains sound, because families should indeed help one another. Friends and neighbours should not be strangers in the same block.
Employers should treat workers fairly and take responsibility for their development. Communities, charities, religious organisations, voluntary groups, and civic institutions should remain strong. Government should act decisively where families and communities cannot reasonably carry the burden alone. Disability, bereavement, caregiving responsibilities, sudden unemployment, and family breakdown can overwhelm even responsible people.
Public support must be real enough to protect dignity and give people a path back to stability. Then-DPM and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s description of the social safety system as a “trampoline” remains useful. The purpose of social support is to help people recover their footing, rebuild capability, and participate fully in society.
Those able to contribute should do so; citizenship as a whole cannot be conceived as a permanent claim on a supposedly inexhaustible state. Nor should we slide into individualism, where “if you fail, you’re on your own”. A mature society pulls people up when they fall, gives them the means to stand again, and expects them to walk where they can.
This demands honesty about public spending. Government programmes must ultimately be financed through taxation, investment returns generated by national savings accumulated over many years, or—where permitted—borrowing for nationally significant infrastructure and other defined purposes.
Public spending is therefore never detached from choice. More spent in one area may mean less available elsewhere, higher revenue needs, greater administrative burden, or a heavier obligation placed on future generations.
A government that spends without discipline eventually weakens the society it claims to protect. A citizenry that demands without restraint eventually discovers that someone must carry the bill.
Keep Responsibility in Mind
Citizens also bear obligations that cannot be outsourced to the state. We are responsible for working honestly where we are able, contributing through taxes, serving the nation, caring for children and elderly parents, helping neighbours, respecting public property, and participating in the institutions and communities that hold society together.
These duties may seem smaller than a major budget announcement or a new national scheme. Yet they are the building blocks of social trust, self-respect, public order, and solidarity. Governments can regulate conduct, but they cannot manufacture conscientiousness by decree.
No ministry can legislate genuine neighbourliness. No subsidy can replace personal responsibility. No reserve can compensate for a people who no longer believe they have obligations to one another.
As living costs rise and public expectations grow, calls for greater support in daily life will become more frequent. Singaporeans should remain critical of government where government falls short. We should call out waste, unfairness, poor execution, complacency, and policies that fail the people they are meant to serve.
Demands for reform should indeed strengthen the foundations upon which Singapore’s prosperity rests, rather than consume them. The objective should be to build a society in which citizens have the confidence to speak frankly, the maturity to recognise trade-offs, and the discipline to think beyond immediate gratification.
The state has duties to citizens: to govern competently, act fairly, preserve opportunity, protect the vulnerable, and steward public resources honestly. But only citizens can keep the nation in good stead. We do this by renewing the habits of responsibility that sustain it, generation after generation.
Harry Tan is a Singaporean law graduate from University College London. He writes on public policy, political economy and institutional development, and is the author of the Singapore Spotlight for the 2026 Legatum Prosperity Index.
