{"id":105131,"date":"2026-10-03T04:00:32","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T08:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105131"},"modified":"2026-10-01T11:51:57","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T15:51:57","slug":"singapores-social-development-unit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/singapores-social-development-unit\/","title":{"rendered":"Singapore’s “Social Development Unit”"},"content":{"rendered":"

We don’t tend to hear very much about Singapore, so I hadn’t heard of the “Social Development Unit<\/a>” that they set up (appropriately, in 1984):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Haha this reminds me of when Singapore had this thing called the Social Development Unit which my American sociology professor told me was “basically government-sponsored eugenics”.<\/p>\n

Back in the 80s, Lee Kuan Yew observed that female university graduates were not getting married, and that smart people weren’t breeding enough which he treated as a national emergency.<\/p>\n

This led to the birth of the Social Development Unit in 1984 — government-sponsored parties, dinners, trips and even “love boat” cruises so that clever people could meet each other and, ideally, produce more clever babies. Locals immediately nicknamed it Single, Desperate and Ugly<\/p>\n

There were other politically incorrect fertility policies of the era: the Graduate Mothers’ Scheme (kids of degree moms got priority school places), and higher tax breaks for those who were more educated with more kids. Meanwhile, cash grants were given to the lower educated and lower income parents who got sterilized after one or two kids.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To which Carl Benjamin<\/a> responded:<\/p>\n

Lee Kuan Yew is what happens when an autistic map gamer becomes president.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We don’t tend to hear very much about Singapore, so I hadn’t heard of the “Social Development Unit” that they set up (appropriately, in 1984): Haha this reminds me of when Singapore had this thing called the Social Development Unit which my American sociology professor told me was “basically government-sponsored eugenics”. Back in the 80s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21,84,66,7],"tags":[930,968,1086,655],"class_list":["post-105131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia","category-government","category-health-science","category-history","tag-1980s","tag-family","tag-marriage","tag-singapore"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rlF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105131"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105134,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105131\/revisions\/105134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}