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Dhevarajan Devadas, a Singapore historian, posted a link to this newspaper article from 1984 asking young people what they thought about the rapid economic growth we were experiencing
Then 26 year old Suratiman Sinthar was prescient: "he was confident Singapore could achieve the Swiss standard of living but warned "there was no point in a high standard of living if the cost of living got out of control".
https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/singmonitor19841213-1.2.5.11
By the time I was a teenager, I found the 'Swiss standard of living' kind of weird. 'Why do I want a Swiss standard of living? Life is pretty good here' My experience growing up in Singapore was about absurd prosperity.
Very different from my parents, which is also why we are on different pages re: financial psychology.
That was, however, the economic goal early on in our history especially after post-colonial independence. Now we have more expensive than Switzerland housing prices
@skinnylatte What do you mean? Singapore houses are very cheap. Almost as cheap as cars. Someone recently shared a post about someone promoting a residential house (3 floors, so pretty big, I admit) but they did say it's really cheap. The asking price was 11 million.
@loke lol, have you seen the GCBs. 20-50M omg
@skinnylatte For anyone who hasn't experienced the property market here, here's an ad for a pretty regular house. Only 16.5 million:
@loke @skinnylatte lol ya I remember when my landlord increased my rent from 2500 SGD/month to 3500 SGD/month. I told him that I couldn't afford that and would move out if he did that. He offered me a 100 SGD discount for the first month 
I also remember the first propertyguru email with the news that an HDB had sold for > 1 million.
@skinnylatte @loke Ya, I ended up temporarily living with someone who was super abusive. Managed to find something marginally better after a few weeks, thankfully, but it made me feel super unsafe.