I recently watched Catherine Lim’s speech “Singapore: An Inconvenient Truth” on her blog and was thinking over some of the things she had said. So I decided it would be useful to have a transcript of it to look over, since I prefer reading to listening, and there are some details in it that are worth scrutinizing more closely.

If and when I have the time, I will post my thoughts about this at a later date. But for now, mayhap as a public service, I have some semblance of a usable transcript which I have made available here. You may either download the pdf transcipt to read offline, or read the rest of it below.

The usual disclaimers apply: this is not an authorized transcription, and its fidelity is not guaranteed. Dubious transcriptions are marked with a (?) and the occasional footnote. Punctuation was more or less arbitrary, except for certain obvious emphases in her speech, which are marked in italics. Minor grammatical editing or contextually obvious omissions are marked with [brackets].

The full text begins here:

Recently - despite the opulence, despite the magnificent success, despite the fact that Singapore really is a textbook case of success - you know, by any criterion of success, Singapore will qualify beautifully. If you take any hard indicator - in terms of income, in terms of education level and so on, Singapore is just tops. Now in spite of that, the inconvenient truth is that there is something dreadfully missing. It has not been properly articulated, but it floats around and everybody is aware of it. Read the rest of this entry »