The trouble with success

Xie Yao Quan knows a cliché when he hears one. It’s unfortunate, given how many of them he believes.

He believes Singapore is a country where people can make something of themselves. He believes those who have benefited from its success have a responsibility to help others. He believes a society should give every child a fair chance, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

None of these propositions is especially original — hardly. Xie, the chief executive of Quantedge Foundation Singapore, would probably be the first to acknowledge that. In fact, he has the peculiar habit of apologising for things he believes. During our conversation a day before the foundation’s community night, he repeatedly prefaces his observations with a warning that they might sound clichéd. Then he proceeds to say them anyway.

Still, there is a difference between an idea becoming familiar and an idea becoming untrue.

And in Singapore, where the promise of meritocracy has become almost inseparable from the national identity, that distinction is becoming increasingly consequential.

The 42-year-old has accumulated an impressive collection of institutions on his curriculum vitae. Raffles Institution, Duke University, the military, finance, public healthcare, parliament. Now, philanthropy. 

And while his career might appear unusually eclectic, Xie offers a less grand explanation. “I’m a little bit like you. I get bored easily. I don’t tend to stay at something for too long.”

Fair enough. But when I ask which experience most profoundly shaped the course of his life, he doesn’t mention any of those institutions.

“I haven’t told anybody this, okay? So you’re the first.” He hesitates over how much to disclose before describing a childhood in which his family’s fortunes changed considerably.

“At the risk of sounding cliché, I was really born to a humble family. Actually, my dad was doing well, relatively, in his business. I was born into a landed house. Then we moved to a flat.”

His father’s business declined as Xie grew older. When he was about 10, his parents divorced. His mother, who had stopped working to raise Xie and his twin brother, concentrated her energies on their education.

“My mom was very focused on academics. She quit her job. I was born with a twin brother, right? So two at the same time, and she just devoted her entire time and attention to us to ensure that we succeeded academically.”

They did. Both boys consistently topped their classes. His mother taught him discipline and academic rigour, as well as the frugality she practised herself. But her emphasis on academic performance also shaped his understanding of achievement.

“My view of success was more grades, was on paper, numbers,” he recalls. That understanding began to change when he entered Raffles Institution (RI).

Xie had attended a primary school whose student population he describes as “predominantly middle- and lower-middle-class, with a more Chinese-speaking culture”. At RI, he encountered classmates from different social backgrounds.

“Honestly, my first year, it was a little bit of a culture shock. The crowd was different. I started realising, oh, schoolmates, cohort mates of this kind of background, the way they spoke and behaved was a bit different. And actually, it took me a while to find my place and fit in.”

His academic results had secured him a place in the school. Finding his place among his classmates proved less straightforward.

“That was probably my first experience with privilege and how that shapes children or young persons differently, and how a person who may not have been born into privilege, all that tension and the struggle that a person like that would have to go through to find his own place in that world.”

Years later, Xie would encounter inequality in more direct forms, through his military service, community volunteering, and eventually his work as a Member of Parliament.

What stayed with him was the question of how a child’s circumstances might shape his or her future.

“How is he or she going to turn out, given what I gather of the circumstances surrounding him, the family structure and the background surrounding this child? Does he or she have a fair shot to convert this God-given potential to do something good compared to somebody who’s born into a stronger background, stronger family circumstances?”

“That, to me, is social mobility in concrete terms.”

The company we keep

His experience at RI also informs how he thinks about social mixing, an increasingly prominent concern in Singapore’s education policies. Having children from different socioeconomic backgrounds attend the same schools is one thing. What happens once they get there is another.

“We always talk about social mixing, right?” he says. “But even if you can achieve a mix, how do you ensure that meaningful mixing can happen? It doesn’t happen by chance. It takes deliberate facilitation and cultivation.”

He returns repeatedly to the importance of relationships, connections, and exposure that can shape a young person’s aspirations. “That social capital is so important. But it doesn’t happen by chance.”

There is an irony in how Xie himself came to lead Quantedge Foundation. He had known the foundation’s principals since his army days, and it was through these longstanding friendships, he says, that the foundation found him.

His entry into politics followed a somewhat similar trajectory. After leaving the military, he began volunteering in the community, where he met MPs and government leaders. These encounters sparked his interest in politics.

The very networks he considers essential to social mobility have played a consequential role in his own life.

Yet Xie remains an ardent defender of meritocracy, the organising principle that helped him rise through Singapore’s institutions. When I ask how he reconciles that faith with the reality that children begin life with unequal advantages, he offers an explanation that begins with what he considers one of the great ironies of Singapore’s success.

The meritocracy paradox

“People started the same. They were equally, generally, equally poor,” he says of Singapore’s early years. It is an admittedly sweeping description of the country’s beginnings, but his larger point concerns what happened afterwards.

“It was meritocracy and our decision to organise a society with meritocracy as a key organising principle that I would argue made our society successful. That allowed the best to rise and get into places where they can do good for themselves and for others, and create the success that we all enjoy today.”

Success, however, has consequences of its own.

“Now that we’ve become successful, you have those who have become successful very naturally wanting to pass on their advantages and the resources to their children, to do the best for their children,” he says. “But that leaves those who don’t have as much resources not being able to do the same for their children, and that creates those different starting points, that gap in opportunities.”

Nobody needs to be particularly selfish for this to happen. Parents who can afford tutors hire them. Those with useful professional connections introduce their children to people who might help them, while families with financial security can give their children the freedom to experiment or pursue careers whose rewards aren’t immediately apparent.

Nor is there anything inherently objectionable about wanting one’s children to enjoy a better life. Xie readily acknowledges that instinct. His concern is what happens when the advantages of one generation become the starting conditions of the next.

“Meritocracy was the very reason why we succeeded and why we now have this state where we have different starting points, different access to opportunities, inequalities in opportunities in the first place,” he says.

For all his concern about the direction in which Singapore is heading, Xie has little appetite for abandoning the principle. “Meritocracy is still the best organising principle for our society, but we’ve got to make it work in today’s context, where starting points are different compared to 60 years ago.”

He is hardly alone in recognising the dilemma. In 2022, then Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong warned that successful families would naturally seek to transfer their advantages to their children, potentially allowing privilege to become entrenched across generations. Wong’s answer, too, was to improve meritocracy rather than discard it.

For Xie, the work begins with understanding opportunity as something that extends well beyond the classroom, and certainly beyond a child’s examination results.

“How do we systematically and systemically create more opportunities for those who may not be born with that access to opportunities?” he asks. “Close the gap,” he offers, “not just at starting points in life, but as they step through life, so throughout the life course, close that gap, so that meritocracy has the conditions to continue operating and serving our society effectively.”

An occasional reckoning

Towards the end of our conversation, Xie introduces me to a publication by the Ministry of Finance with the wonderfully unassuming name of Occasional Paper.

(I find the name rather amusing. For a moment, we abandon social mobility altogether to discuss whether Occasional Papers might make a good title for a publication. Xie suggests an Occasional Podcast. I am sufficiently taken with the idea to contemplate registering a domain name.)

In 2015, MOF published an Occasional Paper examining, among other things, the relationship between family background and eventual income. It found that among Singaporeans born between 1978 and 1982 whose parents belonged to the bottom 20 per cent of the income distribution, 14.3 per cent had risen into the top 20 per cent themselves as adults.

A subsequent paper, published in February 2026, examined a younger cohort born between 1985 and 1989. The corresponding figure was 13.8 per cent.

Xie is particularly interested in how these numbers compare with a hypothetical benchmark.

“If achievement is just randomness, purely up to chance, you’d expect 20 per cent to make it to the top 20 per cent,” he explains. In other words, if parental income had no bearing on where children eventually landed in the income distribution, those born into the poorest fifth would have the same one-in-five probability of reaching the richest fifth as everyone else.

For the two cohorts studied, Singapore fell short of that benchmark. And the younger cohort fared slightly worse.

“It’s slowing,” Xie observes.

The difference between 14.3 and 13.8 per cent is modest, and two cohorts cannot establish an enduring trajectory on their own. The papers also examine particular measures of income mobility rather than every dimension of social opportunity. The figures nevertheless provide a useful way of considering a question that otherwise risks becoming hopelessly abstract: how strongly does a child’s eventual economic position depend on the position of his or her parents?

The latest MOF paper offers some encouraging findings elsewhere. Real household incomes have grown across the distribution, with lower-income households experiencing stronger growth over the preceding decade. Income inequality, measured after taxes and transfers, has also narrowed.

These findings needn’t contradict the mobility figures. Singapore can improve living standards across income groups while the relationship between parental income and adult income remains stubbornly persistent. A young person might enjoy considerably greater material comfort than his parents did and still occupy much the same relative position in society.

Xie is careful, however, not to portray Singapore as a country performing exceptionally poorly.

“Are we doing badly? I don’t think we are,” he says. He cites Denmark, where a comparable figure he refers to is 11.7 per cent. “We’re actually, on various counts, not doing too bad. But I think we can do better.”

His ambition is to bring Singapore’s figure as close to 20 per cent as possible.

When I ask whether philanthropy can ever catch up, however, he acknowledges that the arithmetic of advantage presents a formidable problem. Successful families continue accumulating resources that they can pass on to their children. The resulting differences can grow faster than philanthropic interventions can close them.

“If we don’t do anything, the gap will certainly only widen, social mobility will only slow down, and the inequality in outcomes will only grow,” he says. “So we must do something, and it’s not just philanthropy that has to do something. Government has to do something. Everyone in society has to do something.”

At the very least, he argues, collective action might prevent the gap from widening further, or slow the rate at which it grows. But his ambitions extend beyond containing the damage.

“What we do hope is we can reverse that, and in your words, catch up, and really do not just resist the natural tendency for it to get wider, but actually close it.”

He acknowledges that this is a lofty ambition. “What would give us the best shot at being able to achieve this? I think it is about taking an approach that has to go beyond thinking about individual programmes to looking at systems.”

Beyond the cheque

There is a familiar model of philanthropy in which people who have made a great deal of money give some of it away, usually to organisations doing work they consider worthwhile. A charity identifies a need, a benefactor writes a cheque, and somewhere down the line, somebody’s circumstances improve.

Xie has no quarrel with this arrangement. But he thinks philanthropy can accomplish considerably more.

“What I’ve observed in recent years is the understanding of philanthropy has become more and more sophisticated,” he says when I ask what wealthy people tend to misunderstand about doing good. He gently rejects the premise of my question. 

“It’s really about beyond giving, beyond the money, the funding to fund programmes. What else can philanthropic capital catalyse and create at the systems level to deepen the impact of the work that philanthropic capital is funding?”

He talks about research that allows organisations to understand problems more accurately, and about bringing people together who might otherwise spend years working independently towards similar objectives. 

I suggest that Quantedge’s approach sounds rather different from what one might ordinarily expect of a philanthropic organisation.

Xie is having none of it.

“I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that what we are doing is so at the frontier, so ahead of the curve. I mean, I take the compliment, but I wouldn’t make that claim myself.”

He becomes even more emphatic when I suggest the foundation might persuade other philanthropists to adopt its approach. “We don’t pretend that we’re that clever. We didn’t think this up.”

The Gates Foundation, he explains, has long pursued ambitions that extend beyond supporting individual beneficiaries. Quantedge has studied such institutions, alongside other foundations closer to home, and adapted ideas to Singapore’s circumstances. He sees little value in claiming originality when useful approaches already exist elsewhere.

For its first decade, the foundation concentrated on learning about the social mobility landscape while funding programmes and developing its own approach. “In the past 10 years, we’ve been kind of just doing the work quietly,” he says. “But in the next decade, that will continue, the work will deepen. But I think we have also come to realise that a big part of our work has to be about sharing what we have learned.”

Funding systemic change

It is an expansive ambition, backed by a substantial financial commitment. For its next decade, Quantedge has set aside an initial S$50 million to support its plans, with the possibility of contributing several multiples of that amount as the work develops.

Among the initiatives is a recently launched Social Mobility Fund providing S$3,000 per child annually to help parents pursue developmental opportunities with their children. Quantedge wants to expand the programme through partnerships with preschool operators and other organisations, while studying whether it actually improves outcomes.

There are also plans for deeper collaboration with the Institute of Technical Education, where the foundation hopes to help students develop their abilities and access opportunities beyond their immediate social circles. For lower-income adults, the proposed work extends into employment and debt, which Xie identifies as a poorly understood obstacle to financial stability and employability.

The initiatives cover very different stages of life, reflecting Xie’s belief that disadvantage accumulates over time. Providing a child with enrichment opportunities might address one immediate gap, but the same person could encounter entirely different obstacles when entering the workforce years later.

His approach brings together three systems: practice, which determines how services reach people; policy, which shapes the conditions under which they operate; and evidence, which establishes whether interventions work. 

“Certainly, policies need to change, right? That defines and sets the parameters for so much of how we operate in our society,” he says. “But on top of that, the system of practice and the evidence, to really be where the rubber hits the road and to be able to uplift folks at the bottom, I think that’s going to be incredibly important as well.”

Who gets to change the system?

I wonder aloud whether philanthropy’s progress will inevitably depend on the willingness of these larger systems to change. After all, even an exceptionally effective programme may struggle to produce lasting improvements if the policies surrounding it remain unchanged.

Xie disagrees with the suggestion that foundations must wait for other institutions to act.

“Actually, what we are saying is, we see a role for philanthropy to actively shape and change these systems for the better. We need to work with practitioners to shape their practice, shape assumptions, mental models about practice,” he explains. “We need to update our approach from traditional grantmaking to something that’s a lot more collaborative.”

The foundation also wants to become more active in producing research rather than simply drawing on existing studies to inform its funding decisions.

One of its planned initiatives is the Social Networks and Mobility Study, a six-year longitudinal project tracking more than 3,000 households. Quantedge plans to work with Singapore Management University to investigate how social networks affect mobility and develop datasets that could eventually support predictive models.

Xie is particularly interested in the possibilities created by collecting information that researchers have not previously had access to in Singapore.

“We’re looking at novel datasets that will open possibilities for different research questions, different research lines of inquiry into mechanisms of social mobility, models that can predict social mobility, models that can predict if you have a particular intervention, what might be the expected impact.”

The foundation is also looking to work with the Singapore University of Social Sciences to strengthen practice research, encouraging social service organisations to investigate and evaluate their own methods more systematically.

Whether these investments will produce the insights Xie hopes for remains uncertain. A six-year study can identify relationships between household circumstances, social networks, and outcomes, but establishing which interventions produce lasting improvements in mobility will be a more demanding undertaking.

Xie nevertheless believes philanthropy has an important role in generating the evidence that might eventually influence policy.

“Hopefully with the system of practice and evidence, and through a relationship of trust and collaboration with government, we can also shape the systems of policy as well.”

Partnership and policy

That ambition introduces a more delicate consideration. Quantedge is a privately funded institution seeking to influence public systems, and Xie occupies an unusual position within that relationship. He is both the foundation’s chief executive and a Member of Parliament, with professional experience that gives him an understanding of how public institutions operate.

He doesn’t suggest that philanthropy should replace government. Rather, he envisages a relationship in which each can influence the other’s understanding of the problem.

“We may not agree on everything, but we inform their view. They inform ours, ultimately to try to shape policy in a way that will hopefully make an impact at the systems level in terms of closing that gap in opportunities.”

Yet influence also raises questions about whose priorities prevail when private funding enters public policymaking, and what happens when a foundation’s assessment of a successful intervention differs from that of the communities it exists to serve. 

Our conversation doesn’t establish how Quantedge intends to navigate every such disagreement. Xie is more concerned with describing a partnership in which research and practical experience can inform government decisions without assuming that either party possesses all the answers.

The next decade will provide several opportunities to test that approach.

Quantedge plans to work with ComLink+ on a town-level partnership model in Ang Mo Kio and Geylang Serai, where funders will collaborate with government agencies and social service organisations to develop programmes around the needs of individual communities.

It also intends to expand its Philantropreneur-in-Residence programme, offering promising social entrepreneurs more sustained institutional support. Under the expanded programme, participating organisations may receive around S$2 million over five years, with exceptional participants potentially receiving support for as long as eight years.

The foundation hopes to help these organisations develop the capabilities required to reach more people. Promising interventions, Xie believes, too often remain small even after demonstrating early success.

This ambition will also take physical form in the Quantedge Opportunity Lab (QOLab), which is scheduled to open in 2028 at the former Jalan Bukit Ho Swee Community Centre. The three-storey building will accommodate up to 250 people, providing subsidised workspaces and shared facilities for early-stage non-profit organisations working on social mobility. 

Where the money stops

For all this ambition, Xie is surprisingly candid about the areas Quantedge has chosen to leave alone.

When I ask whether philanthropy has paid sufficient attention to environmental inequality, I mention the recent haze spell in Singapore. A family with air-conditioning and an air purifier can respond to worsening air quality rather differently from one without either.

Xie acknowledges then introduces another example: thermal inequality. Rising temperatures can make homes and classrooms uncomfortable, with potentially different consequences for children depending on the conditions in which they live and study.

“I think it’s real,” he says, although he considers climate justice more immediately salient in societies whose communities face greater exposure to environmental threats. In Singapore, he believes differences in educational opportunities and enrichment remain more pressing concerns for the foundation.

Then, unexpectedly, he turns to health.

“Actually, one domain or one area that you may have picked up that’s not quite conspicuous in our strategy is health.”

Lower-income communities, he posits, often experience poorer health outcomes. The foundation has spent several years considering whether it should extend its social mobility work into this area.

“We know that those in the lower income, those in vulnerable communities also tend to have poorer health outcomes and poorer health habits,” he says. “There’s been something that we’ve been grappling with for the last few years, and even looking ahead, whether as a foundation working on social mobility, we should also be in the health space.”

For now, the answer is no.

“The conclusion we have now is we don’t know enough, and it is an extremely complex space in and of itself,” he explains. “We’ve deliberately made it not so much a strategic focus for us for now, because there’s so many other aspects of social mobility that need to be tackled, and so we’ve chosen to prioritise those.”

Still, he doesn’t dismiss the relationship between health and disadvantage, any more than he disputes that environmental conditions can affect children’s opportunities. He simply doesn’t believe Quantedge can usefully intervene everywhere.

“We hope other philanthropic organisations will pick up on this, and that’s the whole spirit of working together. We tackle different parts of the problem.”

My child, our children 

The limits Xie describes become particularly apparent in a story he recounts in his speech marking Quantedge Foundation’s 10th anniversary on 28 Oct 2026.

A young woman visiting a public rental housing block encounters a child sitting on the stairwell, doing his homework. She asks why he is studying there. The child explains that he is the only caregiver for his grandmother, who lives with him in their rental flat. He cannot go very far because he needs to remain within earshot in case she needs him — the stairwell is as far as he can manage.

Xie returns to the child several times in his speech. He imagines what it would mean for him to discover possibilities beyond the stairwell, to recognise abilities he might possess without yet knowing it, and eventually to find his place in a world considerably larger than the one available to him.

While the circumstances of the child’s life are extraordinary, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about the things he needs. Somewhere to study. An adult who can look after his grandmother. Enough freedom from his responsibilities to spend time discovering what interests him.

In Singapore, a considerable amount of parental effort goes into securing precisely these sorts of advantages, and considerably more.

Just days before my interview with Xie, a CNA report examined the latest changes to Singapore’s Primary One registration system, including the government’s efforts to increase access to popular schools for children without existing connections.

From the 2027 registration exercise, most primary schools will reserve 60 places for Phase 2C, up from 40. Twelve schools will also introduce a two-track arrangement intended to give children living farther away a better chance of admission.

The changes have revived familiar disagreements about alumni privileges, proximity rules, and whether parents who invest time or money in securing admission deserve an advantage over those who cannot.

CNA interviewed a father who considered alumni priority unfair, despite acknowledging that he would likely use his own connection to a school when registering his son. Another father had spent roughly 40 to 45 hours volunteering at a school to improve his son’s admission prospects, even though he believed such volunteering should not determine who secured a place.

Both recognised the contradictions in their positions. Neither saw much reason to handicap their own child while the rules continued to reward families willing and able to use them.

Xie has been following the discussion.

“The key challenge really is at the societal level,” he tells me towards the end of our conversation. “How do you shift parents from a mindset of doing the best for my child, which is so natural and understandable? How do you shift from doing the best for my child to doing what is fair and right and the best for our children?”

There is no suggestion that he considers parental ambition objectionable. His own mother devoted years to ensuring that he and his twin brother excelled academically. He knows what such commitment can accomplish.

Nor does he offer an easy answer to the question he poses. A parent might agree wholeheartedly that Singapore should provide fairer opportunities while remaining unwilling to jeopardise a place at a preferred school. It is possible to hold both convictions sincerely.

For Xie, the ambition of a fairer society extends considerably beyond what parents might be prepared to concede.

A fairer shot

Earlier, when I ask him what success would look like in 20 years, he begins with the statistical answer. He wants Singapore to move closer to the 20 per cent benchmark for children born into the bottom income quintile eventually reaching the top.

Then he returns to the question that has occupied him since his early experiences with privilege, and which continues to follow him through his community work.

When he encounters a child growing up in difficult circumstances, how confidently can he predict that child’s future?

“I hope in 20 years, if the foundation is successful in what it’s doing, we’ll have an easier time answering the question, and we’ll have a greater confidence in answering that question.”

He wants to be able to look at that child and believe that, whatever the difficulties at home, there is sufficient support elsewhere to give him a reasonable chance. He isn’t asking for every child to become wealthy or achieve some extraordinary feat. He just wants to feel less apprehensive about the prospects of a child whose family circumstances offer little reassurance.

And he doesn’t think Quantedge can accomplish this alone.

“When I talk about system, talk about society, it’s not just in the abstract or at a high level,” he says. “It really takes everyone in society to do their part to help a child to succeed despite his circumstances.”

The boy in the stairwell may never become a professional athlete, an entrepreneur, or a highly paid executive. We know almost nothing about him beyond the circumstances that brought him to that staircase. It would be presumptuous to imagine that his ambitions resemble those of the adults who hope to help him.

But there is something particularly troubling about a child whose responsibilities have already begun to restrict his opportunities before he has had much chance to explore them.

Xie is under no illusion that the work will be completed within the foundation’s next decade. The S$50 million commitment, the planned research, and the partnerships he intends to build are beginnings rather than guarantees. Even if they succeed, other children will encounter disadvantages that Quantedge has neither the resources nor the expertise to address.

Still, he returns to the possibility that Singaporeans might eventually develop a different instinct about the opportunities available to children beyond their own families. “If we succeed, our work can help to create a society that has that instinct to look at doing the best for all our children,” he says, “I think that child will have a fairer shot.”