GOH KENG SWEE: Thinker and Institution Builder

Appalling post-war conditions required the newly formed Department of Social Welfare to acquire factual details upon which "to plan its work comprehensively and economically, in order to avoid the pitfall of being merely a purveyor of palliatives, and in order to establish its true position as a primary and necessary instrument of good government".6 In late 1951, Goh, now armed with better research techniques on completing his Bachelor of Science degree from the London School of Economics, led a pilot survey on illnesses. [...] Goh was soon in charge of a huge project called "The Survey of Family Living Conditions", the final report of which appeared in 1956 as the significant Urban Incomes & Housing: A Report on the Social Survey of Singapore, 195 '3-54.7 James Puthucheary used Goh's work for his doctoral dissertation published in 1960, and asserted therein that Goh had shown that on average, Chinese households in Singapore in the mid-1950s suffered at least twice as much from "extreme poverty" than Malay households: