STRATEGIC THINKING – THRU EXTRA VISIONARY LEADERSHIP

The story of Singapore

Talent is a country’s most precious asset.  Singapore, a small resource, poor country had a population of two million at independence in 1965.  Their populace were mainly descendants of agricultural laborers from the Southern provinces of China, early Indians immigrants / merchants.

Analysis of the 1980 census population revealed that their brightest women were not marrying and would not be represented in the next generation.  The implication was grave.  Our best women were not reproducing themselves because men who were their educational equals did not want to marry them. 

About half of their graduates were woman, two third of them were unmarried.  The Asian man, whether Chinese, Indian or Malay, prefers to have a wife with less education than himself: only 38% of graduate men were married to graduate woman as at  1983.

This lopsided marriage and procreation pattern could not be allowed to remain unmentioned /unchecked and it is bad for a country of two million people that needed to nurture talents for its growth.

On August 14, 1983, the founding father of Singapore dropped a down shell in a national day rally address live on television with maximum viewership that it was stupid for their graduate men to choose less educated and less intelligent women if they wanted their children to do as well as they have done hence “Great marriage debate”.

Flood of protests began to pour in.  Graduate women were upset that they had spotlighted their plight.  Non graduate women and their parents were angry with him for dissuading graduate men from marrying them.

But Yew Kuan Yew, was unperturbed, he supported his views by quoting studies of identical twins done in Minnesota in the 1980s which showed that nearly 80% of a person’s make up is from nature, and about 20% the result of nurture.

The capabilities of most children were between those of their two parents, with a few having lower or higher intelligence than either.  Therefore male graduates who marry less educated women were not maximizing the chances of having children who make it to the university. 

He urged them to marry their educational equals, and encouraged educated women to have two or more children, they would be supported with child benefits.  He also supported his views by releasing analysis of statistics for the past few years of educational background of parents of the top 10% of their students in examination ages of 12, 16 and 18.  This left little doubt that the decisive factors for high performance was a pair of well educated parents.

 

-          1960 and 1970 data analysis showed that top students who won scholarship for universities abroad had parents who were well educated.

 

-          That data revealed that 50% of best 100 scholarship winners had at least one parent who was a professional or self employed.

 

R.H. Herrnstein, professor of Psychology at Harvard, supported his claim when in an article “IQ and Falling Birth Rates”, he wrote ”In our time, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore has said, levels of competence will decline, our economy will falter, our admin will suffer and society will decline because so many educated men are failing to find educated women to marry and are instead marrying uneducated women or remaining unmarried”.

 A few years later, Hernestein co-authored a book “The Bell Curve” which set out data that showed intelligence to be inherited.

 

To ease the troubles of unmarried graduate women, they set up a Social Development Unit (SDU) to facilitate socializing between men and graduate women – staging seminars, symposiums, computer classes, club med holidays, etc.  They also extended Social Development Unit (SDU) to all levels (O’ level, A level) to facilitate association between male and female.

It might be difficult to reverse this trend in a short while due to deep rooted cultural biases in Singapore, but by 1983, statistics showed that 67% of graduate women are now married to graduate as against 38% in 1967.

This was just one of the strategic thrusts of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore of today is his testament.

It became a first world country from a third world country in one single generation.  It was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1965 when it was separated from Malaysia.  In 35 years, its one of the world’s wealthiest countries with GDP of $30,000 from $1,000 in 1965.

Singapore is the high tech centre of South East Asia, its ports is the busiest in the world (carrying 19 million TEU’s [20 footer equivalent] annually).  Changai airport has been voted as the best airport in the world in the last 10 years, while Singapore airline is also adjudged the best airline in the last 14 years.  They have one of the best oil refineries in the world without a single oil well.  It is adjudged the cleanest city in the world.  It was awarded the best city in Asia to do business in 1989, 1999 and a lot more.

Culled from:  Third World to First, Singapore’s Story: 1965–2000

Lee Kuan Yew