Strategic Thinking Through Visionary Leadership: Lee Kuan Yew's Approach to Singapore's Growth

                                                     

The story of Singapore

Talent is a country’s most precious asset. Singapore, a small resource-poor country, had a population of just two million when it gained independence in 1965. Its population primarily consisted of descendants of agricultural laborers from the southern provinces of China and early Indian immigrants/merchants.

An analysis of the 1980 census revealed that the brightest women in Singapore were not marrying and, therefore, would not be represented in the next generation. The implications were grave. These highly educated women were not reproducing because men of similar educational backgrounds were unwilling to marry them.

About half of Singapore’s graduates were women, but two-thirds of them were unmarried. The typical Asian man, whether Chinese, Indian, or Malay, preferred a wife with less education than himself. As of 1983, only 38% of graduate men were married to graduate women.

This imbalanced marriage and procreation pattern posed a significant issue for a country of just two million people, which needed to nurture talent for its continued growth.

On August 14, 1983, Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, dropped a bombshell during a National Day Rally address, broadcast live on television. With maximum viewership, he argued that it was unwise for graduate men to choose less educated and less intelligent wives if they wanted their children to perform as well as they had. Thus began the "Great Marriage Debate."

A flood of protests followed. Graduate women were upset that their plight had been spotlighted. Meanwhile, non-graduate women and their parents were angry with him for discouraging graduate men from marrying them.

However, Lee Kuan Yew remained unperturbed. He supported his argument by citing studies of identical twins conducted in Minnesota during the 1980s, which showed that nearly 80% of a person’s makeup comes from nature, with only 20% being the result of nurture.

Most children's capabilities fell between those of their parents, with only a few having intelligence levels either above or below that of both parents. Therefore, male graduates who married less educated women were not maximizing their chances of having children who could attend university.

Lee urged graduates to marry their educational equals and encouraged educated women to have two or more children, offering them child benefits as support. He bolstered his case by releasing statistics from the past few years, showing that the top 10% of students, aged 12, 16, and 18, were overwhelmingly from well-educated parents.

Data from the 1960s and 1970s also showed that the top students who won scholarships to study abroad had well-educated parents. Specifically, 50% of the best 100 scholarship winners had at least one parent who was a professional or self-employed.

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

A few years later, Herrnstein co-authored a book titled The Bell Curve, which presented data showing that intelligence is inherited.

To address the challenges faced by unmarried graduate women, Singapore established the Social Development Unit (SDU) to facilitate socializing between male and female graduates by organizing seminars, symposiums, computer classes, and club med holidays, among other activities. The SDU was later extended to all levels (O’ level, A level) to foster associations between men and women.

It was difficult to reverse this trend in a short time due to deep-rooted cultural biases in Singapore. However, by 1983, statistics showed that 67% of graduate women were now married to graduate men, compared to just 38% in 1967.

This was just one of the strategic thrusts of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore’s transformation stands as his testament.

 The country went from third-world to first-world status within a single generation. When it separated from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore was one of the poorest nations in the world. Thirty-five years later, its GDP had skyrocketed from $1,000 to $30,000.

Today, Singapore is the high-tech center of Southeast Asia. Its port is the busiest in the world, handling 19 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) annually. Changi Airport has been voted the best airport in the world for the past ten years, and Singapore Airlines has been judged the best airline for the last 14 years. Singapore boasts one of the best oil refineries in the world, despite not having a single oil well. It is regarded as the cleanest city globally and was named the best city in Asia to do business in 1989, 1999, and numerous other years.

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

Lee Kuan Yew