From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Atlantic Monthly
of
May 1989, he wrote, “In our time Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore
has said, ‘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 and are instead marrying
uneducated women or remaining unmarried. But Lee is an exception, for few
modern political leaders dare to talk in public about the qualitative aspect of low
fertility.” A few years later, Herrnstein co-authored 
The Bell Curve
which set out
the data that showed intelligence to be inherited.
To help ease this problem of unmarried graduate women, we set up a Social
Development Unit (SDU) to facilitate socialising between men and women
graduates. I personally chose Dr Eileen Aw, a doctor at the National University
of Singapore. Then in her late 40s, she was married to a doctor and had two
children at the university. Soft-spoken and approachable, with a knack for
putting young people at ease, she was just the person for the job. The SDU was
initially received with disdain by graduates, both men and women. The
international press had another field day ridiculing our matchmaking efforts and
SDU activities, from symposiums, seminars and computer classes to cruises and
Club Med holidays.
The fact was that parents were alarmed at the swelling numbers of their
graduate daughters remaining unmarried and were desperate for help. One night
in 1985, after a reception at the Istana, Choo told me that the women of her
generation had been discussing the plight of their professionally trained
daughters and commiserating with each other. They lamented the passing of the
age when women had marriages arranged by their parents with the help of
professional matchmakers. When most women received little formal education,
the bright women and the less bright had equal chances of being “married off”
since there were no O levels or university degrees to grade them. This practice of
arranged marriages was no longer acceptable to educated women.
It was as much the fault of mothers of graduate sons as of the sons
themselves. Non-graduate mothers preferred non-graduate daughters-in-law who
would be less intimidating. It was most difficult to erase this cultural prejudice,
that a male who was not seen to be the main breadwinner and head of the
household was to be pitied and ridiculed. This was so with the Chinese, more so
with the Indians, and most of all with the Malays.
The same problem extended through all educational levels. A large number
of A level (or high school) women could not find college or A level men to

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marry. So too with O level women. Women want to marry up, men want to
marry down. The result was that the least-educated men could find no women to
marry, because the women who remained unmarried were all better-educated
and would not marry them. To complement the SDU, I asked the executive
director of the People’s Association to form a Social Development Section
(SDS) for those with secondary education. Membership rapidly expanded and by
1995 was 97,000. Thirty-one per cent of SDS members who met through its
activities got married. Traditional methods of choosing marriage partners had
been ruptured by universal education: the government had to provide alternatives
to the family matchmakers of old.
The 1980 census figures also revealed that better-educated women had
compounded our problem by having much fewer children than the less-educated.
The tertiary-educated had 1.6, the secondary-educated also 1.6, the primary-
educated 2.3, and the unschooled 4.4. To replace themselves, parents must have
2.1 children. We were more than doubling our less-educated, and not replacing
our better-educated.
To reverse this reproductive trend, Keng Swee, then minister for education,
and I decided in 1984 to give graduate mothers who have a third child priority in
choosing the best schools for all their children, a much-prized objective of all
parents. It was a sensitive and divisive issue. The egalitarians in cabinet led by
Raja were outraged. He disputed that brighter parents had brighter children.
Even if it were true, he argued, why hurt people’s self-esteem? Eddie Barker was
unhappy not because he agreed with Raja, but because it was offensive to less-
bright parents and their children. Younger ministers were divided between the
views of their older colleagues. Keng Swee, ever the hard-headed realist, agreed
with me that we had to jolt male graduates from their outdated cultural
prejudices into recognising the folly of marrying down. We carried a majority in
cabinet.
Keng Swee and I had expected non-graduate mothers to be angry because
they would be discriminated against, so we were taken aback when graduate
mothers protested instead. They did not want this privilege. However, the
message to young men did sink in: more married their equals though the
progress was slow. After the elections, I agreed that Tony Tan, who had taken
over from Keng Swee as the new minister for education, reverse this decision
and cancel the priority for graduate mothers. I had awakened our people,
especially tertiary-educated young men and women, to the starkness of our
plight. But since women graduates were embarrassed by this privilege, it was

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best to remove it.
In its place, I gave special income tax concessions to married women – this
time to graduate, polytechnic, A level and O level mothers, enlarging the pool
and lessening the sense of elitism. They qualified for substantial income tax
rebates on either their or their husband’s income for their third and fourth child.
These concessions did encourage more third and fourth births.
Many critics blamed the government for thoughtlessly implementing the
“Stop-at-Two” policy in the 1960s. Was it wrong? Yes and no. Without that
policy, family planning might never have brought population growth down, and
we would not have solved our unemployment and schooling problems. But we
should have foreseen that the better-educated would have two or fewer children,
and the less-educated four or more. Western writers on family planning had not
drawn attention to this already familiar though less stark outcome in their own
mature countries because it was not politically correct to do so. Had we found
out on our own sooner, we would have refined and targeted our campaign
differently, encouraging with incentives the better-educated women to have three
or more children right from the start of the family planning drive in the 1960s.
Unfortunately we did not know and did not change our policy until 1983 when
analysis of the 1980 census revealed the reproductive patterns of the different
socioeconomic groups.
Since that speech in 1983, I have regularly released the statistical analysis of
the educational backgrounds of parents of the top 10 per cent of students in
national examinations. Singaporeans now accept that the better-educated and
more able the parents, the more likely are the children to achieve similar levels.
My speech was intended to shake up our young men and women and their
parents, and make them do something to redress the seriousness of the situation.
The open discussion it stimulated made some difference. However, Keng Swee,
the trained statistician, upon studying the figures for a couple of years after my
shock tactics, told me dolefully that we would not be able to solve this problem
soon enough to save most of our graduate women from their fate. The figures,
although improving, revealed it would take many years to reverse the trend. Our
bright women would suffer, and so would Singapore. By 1997, 63 per cent of
graduate men married fellow graduates, as against 38 per cent in 1982. Also,
more graduate women were marrying non-graduates rather than remaining
single. It is difficult to override a deep-rooted cultural bias. Intellectually I
agreed with Keng Swee that overcoming this cultural lag would be a slow
adjustment process, but emotionally I could not accept that we could not jolt the

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men out of their prejudices sooner.
Difficulties over our talent pool were aggravated when the rich Western
countries changed their policies on Asian immigration. In the 1960s, when the
United States was fighting the war in Vietnam, it did not want to be seen as anti-
Asian. It decided to accept Asian immigrants, reversing more than a century of
its whites-only policy. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the big countries
with small populations, soon followed suit. They had long barred Asian
immigration. When they changed their rules to admit better-qualified Asians, we
lost a large part of the inflow of Chinese and Indians from Malaysia. Many
middle-class professional Chinese and Indian Malaysians migrated permanently
to Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Fewer foreigners also came to Singapore
for their education. They now had their own universities, and many could afford
to study in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, the United States and Canada.
Not all leaders shared my view of the bad effects of this change in policy.
When I told Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Razak in the early 1970s that
Malaysia was suffering a brain drain, losing many well-educated Chinese and
Indians to Australia and New Zealand, he replied, “This is not a ‘brains drain’. It
is a ‘trouble drain’; it drains trouble out of Malaysia.”
Our shortage of talent was aggravated from the late 1970s when some 5 per
cent of our better-educated began emigrating. Too many of our bright students
became doctors. Many emigrated because they felt they did not have the success
their level of professionalism deserved. Some students who had studied in
Australia, New Zealand and Canada migrated there because their careers in
Singapore were not advancing rapidly enough. Unlike Japanese or Koreans,
Singaporeans were educated in English and faced negligible language or cultural
problems when they settled overseas.
To get enough talent to fill the jobs our growing economy needed, I set out to
attract and retain entrepreneurs, professionals, artistes and highly skilled
workers. In 1980 we formed two committees, to get them placed into jobs and to
integrate them socially. With the help of student counsellors in our missions in
Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, a team of
officers would meet promising Asian students at their universities to interest
them in jobs in Singapore. We concentrated on recruiting Asian students because
Singapore offered an Asian society with a higher standard of living and quality
of life than their own countries, and they could assimilate easily into our society.
This systematic search for talent worldwide brought in a few hundred graduates
each year. It made up for the loss each year through emigration of 5–10 per cent

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of our better-educated to industrialised countries.
For the exceptionally bright, we tried to “green harvest”, an American
corporate practice of offering jobs even before graduation, on the basis of their
performance before their final examinations. By the 1990s this inflow through
active recruitment was three times the outflow. We began offering a few
hundred scholarships to bright students from China, India and the region in the
hope that some would remain because of the better job opportunities; those who
returned to their countries could still be useful for our companies that went
abroad.
We also set up two task forces specially to attract talent from India and from
the region, but were more successful in attracting Indian than Malay talent.
There were too many privileges for bumiputras and pribumis (indigenous
Malays and Indonesians) in their home countries for them to consider leaving.
A new phenomenon is the increasing number of Caucasian men marrying
our women, especially the tertiary-educated. Singapore graduate men were
fearful of marrying them but Caucasian graduates were not. Many of these
women were forced to emigrate by our rules that allowed a Singapore male
citizen to bring in a foreign bride, but not the other way around. We gave that
permission only if the foreign husband had regular employment. We changed
this policy in January 1999: this will add to the cosmopolitan character of
Singapore. Furthermore, quite a number of our men who were educated abroad
have married Caucasian, Japanese and other Asian girls they met at university.
Their children are valuable additions to our talent pool. The old clear-cut barriers
to interracial marriage have been breached by the intermingling of people as they
travel to and work in countries not their own. We have to change our attitudes
and take advantage of what was once considered foreign and not assimilable
talent. We cannot allow old prejudices to hamper our development as an
international centre for trade, industry and services.
Besides natural conservatism, the other problem is fear of competition for
jobs. Both at professional and lower levels there is resistance to the inflow of
talent. Singaporeans know that more foreign talent will create more jobs. But
they want this to happen in some other sector, not their own.
Without foreign talent, we would not have done as well. In my first cabinet
of ten, I was the only one born and educated in Singapore. Keng Swee and Chin
Chye were born in Malaya, Raja in Ceylon. Our present chief justice, Yong Pung
How, came from Malaysia, as did our attorney-general, Chan Sek Keong. The
list could roll on. Thousands of engineers, managers and other professionals who

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came from abroad have helped us to grow. They are the extra megabytes in
Singapore’s computer. If we do not top up with foreign talent, we will not make
it into the top league.

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