I’ve been (very slowly) reading Lee Kwan Yew‘s memoirs. I’ll review it later, but there’s a bit I am compelled to post on now. Here’s Lee Kwan Yew:
On the night of 14 August 1983, I dropped a bombshell in my annual National Day Rally address. Live on both our television channels, with maximum viewership, I said it was stupid for our graduate men to choose less-educated and less-intelligent wives if they wanted their children to do as well as they had done. . . . It had taken me some time to see the obvious, that talent is a country’s most precious asset. . . .
The implications were grave. Our best women were not reproducing themselves because men who were their education equals did not want to marry them. . . .
This lopsided marriage and procreation pattern could not be allowed to remain unmentioned and unchecked. . . .
I quoted studies of identical twins done in Minnesota in the 1980s which showed that these twins were similar in so many respects. Although they had been brought up separately and in different countries, about 80 percent of their vocabulary, IQ, habits, likes and dislikes in food and friends, and other character and personality traits were identical.
Obviously, this caused a controversy. However, one Western academic stood up for Lee Kwan Yew . . . Richard Herrnstein (yeah, that guy).
Lee Kwan Yew also has realistic views on sex differences: “Women want to marry up, men want to marry down.”
He goes on:
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. . . .
Since that speech, I have regularly released the statistical analysis of the educational backgrounds of parents of the top 10 percent 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.
The problem is that smart women don’t want to be stuck for two plus decades in a child-rearing role which is what they’d have to do if society wanted more children from them. Of course, there is an alternative in that high achieving men could marry lesser women, but only having children through selective egg-donors.
Can any inference be drawn from dysgenic reproduction (that low-IQ people have more children) and the status-loss of UK in 20C?
Also are you going to draw inferences regarding the increasing crime rate in the Western countries?
Amazing. Is there a way to invest in Singapore?
Has Singapore taken any measures to counteract that trend? Also, I think it would be really interesting to see them implement an eugenics type program, where they took the sperm from a few of the greatest geniuses in the world and paid women to have their babies.
Great book. From my Singaporean friends, even though it’s written by an interested party, the book is pretty accurate with regards to the events of history. All it glosses over are some personal scandals.
Lee Kwan Yew in 2012!
> smart women don’t want to be stuck for two plus decades in a child-rearing role which is what they’d have to do if society wanted more children from them.
Smart women, like all women, only want what society tells them to want. Right now society tells them that the highest good is for them to spend their futile years tending to NAMs via Teach for America. Given a friendly media, that signal would be exactly inverted.
Just broadcast regular specials which show 40-50 year old professional childless women from the previous generation weeping over their lack of children.
I’m not so much bothered by high IQ people being less fecund than low IQ people. The heart of the looming tragedy is that people who produce beautiful daughters are outbred by people who produce ugly daughters.
Of course, as long as human (male and female) beauty and IQ are strongly correlated, I’ll go with the handwringing over IQ as proxy for what really matters, which is physical beauty.
Amazing. Is there a way to invest in Singapore?
Has Singapore taken any measures to counteract that trend? Also, I think it would be really interesting to see them implement an eugenics type program, where they took the sperm from a few of the greatest geniuses in the world and paid women to have their babies.
Hmmm. Odd. This above comment isn’t from me.
If memory serves me right, Singapore has an African slum that is a no-go zone for natives due to its high crime rate. If they are so smart, why don’t they get rid of those Africans?
I’ve not heard of this. What’s the neighborhood called?
[...] Lee focused on his population. I wrote more on that here. The short version is that it’s not an accident that Singapore is high on this [...]
PA—
I wouldn’t call 3000 sizeable. Most of them don’t seem to last in Singapore very long (see the end of my except.) One wonders why they let any in given Lee’s views on HBD.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Free/Story/STIStory_214536.html