By Richard Hartung
06 February.
After the disappointment of what was supposed to be the debut of a retirement resort community at Hillford turning out to be more like an ordinary condominium launch on Jan 17, policymakers have an opportunity to do better.
Admittedly, neither the developer nor the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) might call Hillford a failure. Yet, a look at what happened shows how the project strayed from its intended purpose.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Asia’s risky strongman nostalgia
TODAY
By William Pesek
05 February 2014.
Indonesia is growing at 6 per cent, has rejoined the ranks of investment-grade nations and, after decades under the repressive President Suharto, has reaffirmed its place as the world’s third-largest democracy. Yet somehow, enough Indonesians remember the Suharto years fondly that his Golkar Party has hopes of regaining power in upcoming elections.
Golkar is not alone in trying to exploit nostalgia for past strongmen (and women). India’s Congress Party is trying to squeeze any remaining good feelings about the Nehru-Gandhi period (from 1947 to about 1989) to elevate lacklustre heir apparent Rahul Gandhi. Even as China’s Xi Jinping pushes ahead with market reforms, he continues to pay homage to Communist icon Mao Zedong’s rule between 1949 and 1976.
Thais are destroying their economy rather than cutting off support for tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra (in office 2001-2006) and his sister Yingluck. Many Malaysians wax sentimental about the boom days of Dr Mahathir Mohamad (in office 1981-2003). Japanese are indulging Mr Shinzo Abe’s dangerous stroll down memory lane.
What gives with nostalgianomics? The yearning for yesteryear speaks to our disorienting times and a dearth of visionary leadership when it is most needed.
By William Pesek
05 February 2014.
Indonesia is growing at 6 per cent, has rejoined the ranks of investment-grade nations and, after decades under the repressive President Suharto, has reaffirmed its place as the world’s third-largest democracy. Yet somehow, enough Indonesians remember the Suharto years fondly that his Golkar Party has hopes of regaining power in upcoming elections.
Golkar is not alone in trying to exploit nostalgia for past strongmen (and women). India’s Congress Party is trying to squeeze any remaining good feelings about the Nehru-Gandhi period (from 1947 to about 1989) to elevate lacklustre heir apparent Rahul Gandhi. Even as China’s Xi Jinping pushes ahead with market reforms, he continues to pay homage to Communist icon Mao Zedong’s rule between 1949 and 1976.
Thais are destroying their economy rather than cutting off support for tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra (in office 2001-2006) and his sister Yingluck. Many Malaysians wax sentimental about the boom days of Dr Mahathir Mohamad (in office 1981-2003). Japanese are indulging Mr Shinzo Abe’s dangerous stroll down memory lane.
What gives with nostalgianomics? The yearning for yesteryear speaks to our disorienting times and a dearth of visionary leadership when it is most needed.
What Machines Can’t Do
FEB. 3, 2014
David Brooks
We’re clearly heading into an age of brilliant technology. Computers are already impressively good at guiding driverless cars and beating humans at chess and Jeopardy. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology point out in their book “The Second Machine Age,” computers are increasingly going to be able to perform important parts of even mostly cognitive jobs, like picking stocks, diagnosing diseases and granting parole.
As this happens, certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.
But what human skills will be more valuable?
Low take-up for hawker apprenticeship programme
05 February.
SINGAPORE — In contrast to the strong initial interest, fewer than half of the places offered under a scheme to learn from famous hawkers here have been taken up so far — more than three months after it was launched.
The Hawker Master Trainer Pilot Programme, which lasts about five to six months, has 23 trainees filling the 50 places available.
SINGAPORE — In contrast to the strong initial interest, fewer than half of the places offered under a scheme to learn from famous hawkers here have been taken up so far — more than three months after it was launched.
The Hawker Master Trainer Pilot Programme, which lasts about five to six months, has 23 trainees filling the 50 places available.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Let court trial outcome determine lawyers' fees
Feb 03, 2014
By Andy Ho Senior Writer
THE way the legal services sector is regulated will be tweaked in the Legal Profession (Amendment) Bill to be tabled later this year. The Law Ministry, which will be inviting feedback on the Bill, should seriously consider legalising the contingency fee system.
In such a system, a lawyer's fees depend on him winning the case. Should he lose in court, then both he and his client walk out of the courthouse with nothing.
This arrangement is not yet permitted in Singapore. But it is already allowed in the United States, Britain and Canada.
The long-standing Singapore ban derives historically from English law that traditionally barred contingency fees.
It was feared that with a financial stake in his client's claim, the lawyer may be driven, "for his own personal gain, to inflame the damages, to suppress evidence, or even to suborn witnesses", as Lord Denning, the most celebrated English judge of the 20th century, said in Re Trepca Mines Ltd (1963), an appeal he presided over. Such a system, it was argued, may promote frivolous suits and those without merit.
Britain decriminalised contingency fees in the Criminal Law Act of 1967, 119 years after the US state of New York did so in 1848. Today, 28 states in the US allow it. Canada followed suit in 2002.
In the US, the impetus for change came from rising rates of workplace accidents as the economy industrialised in the 19th century. Such victims, who were too poor to hire lawyers, clamoured for access to justice, as Lawrence Friedman notes in A History Of American Law (1973).
In Singapore, some valid claims are not being litigated but not just because the victims are indigent. Some victims are middle-class folks who cannot afford lawyer fees as well.
Writing on the Singapore Law Watch website run by the Singapore Academy of Law, Mr Seow Tzi Yang and Ms Debra Lam noted recently that, based on the 2010 census, only 12 per cent to 17 per cent of two-income households here qualify for legal aid.
This means that much of the middle class does not qualify for legal aid. They are thus also unlikely to be able to afford litigation, given that each trial day in a District Court costs $12,000 to $16,000 while a day in High Court can "nearly wipe out an entire year's household income". As Mr Seow and Ms Lam note, the median family income in 2010 was $48,000.
The two writers observe that such economic reasoning "cuts directly against the usual complaints that the contingency fee encourages frivolous litigation".
Instead, it is about making meritorious litigation possible not only for the impecunious but also for the middle class. Thus, the contingency fee system increases access to justice, which is "a fundamental human right" as the duo note.
In the US, the industry standard for contingency fees is one-third of winnings. But because these fees have, on occasion, amounted to astronomical sums, they make lawyers look avaricious. So a main gripe about contingency fees is that they can turn out to be exorbitant.
Many cite as example the class action suits brought against US Big Tobacco in the 1990s by several states. In the multi-state class action lawsuit against Big Tobacco, which eventually agreed in 1998 to pay US$206 billion to the states over 25 years, the winning lawyers made so much that their fees worked out to the equivalent of US$200,000 (S$255,300) per hour - had they been retained on billable hours instead.
Detractors say that, as one of the two classic professions, lawyers have an ethical obligation not to charge such unreasonable fees.
However, such fees are not unreasonable if one does not use hourly rates to evaluate them.
The essence of a contingency fee arrangement is that it is a deal between the client and the lawyer that turns on the latter's risk-taking. The lawyer risks not earning anything for all his work if he loses the case, while the victim stands to lose merely some portion of any potential compensation that would go to his lawyer.
Such a deal aligns the economic goals of lawyer and client.
The fee acts as an incentive to encourage more diligent work from lawyers, while clients neither have to contend with billable hours nor worry whether their lawyers are efficient or not, since the fee does not pivot on such considerations.
Such a system would allow the lawyer to "invest" his time and resources in a litigation "market" as he deems fit, taking into account his tolerance for the risk of losing and ending up with nothing for all his work.
The idea of big rewards for the risk-taker who ends up with nothing if he loses, is consistent with a capitalist market system.
Consider the chief executive in a market economy. Like a lawyer, a chief executive is a fiduciary, holding a legal and ethical relationship of trust between himself and his beneficiaries. So a chief executive has a fiduciary duty to shareholders and acts as a trustee for their best (financial) interests. In carrying out his duties, he has the same obligations of full disclosure and fairness to them as a lawyer has towards his clients.
Now a chief executive does not justify his salary on an hourly basis. Instead, he is judged on the basis of the financial impact of his activities in, and risk-taking for, his corporation. How he spends his time (not illegally, of course,) does not matter as long as he delivers the goods.
In the same vein for a contingency fee lawyer, it is not how many hours he chalks up on a case that matter - so hourly rates do not matter. What he is being rewarded for is his acceptance of the high business risks as well as his efficiency and expertise in working on a case and winning it.
In the multi-state litigation against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, the state of Maryland alone, for example, asked 150 law firms to take up the litigation on a contingency fee basis but only six firms submitted bids. This shows how few law firms have the capacity and risk propensity to take on such a risky endeavour.
Right now, it is impossible to quantify the number of meritorious cases that never went to court because the victims did not have the resources for legal action. Allowing lawyers to be risk-taking market participants in a contingency fee system will afford access to the courts for such victims who are not just the indigent but also the middle class. This is clearly a good thing that Singapore should legalise.
[The corollary to this system is that if a middle-class client goes to a lawyer and none of them will take the case on a contingency fee basis, he would realise that his case is weak and he should forget about it.]
By Andy Ho Senior Writer
THE way the legal services sector is regulated will be tweaked in the Legal Profession (Amendment) Bill to be tabled later this year. The Law Ministry, which will be inviting feedback on the Bill, should seriously consider legalising the contingency fee system.
In such a system, a lawyer's fees depend on him winning the case. Should he lose in court, then both he and his client walk out of the courthouse with nothing.
This arrangement is not yet permitted in Singapore. But it is already allowed in the United States, Britain and Canada.
The long-standing Singapore ban derives historically from English law that traditionally barred contingency fees.
It was feared that with a financial stake in his client's claim, the lawyer may be driven, "for his own personal gain, to inflame the damages, to suppress evidence, or even to suborn witnesses", as Lord Denning, the most celebrated English judge of the 20th century, said in Re Trepca Mines Ltd (1963), an appeal he presided over. Such a system, it was argued, may promote frivolous suits and those without merit.
Britain decriminalised contingency fees in the Criminal Law Act of 1967, 119 years after the US state of New York did so in 1848. Today, 28 states in the US allow it. Canada followed suit in 2002.
In the US, the impetus for change came from rising rates of workplace accidents as the economy industrialised in the 19th century. Such victims, who were too poor to hire lawyers, clamoured for access to justice, as Lawrence Friedman notes in A History Of American Law (1973).
In Singapore, some valid claims are not being litigated but not just because the victims are indigent. Some victims are middle-class folks who cannot afford lawyer fees as well.
Writing on the Singapore Law Watch website run by the Singapore Academy of Law, Mr Seow Tzi Yang and Ms Debra Lam noted recently that, based on the 2010 census, only 12 per cent to 17 per cent of two-income households here qualify for legal aid.
This means that much of the middle class does not qualify for legal aid. They are thus also unlikely to be able to afford litigation, given that each trial day in a District Court costs $12,000 to $16,000 while a day in High Court can "nearly wipe out an entire year's household income". As Mr Seow and Ms Lam note, the median family income in 2010 was $48,000.
The two writers observe that such economic reasoning "cuts directly against the usual complaints that the contingency fee encourages frivolous litigation".
Instead, it is about making meritorious litigation possible not only for the impecunious but also for the middle class. Thus, the contingency fee system increases access to justice, which is "a fundamental human right" as the duo note.
In the US, the industry standard for contingency fees is one-third of winnings. But because these fees have, on occasion, amounted to astronomical sums, they make lawyers look avaricious. So a main gripe about contingency fees is that they can turn out to be exorbitant.
Many cite as example the class action suits brought against US Big Tobacco in the 1990s by several states. In the multi-state class action lawsuit against Big Tobacco, which eventually agreed in 1998 to pay US$206 billion to the states over 25 years, the winning lawyers made so much that their fees worked out to the equivalent of US$200,000 (S$255,300) per hour - had they been retained on billable hours instead.
Detractors say that, as one of the two classic professions, lawyers have an ethical obligation not to charge such unreasonable fees.
However, such fees are not unreasonable if one does not use hourly rates to evaluate them.
The essence of a contingency fee arrangement is that it is a deal between the client and the lawyer that turns on the latter's risk-taking. The lawyer risks not earning anything for all his work if he loses the case, while the victim stands to lose merely some portion of any potential compensation that would go to his lawyer.
Such a deal aligns the economic goals of lawyer and client.
The fee acts as an incentive to encourage more diligent work from lawyers, while clients neither have to contend with billable hours nor worry whether their lawyers are efficient or not, since the fee does not pivot on such considerations.
Such a system would allow the lawyer to "invest" his time and resources in a litigation "market" as he deems fit, taking into account his tolerance for the risk of losing and ending up with nothing for all his work.
The idea of big rewards for the risk-taker who ends up with nothing if he loses, is consistent with a capitalist market system.
Consider the chief executive in a market economy. Like a lawyer, a chief executive is a fiduciary, holding a legal and ethical relationship of trust between himself and his beneficiaries. So a chief executive has a fiduciary duty to shareholders and acts as a trustee for their best (financial) interests. In carrying out his duties, he has the same obligations of full disclosure and fairness to them as a lawyer has towards his clients.
Now a chief executive does not justify his salary on an hourly basis. Instead, he is judged on the basis of the financial impact of his activities in, and risk-taking for, his corporation. How he spends his time (not illegally, of course,) does not matter as long as he delivers the goods.
In the same vein for a contingency fee lawyer, it is not how many hours he chalks up on a case that matter - so hourly rates do not matter. What he is being rewarded for is his acceptance of the high business risks as well as his efficiency and expertise in working on a case and winning it.
In the multi-state litigation against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, the state of Maryland alone, for example, asked 150 law firms to take up the litigation on a contingency fee basis but only six firms submitted bids. This shows how few law firms have the capacity and risk propensity to take on such a risky endeavour.
Right now, it is impossible to quantify the number of meritorious cases that never went to court because the victims did not have the resources for legal action. Allowing lawyers to be risk-taking market participants in a contingency fee system will afford access to the courts for such victims who are not just the indigent but also the middle class. This is clearly a good thing that Singapore should legalise.
[The corollary to this system is that if a middle-class client goes to a lawyer and none of them will take the case on a contingency fee basis, he would realise that his case is weak and he should forget about it.]
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Air India
Delhi says air 'not as bad' as Beijing after smog scrutiny
Jan 29, 2014
NEW DELHI (AFP) - India's air monitoring centre denied on Wednesday that pollution in New Delhi was worse than in Beijing, following scrutiny of the Indian capital's winter smog, which shrouds the city each year.
A report in the New York Times last week and fresh research by scientists at Yale University suggested Delhi's air was more harmful than Beijing's, where concerns about the health impact of pollution are growing.
"I am amazed to read such reports because Delhi air quality, especially in winter, is very poor but certainly not as bad as in Beijing," Gufran Beig, from the state-run System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR), told AFP.
Yale's Global Environment Performance Index, a study of 178 countries released earlier this month, showed Delhi had the highest concentration of harmful small particles less than 2.5 micro meters in diameter (PM 2.5) followed by Beijing.
The New York Times meanwhile examined pollution figures collected from one monitoring centre in the first three weeks of this year, which found on average the daily peak figure over the period was 473 micrograms per cubic metre.
This was twice as high of an equivalent figure in Beijing, the newspaper said.
Beig said that a better measurement of Delhi's air would be the 24-hour average of PM2.5 pollution taken from nine air quality monitoring stations spread around the capital.
This showed that PM 2.5 never crossed 250 - although this is still 10 times the limit proposed by the World Health Organisation.
China's capital was shrouded in thick smog between January 16-18 with the count of small particulate pollution reaching 650, more than 25 times recommended levels.
Pollution in China has been linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, and has tarnished the image of its cities including Beijing, which saw a 10 percent drop in tourist visits during the first 11 months of 2013.
Because PM2.5 particles are very small in size, they can easily enter the body and interfere with the functioning of the lungs.
They are also associated with increased rates of chronic bronchitis, lung cancer and heart diseases.
A World Bank report last year which surveyed 132 countries ranked India 126th for environmental performance and last for air pollution.
see also:
Why the US releases pollution data on Beijing but not Delhi.
Jan 29, 2014
NEW DELHI (AFP) - India's air monitoring centre denied on Wednesday that pollution in New Delhi was worse than in Beijing, following scrutiny of the Indian capital's winter smog, which shrouds the city each year.
A report in the New York Times last week and fresh research by scientists at Yale University suggested Delhi's air was more harmful than Beijing's, where concerns about the health impact of pollution are growing.
"I am amazed to read such reports because Delhi air quality, especially in winter, is very poor but certainly not as bad as in Beijing," Gufran Beig, from the state-run System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR), told AFP.
Yale's Global Environment Performance Index, a study of 178 countries released earlier this month, showed Delhi had the highest concentration of harmful small particles less than 2.5 micro meters in diameter (PM 2.5) followed by Beijing.
The New York Times meanwhile examined pollution figures collected from one monitoring centre in the first three weeks of this year, which found on average the daily peak figure over the period was 473 micrograms per cubic metre.
This was twice as high of an equivalent figure in Beijing, the newspaper said.
Beig said that a better measurement of Delhi's air would be the 24-hour average of PM2.5 pollution taken from nine air quality monitoring stations spread around the capital.
This showed that PM 2.5 never crossed 250 - although this is still 10 times the limit proposed by the World Health Organisation.
China's capital was shrouded in thick smog between January 16-18 with the count of small particulate pollution reaching 650, more than 25 times recommended levels.
Pollution in China has been linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths, and has tarnished the image of its cities including Beijing, which saw a 10 percent drop in tourist visits during the first 11 months of 2013.
Because PM2.5 particles are very small in size, they can easily enter the body and interfere with the functioning of the lungs.
They are also associated with increased rates of chronic bronchitis, lung cancer and heart diseases.
A World Bank report last year which surveyed 132 countries ranked India 126th for environmental performance and last for air pollution.
see also:
Why the US releases pollution data on Beijing but not Delhi.
Saturday, February 1, 2014
The triple package of success
Jan 31, 2014
Three cultural factors explain the success of ethnic and cultural minorities in American society: a belief that the group one belongs to is exceptional; a goading sense of inferiority; and impulse control.
By Amy Chua And Jed Rubenfeld
A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well.
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly US$90,000 or S$115,000 per year in median household income versus US$50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top jobs in many of the most recognisable US companies.
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 per cent of the adult population in the US, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.
Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents' socioeconomic or educational background.
Take New York City's selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders.
For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardised entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others - as measured by income, test scores and so on - is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
There are some black and Hispanic groups that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana and Haiti, are climbing America's higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians.
Nigerians make up less than 1 per cent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry.
Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence.Meanwhile, some Asian- American groups - Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example - are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
Most fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elites have been declining for decades.
In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 - including a 63-point edge over whites - a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
[There is a Chinese saying, that family fortunes are lost within three generations. This seems to support that saying.]
Three traits for success
IT TURNS out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in the United States today share three traits that, together, propel success.
The first is a superiority complex - a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite - insecurity, a feeling that you or what you've done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
It's odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it's precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control - the ability to resist temptation - and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
Ironically, each element of the triple package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America's most successful groups tells itself that it's exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are "gods in embryo" placed on Earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the historian Claudia Bushman's words, as "an island of morality in a sea of moral decay".
Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a Persian "superiority complex". At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the "chosen" people.
That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in US culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America's rising groups.
A central finding in a study of over 5,000 immigrants' children led by sociologist Ruben Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt "motivated to achieve" because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents' sacrifices.
By contrast, white American parents are found to be more focused on building children's social skills and self-esteem.
In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-Americans reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
Plus, being an outsider in a society - and America's most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another - is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life's precariousness to their children.
Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro's takeover reported seeing signs reading "No dogs, no Cubans" on apartment buildings. During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear presidential candidate Mitt Romney's clean-cut sons described as "creepy" in the media.
Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well.
Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don't live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children's happiness with excessive restraints or demands.
By contrast, every one of America's most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age - or at least they did so when they were on the rise.
In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the "longing to rise".
Flip side of success
BUT this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they're never good enough. "I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents," recalls the novelist Amy Tan. "It's a horrible feeling."
Recent studies suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide).
A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout history.
Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning - precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
The good news is that it's not some magic gene generating these groups' disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old "education culture" that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone. The way to develop this package of qualities - not that it's easy, or that everyone would want to - is through grit.
It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn't ethnically or religiously exclusive. It's the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
The US itself was born a triple package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America's animals were bigger than Europe's) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was America's superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fuelling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification. Thus the trials of recent years - the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China - have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
Those who talk of America's "decline" miss this crucial point. America has always been at its best when it has had to overcome adversity and prove its mettle on the world stage. For better and worse, it has that opportunity again today.
[There are 3 criteria for Success according to this article, and their upcoming book. So while Americans never lost their sense of "American Exceptionalism" and so their sense of superiority has always there, the authors suggest that their recent failures have brought "the return of insecurity".
However there is a third element in their hypothesis for success: impulse control.
I do not see that happening.]
The writers are professors at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise And Fall Of Cultural Groups in America.
Amy Chua is the author of the controversial book on parenting, Battle Hymn Of A Tiger Mother, published in 2001. Jed Rubenfeld is her husband.
This is excerpted from a longer article in the New York Times.
Three cultural factors explain the success of ethnic and cultural minorities in American society: a belief that the group one belongs to is exceptional; a goading sense of inferiority; and impulse control.
By Amy Chua And Jed Rubenfeld
A SEEMINGLY un-American fact about America today is that for some groups, much more than others, upward mobility and the American dream are alive and well.
Indian-Americans earn almost double the national figure (roughly US$90,000 or S$115,000 per year in median household income versus US$50,000). Iranian-, Lebanese- and Chinese-Americans are also top-earners. In the last 30 years, Mormons have become leaders of corporate America, holding top jobs in many of the most recognisable US companies.
Jewish success is the most historically fraught and the most broad-based. Although Jews make up only about 2 per cent of the adult population in the US, they account for a third of the current Supreme Court; over two-thirds of Tony Award-winning lyricists and composers; and about a third of American Nobel laureates.
Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents' socioeconomic or educational background.
Take New York City's selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders.
For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardised entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.
Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others - as measured by income, test scores and so on - is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.
There are some black and Hispanic groups that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana and Haiti, are climbing America's higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians.
Nigerians make up less than 1 per cent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry.
Cuban-Americans in Miami rose in one generation from widespread penury to relative affluence.Meanwhile, some Asian- American groups - Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example - are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.
Most fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elites have been declining for decades.
In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 - including a 63-point edge over whites - a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.
[There is a Chinese saying, that family fortunes are lost within three generations. This seems to support that saying.]
Three traits for success
IT TURNS out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in the United States today share three traits that, together, propel success.
The first is a superiority complex - a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite - insecurity, a feeling that you or what you've done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.
It's odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it's precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control - the ability to resist temptation - and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.
Ironically, each element of the triple package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.
We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America's most successful groups tells itself that it's exceptional in a deep sense. Mormons believe they are "gods in embryo" placed on Earth to lead the world to salvation; they see themselves, in the historian Claudia Bushman's words, as "an island of morality in a sea of moral decay".
Middle East experts and many Iranians explicitly refer to a Persian "superiority complex". At their first Passover Seders, most Jewish children hear that Jews are the "chosen" people.
That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in US culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America's rising groups.
A central finding in a study of over 5,000 immigrants' children led by sociologist Ruben Rumbaut was how frequently the kids felt "motivated to achieve" because of an acute sense of obligation to redeem their parents' sacrifices.
By contrast, white American parents are found to be more focused on building children's social skills and self-esteem.
In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-Americans reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.
Plus, being an outsider in a society - and America's most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another - is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life's precariousness to their children.
Cubans fleeing to Miami after Fidel Castro's takeover reported seeing signs reading "No dogs, no Cubans" on apartment buildings. During the 2012 election cycle, Mormons had to hear presidential candidate Mitt Romney's clean-cut sons described as "creepy" in the media.
Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well.
Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don't live in the moment. The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children's happiness with excessive restraints or demands.
By contrast, every one of America's most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age - or at least they did so when they were on the rise.
In isolation, each of these three qualities would be insufficient. Alone, a superiority complex is a recipe for complacency; mere insecurity could be crippling; impulse control can produce asceticism. Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the "longing to rise".
Flip side of success
BUT this success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they're never good enough. "I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents," recalls the novelist Amy Tan. "It's a horrible feeling."
Recent studies suggest that Asian-American youth have greater rates of stress (but, despite media reports to the contrary, lower rates of suicide).
A superiority complex can be even more invidious. Group supremacy claims have been a source of oppression, war and genocide throughout history.
Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning - precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.
The good news is that it's not some magic gene generating these groups' disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old "education culture" that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone. The way to develop this package of qualities - not that it's easy, or that everyone would want to - is through grit.
It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn't ethnically or religiously exclusive. It's the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.
The US itself was born a triple package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America's animals were bigger than Europe's) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.
But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was America's superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fuelling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification. Thus the trials of recent years - the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China - have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.
Those who talk of America's "decline" miss this crucial point. America has always been at its best when it has had to overcome adversity and prove its mettle on the world stage. For better and worse, it has that opportunity again today.
[There are 3 criteria for Success according to this article, and their upcoming book. So while Americans never lost their sense of "American Exceptionalism" and so their sense of superiority has always there, the authors suggest that their recent failures have brought "the return of insecurity".
However there is a third element in their hypothesis for success: impulse control.
I do not see that happening.]
The writers are professors at Yale Law School and the authors of the forthcoming book The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise And Fall Of Cultural Groups in America.
Amy Chua is the author of the controversial book on parenting, Battle Hymn Of A Tiger Mother, published in 2001. Jed Rubenfeld is her husband.
This is excerpted from a longer article in the New York Times.
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