The Dilemma of Parents Educating Children in Developing Nations

http://hsudarren.wordpress.com linked to an interesting dilemma:

The dilemma of Chinese, Indian parents
Dr Hsu Dar Ren | Apr 9, 07 4:20pm

Many Malaysian parents, mainly the non-bumiputeras, have a dilemma regarding their children’s education and future. I just met a friend who has this to tell me. He is an engineer earning a decent living but not really rich. He has two children, and he is grateful that he has only two. The eldest is a son who has just finished his studies in engineering in Australia. The second one is a daughter who has just gone to Australia to study business management.

His dilemma is this. He had no choice but to send his son overseas in order to provide him with a good education and at the same time to broaden his perspective. He could have asked his son to study locally but the problem was that his son might not be given the course of his choice since majority of places for medicine and engineering courses are reserved for bumiputera students.

My friend had to work very hard and had to be very thrifty in order to save to send his children overseas. And he is now near retirement age. He wants his son to come back Malaysia to work but he fears that his son may not get a good job and the prospect of promotions may be limited.

So he asked me what to do. I told him this is the dilemma faced by many, many Chinese and Indian Malaysian parents. Who doesn’t want their children to be around them? But at the same time, if the children don’t good job prospects here, what would the parents do?

They would want the children to have the best chances and do something that they are happy with. And that means letting their children work overseas where the employment prospects are better, and where work satisfaction and upward mobility also better.

I asked my friend, ‘Why don’t you join your son Down Under?’ He answered that he loves Malaysia, he was born and bred here, his friends and relatives are all here, and his business is also here. He would feel out of place and it would not be easy for a middle-aged man to start his network and friends all over again in a foreign country.

What can we do about this? When a citizen’s child studies overseas, we lose precious foreign exchange and this is no small sum as an overseas education runs into hundreds of thousands of ringgit for each student. Over the years, how many Malaysians have gone overseas to study? One hundred thousand? Half a million? One million? I don’t have the figure. But Malaysian used to be the biggest group of foreign students in Australia, the UK, etc. How much money was lost?

And how many of these did not come back? I have so many classmates working as consultants in the UK, Singapore and Australia that I have lost count. This is ‘brain drain’ and ‘brain loss’. Human capital is now recognised as the most important asset in this flattening world. Many of these who stay abroad become very famous scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc. How much ‘brain’ was lost? No one can quantify that.

Who knows, Malaysia would have become a First World country by now if we had all these brains realising their potential locally. Everyone, both bumi and non-bumi, would have benefitted more by now. How about the human cost? How many families were separated? How many parents died a lonely death because their children were overseas?

The lists go on and the dilemma is getting more acute. We should in fact be more farsighted. Intake for local tertiary education should be based on merit, with maybe a small proportion reserved for socially-handicapped people. For those studying overseas, try to lure them back, place them in GLCs such as Petronas, TNB, Telekom and government departments and let their promotion be based on merit.

That way, these companies can be much more successful, the country be more prosperous and there will be that much more job prospects. In turn, the economic cake grows bigger and we then have a bigger capacity to offer affirmative action for the less-advantaged groups. By being farsighted, we will be rewarded with every ethnic group getting a bigger share of the economy.

http://www.malaysiakini.com/letters/65682

The Graying of the Great Powers

Major Findings: The Geopolitical Implications
􀂃 The population and GDP of the developed world will steadily shrink as a share of the
world’s total. In tandem, the global influence of the developed world will likely decline.
􀂃 The population and GDP of the United States will steadily expand as a share of the
developed world’s total. In tandem, the influence of the United States in the developed
world will likely rise.
􀂃 Most nations in sub-Saharan Africa and some nations in the Arab world and non-
Arab Muslim Asia will possess large ongoing youth bulges that could render many of
them chronically unstable until at least the 2030s.
􀂃 Many nations in North Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the
former Soviet bloc—including China, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan—are now
experiencing a rapid or extreme demographic transition that could push them toward
civil collapse, or (in reaction) toward “neo-authoritarianism.”
􀂃 Ethnic and religious conflict will continue to be a growing security challenge both in the
developing and developed world.
􀂃 Throughout the world, the 2020s will likely emerge as a decade of maximum
geopolitical danger.
􀂃 The aging developed countries will face chronic shortages in young-adult manpower—
posing challenges both for their economies and their security forces.
􀂃 An aging developed world may lose its reputation for innovation and boldness—and
struggle to remain culturally attractive and politically relevant to younger societies.

link

Assault of the poor as commercial entertainment

And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China’s new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu’s capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag. Men “are under too much pressure,” Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. “They need a way to release it.”

From the comments on the same page:

Back in 1998 when I was teaching in Shanghai at a key High School, I mentioned this disparity between boys and girls, saying in my slow and careful English that there were 110 boys for every 100 girls. I asked one boy student what he intended to do about it, hoping to elicit that he would work hard, study hard, and be a good man in order to attract a girl in the future. Instead he simply told me that he would kill 10 men. Honest to God true story.

http://www.tnr.com/story.html?id=06d65840-0997-482e-a84d-b09b61a7b0e5&p=2

A good but flawed analysis of patriarchy, polygamy, and monogamy

Some patriarchal societies developed monogamy; others developed polygamy. Both types of patriarchy differ from primitive promiscuity, which incidentally seems to have been more popular in warmer climates.

These reservations aside, one can overlook some of the flaws of “The Garbage Generation,” a book about why patriarchy of some kind is necessary to civilization.
http://www.fisheaters.com/garbagegeneration.html

The Code of Hammurabi [continues Dr. Lerner] marks the beginning of the institutionalization of the patriarchal family as an aspect of state power. It reflects a class society in which women’s status depended on the male family head’s social status and property. The wife of an impoverished burgher could by a change of his status, without her volition or action, be turned from a respectable woman into a debt slave or a prostitute. On the other hand, a married woman’s sexual behavior, such as adultery or an unmarried woman’s loss of chastity, could declass her in a way in which no man could be declassed by his sexual activity.

Her status depended upon his status. Therefore she was motivated to make him achieve high status. And the success of the system in generating male overachievers who create wealth, social stability and progress–all beneficial to women–proves the arrangement to be desirable. Women would not have accepted it unless its benefits were greater than those offered by matriarchy. The wife of an impoverished burgher could have been de-classed by her husband’s behavior, but she chose to be his wife because through marriage her status and income were more likely to be raised than lowered. This is the way the patriarchal system works, and it benefits everyone. It gives men motivation, makes them productive and thus helps their wives and children. It puts sex to work as a motivator, focusing on long-term (family) arrangements rather than on short term sexuality–promiscuity, the first law of matriarchy. “Society asks so little of women,” says Betty Friedan. But that little must include the chastity and loyalty which makes patriarchal fatherhood and legitimate children possible.

It would be interesting to work out the differences with (e.g.) Chinese and Hindu royal polygamy. Possibly polygamy (limited to the very rich) is a survival from transitional times between matriarchy and patriarchy.

Real-Life Retroculture is not as vigorous as Lind’s fictional visions

William S. Lind wrote a fiction piece in the 1995 Washington Post that offered an extremely optimistic view of “Retroculture.”

But it was what happened on the cultural front that really made the difference for us. The Retroculture Movement had been growing quietly since the mid-1990s. It wasn’t political, just individuals and families deciding to live again in the old ways. …
The family was the first Victorian institution to make a comeback….

The schools came next. …
We deconstructed most of the universities. …
Christians took back their churches from the agnostic clergy, and the pews filled up again. ….

As the Victorian spirit spread, standards were revived. Communities decided that some things were acceptable and some weren’t. Crime wasn’t; with justice locally controlled and the lawyers digging potatoes, somebody who mugged on Tuesday hanged on Wednesday.

Entertainment was expected to be decent. In a world that had grown ugly enough, there was small desire for ugliness in art and music as well. The Victorian entertainments were revived, and young people in particular went in heavily for choral singing. The last rock concert was held in 2013 in the Cleveland arena. It featured all the big rock bands lift in North America and most of the remaining rock fans too. The Greater Cleveland Garden Club sealed the doors and pumped in a herbal compound, derived largely from Queen Anne’s lace and Viola odorata, that rectified brain damage in the cranial region connecting hearing to taste. The fans were soon holding their ears and whistling “Dixie,” and the ancient Rolling Stones ended up improvising Albinoni on their electrical guitars.

I write this from the real world of 2008. American rock concerts are not likely to stop in five years.

What are the real problems of Retroculture?

H.G. Wells and M. Sanger versus T. Kaczynski

Totalitarians are dangerous, but they are not as clever as their opponents fear them to be.

H.G. Wells wrote an introduction to Sanger’s Pivot of Civilization, including the passage:
“The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: “We cannot go on making power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must stop waving flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”

H.G. Wells was clever, but not nearly as clever as he thought himself to be.

H.G. Wells did not fathom the tremendously contagious, self-sustaining, spontaneously spreading power of hatred. Humans can hate each other for any reason, or for no reason at all. Seemingly rational, progressive, civilized humans can suddenly generate full-blown hatreds of their fellow humans.

We might very well abolish nationalist governments in order to enjoy a Hobbesian war of All against All, rather than a utopian World Peace.

And even if World Peace were established — even if the frightening masculine culture of Patriarchy were to be abolished — even if we were all forced to be politically correct and vegan — a single super-empowered individual, with the ethics of Kaczynski and a DNA sequencer, could unleash a plague that would throw everything into confusion.

I owe Fabius Maximus some serious research

Blogging can be done on a strict time-budget — but one is often tempted to do on-the-spot research, leading to time overruns.

Long story short, I’ve got about ten posts researched and ready to rip, I just need to get my notes posted.

However, as I have been preparing those posts, Fabius Maximus has raised some questions about my unsupported claims — so now I have to budget some time to write up the evidence that supports those claims.

What if the Christian Men “Go Their Own Way” and the Muslim Men Don’t?

Quite a few websites are dedicated to Men’s Rights, the marriage strike, “Men Going Their Own Way.”

Examples:

http://menforjustice.net/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=4

http://outcastsuperstar.blogspot.com/

This would seem to imply demographic collapse. Currently the post-Christian West has a lot of illegitimate and abused children. In ten years it may simply have very few children at all.

Further, post-Christian men frequently cite the injustice of divorce laws — i.e. the illegitimate priorities of their governments — as a decisive factor. Probably most disengaged men will not become violent radicals, but probably most of them will have little genuine respect for governments.

One obvious temptation is to revert to a more primitive state of affairs and reinstate a culture of Wild West violence. If public safety were only guaranteed to the armed, divorce lawyers would become an endangered species, but Western Civilization might well be swamped by the ankle-deep rivers of blood.

Regardless of whether domestic fury and fierce civil strife cumber all the parts of the post-Christian West — what happens if post-Christian men “go their own way” and Muslim men remain faithful to the goal of heading a patriarchal family, impregnating a faithful wife, and raising several children?

Would that constitute the collapse of Christendom?