Status Updates From From Third World to First: ...

As Taiwan rose in the economic league tables, Li set out to attract some of their best to return, those who had worked in top research laboratories and in the big electronic multinationals.

Comment : After a hate for Japan where he admits to having schadenfraude at their disasters, begins to have admiration to the point of praising yakuza at their reaction of a disaster. To me, this is a sign that he doesn’t understand the fragility of Japan and how they attack people after incurring massive cultural losses post world war 2.

The Soviets, however, were interested in Singapore because of its strategic location.

Until the Europeans settle on a common language, they cannot equal the uniformity and the benefits of scale that America enjoys. Every EU country teaches English as the second language. None is prepared to give up its language for English or any other language.

It was not until the mid-1980s, when a socialist President Mitterrand and his Gaullist prime minister, Jacques Chiraq, both decided that Africa was not as ready for development as Asia, that my efforts came to fruition.

Desai .. had a dry sense of humor and capacious memory, but some unusual ideas. In December 1978, in the car taking us from Delhi airport to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, he said thousands of years ago Indians had made a space journey and visited the planets, which the Americans were then doing.

By 1995, Singapore’s per capita GDP of US$26000 had surpassed Britain’s US$19700. Our workers earned more than the British workers. They also owned their own homes and had more savings( in Central Provident Fund and POSBank accounts) than the British workers. — The calamity of believing in GDP as a true measure of success, Singapore lost its culture and landscape advantage by trusting this measure