I oso feel tht poverty among mlys in Spore is mainly due to lack of OPPORTUNITIES..e govt allows job discriptions to blatantly announce MANDARIN speaking only..who noes in e future, when more new gen of mlys can speak Chinese, then job descriptions wl b CHINESE only..

There is no ethnic-group by age by education breakdown, so we won’t know what you observe in terms of young Malay “underclass” having bigger family sizes is generally true. My own observation is that this may be true, but again, the problem of underachievement cuts across the board in the community and is not simply restricted to the “underclass” you keep talking about. As I mentioned, the vast majority of Malays (based on many statistics including TFR) and even uneducated ones, do not have as large family sizes as you think, yet the community as a whole is lagging quite substantially in many socio-economic and educational parameters. Long story short: even if you make the Malay ‘underclass’ have no children (LKY’s dream), overall, the Malays will still have tertiary education rates, mean and median incomes, etc. that are vastly lower than the national rates.

I think there is a big danger for comfortable, middle class folks out of both sympathy and self-deceit to think the problem of averages is with the “others”, the extreme tails or “underclass” because it is not. The problem is with the very people who claim they are trying to help the “underclass”. Appended is what I wrote to the Straits Times last year and hope you find it useful.

———————————————————-
Malay middle class, not the poor, must buck up

YAYASAN Mendaki, the self-help group for the Malay/Muslim community, recently conducted a seminar on ways to curb the growing income gap between the Malays and the other races.
According to news reports, the participants lamented over how the Malays are not taking advantage of retraining and upgrading programmes by Mendaki and other bodies which target mostly the lower income groups and the lesser-skilled.

But is the growing income gap between races explained by the lower income group? The statistics question current wisdom.

The income gap between races is widening at a much faster rate for average income than for median income whether by households or by individuals.

The latest Population Census of 2000 data confirms this.

The proportion of Malay households earning less than $1,000 per month has declined by 4.7 percentage points from 1990 to 2000. This is greater than the national drop of 3.4 percentage points.

But the rise in proportion of Malay households in the higher income brackets, that is, those earning $4,000 or more monthly, lags behind the national rise (16.6 percentage points versus 21.7). This disparity in upward mobility across races gets even wider as one goes up the income ladder.

The implication is clear: Poor Malays are closing the gap but the middle- and the upper-income Malays are not competitive and mobile enough to close the gap with the other races.

This, of course, does not mean we should now provide financial subsidies for the middle- and upper-class to get richer.

What it does mean, however, is that while we should still be helping the poor, the Malay community should stop identifying poor Malays as the source of the ethnic income gap and blaming them for not upgrading themselves.

Middle-class guilt and comfort have convinced the more educated Malays that the poor Malays should be the target group.

In fact, what is contributing to the income gap among the races is the lack of upward mobility among the comfortable and complacent Malay middle-class.

Future discussions should highlight this fact.

The middle-class should explore ways to help lift themselves and the community. For example, although more Malays are receiving a university education, disproportionately fewer are in growth areas of the economy such as life sciences research and finance.

For a start, we should motivate the Malay middle-class to upgrade themselves and explore new and exciting growth areas

Sorry for getting back to you late.

Crossed lagged correlations does help to tell a better story than ordinary correlations, but still, one cannot eliminate intervening variables that could be causing the correlation, so ultimately it’s still not possible to be certain that something is the cause of an effect through correlations, although your point is well-taken and I do agree that addressing poverty is definitely something that needs to be done, but I’m still going to stick to my guns on the point that getting the Malay-Muslim underclass out of the poverty cycle is going to be very difficult without a corresponding decrease in their family sizes due to the simple reason of scarcity.

As for statistics, sure, I’m definitely not as knowledgeable as you are, and I need to read them up. However, I think you need to beware the statistics you are quoting on Chinese family sizes. I don’t know if there’s a breakdown of family sizes by age, but if there is, I have a feeling that the young Chinese underclass have substantially smaller sizes that the young Malay-Muslim underclass. I qualify that I base my comment on casual observation, and I’m willing to stand corrected as always.

Regarding football and motorbikes, I’ve already stated that these are my personal observations, but I should have added “non-scientific” to be more precise. Of course I don’t believe that all Malays do nothing but that. I know enough capable Malays to not blindside myself.

Apparently there is something else that places some families in socio-economic-backwardness-large-families.

Some run fast, some walk slow.
The fast look forward to what’s ahead (and may speed into the wrong place).
The slow appreciates what has been given to them (by the Creator) but lagged too far behind that they’ve become “backward”.

But all these are just ape’s personal views without any facts or statistics or research or studies to support and validate. :p

In any case, I think you’re basing your conclusions on gut feeling/anecdotes instead of actual stats. Even the “underclass” may not have as large a family size as you think. For example, 40% of Malay females with below secondary education have 4 or more children, that’s just a little bit higher than the corresponding figure for the Indians and Chinese (~30%). And of course, in terms of absolute numbers, there are definitely many many more uneducated Chinese families with big families (All in the General Household Survey 2005, demographic trends tables). The majority of uneducated Malay families have your “ideal family size”, so the issue is not family size.

And about playing football and tweaking motorbikes, again, is that what you choose to see or is that reality? (: