Amy Chua’s paternal grandmother got rich opening factories in the Philippines. Her father, Leon Chua, Professor of Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley, inventor of Chua’s Circuit and the concept of the memristor (Hewlett-Packard is currently gearing up for mass production of them, four decades after he dreamed them up) has received nine honorary doctorates. Her mother, a chemical engineering major, was valedictorian of her college class in Manila. The author herself holds an endowed chair at the nation’s most intellectually elite law school, Yale.
Amy Chua’s first books was World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.
Amy coined the term “market-dominant minorities”—to describe groups like her own Overseas Chinese and Ashkenazis in Yeltsin’s Russia.
we [America] are one of the fairly small number of lucky countries with “market dominant majorities.” We can have our cake (capitalism) and eat it too (democracy) because our majority group is economically quite competence
Indonesia that has a market dominant minority of Chinese. The Chinese made up 3% of its vast population, yet owned the great majority of all businesses. The dictator Suharto, whose family had lucrative ties to the Chinese community, fell in 1998. Democratization set off a vicious pogrom against the Chinese, many of whom fled to Chinese-majority Singapore. The government expropriated $58 billion in assets.
Not surprisingly, the native Indonesians proved inept at running the businesses nationalized from the Chinese, and the economy collapsed.
After anti-Chinese riots in 1969, the Malaysian majority voted itself affirmative action at the expense of the Chinese. Chua considers this quota system a success. Malaysia has avoided subsequent violence.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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