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it is your industrial capacity that determines your national strength,
China has a certain cohesiveness that India lacks. In India there are more than 400 indigenous languages,
India was never a single homogeneous entity. It was a concept thought up by the British.
One country gets things done. The other talks incessantly but seldom finds the will or ability to get up and go. India simply does not have the same push or the singleness of purpose that you see in China.
India would not have held together under a unitary system like China’s because of its disparateness.
At the macro level, the caste system freezes the genetic pool within each caste. Over many years, this has had an isolating impact on the overall intelligence of the people. In
the overall decline in caste consciousness is very marginal. It may take many more decades or centuries of gradual shifts before India can declare itself to be free from the influence of caste.
The country has developed a reputation for being inconvenient for investors because it does not have a solid infrastructure in place for doing business:
One, that democracy is no magic potion. It does not solve all problems for all peoples. China would not have got to where it is today if it had been run as a democracy. Two, that there are certain fundamental forces at work in societies – especially those with long histories – that do not change easily. India is trapped by the almost unchangeable realities of its internal composition and the persistent grip of the caste system.
they have to come at a pace that is politically digestible or there will be a significant backlash from the population,
we do not want the local culture or ethos to be significantly altered by a foreign one.
when a critical mass of immigrants is reached, there is often a desire in them to want to assert themselves and to remain distinct.
if the number is large enough, they may even be able to force changes onto the local culture. To
Each generation of immigrants, therefore, represents not a permanent fix to the underlying problem, but temporary relief. A never-ending stream of immigrants is required. What
This is a lifestyle change of a profound nature. The Germans are not reproducing themselves, so the Turks are coming in to do the jobs. None of the Asian Tigers are replacing themselves. Only the Americans are, but I think it’s the Latinos who are reproducing faster than the Whites.
What we see in many parts of the Middle East, however, are tribal or feudal systems.
The loyalty held by ordinary people is to the tribe – not to the nation, for no nation exists, and certainly not to fellow citizens.
They have refused to allow women to be educated equally and to become as productive as men in society – precisely what is needed for the potential of these countries to be unlocked and for their economies to become modernised.
passed on from one generation to the next since less-educated women tend to bring up less-educated children, as mothers spend much more time with their children than fathers do. A generation of well-educated mothers, by contrast, is bound to nurture a generation of young people with different attitudes and worldviews.
New democratic regimes cannot survive for long without delivering real economic progress.
They will allow for evolution. Change is inevitable.
how they can make themselves relevant to the world when their finite energy resources run out.
They will have to raise their game quickly and to find their competitive advantage in non-extractive industries,
considerable oil wealth tends to breed populations that believe the world owes them a living.
They will go, invest and extract resources. This is what they have been doing in Africa. They are building conference halls and palaces to generate goodwill so that they can get more oil and other primary resources.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the biggest problem plaguing the Middle East.
The Palestinian state must also be economically and politically viable. Its people must feel that they have a reasonable chance of making a success out of their country – only then will they have a vested interest in keeping the peace in this troubled region.
pro-Israel policy the Jewish lobby has succeeded in forging for America, a hard-line stance is allowed to prevail in the Israel leadership. This can have adverse and irreversible effects on the peace process. By building settlements in the occupied territories, for example, Israel is slowly but surely annexing land that presumably would be handed over to the Palestinians in any potential deal between the two sides.
They believe recovering the land is ordained by God, no less.
After the trauma of the Holocaust which saw six million Jews killed, European sympathy for the Jews was at its highest, and government policies swung to their advantage. With the decline of Britain as a superpower, however, the Americans have come in to fill the vacuum, and the state of Israel, formed in 1948, turned to America as its primary ally. America has continued to support Israel ever since.
Without the Americans putting pressure on Israel, there is no end in sight for the conflict.
All of this is doing America no good in the long run. It erodes the superpower’s overall credibility and roils up the whole Arab world against the Americans.
It is like a cancer in the international system which, if removed, would pave the way for the resolution of many other problems.
Israeli-Palestinian peace is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for a wider peace in the Middle East. If
The Iranian government has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the destruction of the state of Israel. The
Iran appears to be keen on developing nuclear weapons and could conceivably trigger a nuclear war,
If Iran obtains a nuclear bomb, Egypt would also want one – and they may well get one from Pakistan. That would lead to a very precarious position in the Middle East, with four nuclear powers – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran.
We could see the first use of nuclear weapons since the Second World War in this region.
Have you got that kind of cool-headed thought processes between Israel, Iran and Egypt? That
We are talking about a system that produces suicide bombers
Dubai especially is proving intense competition for Singapore in such industries as aviation, tourism, finance and conventions.
United Arab Emirates are prepared to spend a great deal of money developing the city into a hub that will rival what we are trying to do in Singapore.
Their airlines have been known to intentionally price their tickets slightly cheaper than Singapore Airlines (SIA). Amid the financial crisis, Emirates Airlines ordered 32 Airbus A380s in a demonstration of how cash-rich it was. When all their orders are delivered, Emirates looks set to have over 90 A380s on its fleet. SIA, by comparison, has just 19 A380s at present and five more on order.
The US is able to carry out quantitative easing because its dollar happens to be the world’s reserve currency.
The Americans can borrow at more favourable interest rates because of a greater willingness by people elsewhere to hold cash reserves and assets in US dollars. That is the advantage of being the reserve currency.
moving back to the gold standard because he could see the unfairness of a system based on the US dollar.
So long as the Chinese require enormous quantities of resources – iron, coal and others – to keep their economy going, it will push up the Australian dollar, because
Brazil, a major producer of soya beans. The Chinese require so much soya beans that they have gone to Brazil.
The Chinese have lived through natural disasters, wars and great uncertainty, when the individual or the family had to be self-reliant, falling back on whatever had been saved up during the good times. It will not be easy to convince them to become free spenders.
The drive to pay these individuals very high salaries therefore becomes impossible for companies to resist if they want to retain them.
