The Online Citizen A Community of Singaporeans
From Tech Crunch:
It’s hard to find any corner of chaos in Singapore. The system is engineered with one outcome, Chan says: “Making people good economic units for society.” Is there room for a high-beta version of good economic units of society– one that could succeed disproportionately or fail disproportionately in a culture so tied to obediance? The big “what’s-wrong-with-youth-today?” scandal of late has been kids getting out of school and taking all the tables up at Starbucks with their endless studying.
Lily Chan, CEO of the National University of Singapore’s Enterprise program, thinks it’ll take generations for Singapore to truly develop a culture of entrepreneurship– and she blames the parents. In a place replete with accountant and banker jobs, where buying a house is more expensive than most places in the United States the pressure not to waste your time building something speculative is high.
There’s also another problem: One employer has optimized the system to find and make lucrative offers to the smartest kids in the system– that’s right, the Government. People who could have made the country’s top entrepreneurs instead make comfortable salaries trying to craft policy to encourage people to be entrepreneurs.
Read the rest of the article here.