SLOW Movement

NY Times: Pancakes, Prosperity, Peace

January 5, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

Pancakes, Prosperity, Peace

By ROGER COHEN

HOI AN, VIETNAM — After the war and failed flight overseas, after her father’s persecution and the knowledge of hunger, it was the miracle of the crispy pancake that changed things for Trinh Diem Vy.

That pancakes save lives is not sufficiently known. That Vy’s family pancake — a savory rice-flour creation turned a warm yellow by turmeric and stuffed with shrimp, pork, bean sprouts, star fruit, mixed herbs, green banana — can reconcile a war-ravaged nation like Vietnam is a truth this woman has lived.

Hurt still inhabits her eyes. Vy’s father worked with U.S. forces during the war. When America lost, retribution came for him in the form of Communist “re-education.” Unable to put food on the table, he would bang his head against the wall in frustration. Attempts to flee in 1975 and 1978 failed.

“The second time we got as far as a fishing village and there was this woman with blackened teeth, spooky-looking,” Vy tells me. “She offered us clams in a broth with sweet potatoes, and I did not want to eat it but my mother made me. And the comfort of it spread through me. I guess I learned early that when I feel a deep stress, the only place that brings me back is the kitchen.”

It was a quiet morning in Hoi An on the central Vietnamese coast, a scent of lemon basil in the air. Old folk were dusting porches with brooms of bound thatch.

Just up the coast, at Da Nang, the first American marines landed in 1965, and the war soon escalated. Vy smiles at me: “During the hunger, I understood that food was life. Now I look at all the fresh ingredients and it brings back my energy.”

I’m a big believer in the stress-dissipating, difference-bridging kitchen. Nothing dissolves angst as fast as culinary creation. I look forward to the first Israeli-Palestinian food festival and the inaugural Indian-Pakistani gastronomic fair. Visceral enemies betray themselves in the similarity of their foods. We know from the Bible how blood brothers slay each other.

Vy, now 40, saw all the killing as a child. She knows the millions of dead beneath the shimmering green of the rice paddies. She saw how the collectivization of the Communist victors could keep rice from tables. Survival, she understood, comes first; then comes the rest.

The rest began with that crisp pancake, the signature dish of the tiny restaurant her family opened in 1980. From the first, it was about balance of taste and texture. For Vy, there are five essential elements of taste — sweet, sour, hot, bitter and salty. But they demand the five elements of texture: crispy, crunchy, chewy, soft and silky. In their marriage lies the harmony that reconciles.

Locals came. They chewed and talked. So did occasional visitors. The yin-yang pancake was deemed good. Former foes agreed on that.

Vy liked the feel in her hands of the mangos blotchy from the sun, the coarse-skinned pomelos, the turmeric root gnarled as ginger, the crinkly rice paper and crisp-stemmed morning glory. She mused on her future — and took a practical romantic step.

He was from the North, of “clean background,” and so he opened party-controlled doors. “My husband gave me space, I was able to do things,” she says. Was it a loveless marriage? “Let’s say we are modern friends.”

So it was that the daughter of a man who fought with the Americans married into a family that fought against the United States: of such compromises has Vietnam’s fast-growing prosperity been built. And so it was that Vy got authorization to open her own restaurant, “Mermaid,” in 1990, about the time that the Communists were deciding socialism was really whatever made the people happy.

Vy now has four restaurants. She’s a successful entrepreneur in a country where communism is capitalism. She dreams of the quiet life but “is riding the tiger” for now.

That takes balance, which is what her food is about. She explains texture. A pear or bean sprout is crunchy. Deep-fried is crispy. Chewy is, well, Vietnamese meat. Good rice is soft and silky. American food, by contrast, tends toward uniformity of texture and instant, illusory satisfaction.

Vietnam induces wonder. All the French blood, American blood, Vietnamese blood, the decades of war, has been conjured away. Nations where women are succeeding and compromise is prized are capable of that. Vy has balanced out the past. Women do that a lot better than men.

She worries about the speed of development now, tells me “we are selling the young rice” (a Vietnamese metaphor for being impatient), losing the life of the spirit to globalized material things. Prospective daughters-in-law need no longer prove their worth by preparing a good “pho” — the national broth. “People want shortcuts, but in cooking there are no short cuts,” she says.

With that Vy offers me a wonderful banh mi op la, that marriage of the French baguette, eggs, chili, fresh herbs and spices that in itself seems almost worth a colonial war. The banh mi is an act of balance like Vy’s inspiring life.

Copyright 2010

NY Times: Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

December 26, 2009

Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

By STEFANIE OLSEN

When Benjamin Feshbach was 11 years old, he was given a brainteaser: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?

Benjamin, now 13, said he typed the question directly into the Google search box, to no avail. He then tried Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com, also without success. “Later someone told me it was a multistep question,” said Benjamin, a seventh grader from North Potomac, Md.

“Now it seems quite obvious because I’m older,” he said. “But, eventually, I gave up. I didn’t think the answer was important enough to be on Google.” Benjamin is one of 83 children, ages 7, 9 and 11, who participated in a study on children and keyword searching. Sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, the research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information.

Like other children, Benjamin was frustrated by his lack of search skills or, depending on your view, the limits of search engines.

When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools.

Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.

“We’re giving them a tool that was made for adults,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a nonprofit research center in New York focused on digital education for children. Allison Druin, director of the human-computer interaction lab at the University of Maryland, suggested expanding the concept of keywords. Instead of typing a word into a search box, children could click on an image or video, which would turn up results.

Ms. Druin said that parents played a big role in helping children search. She proposed that search engines imitate that role by adding technology aids, like prominent suggestions for related content or an automated chat system, to help children when they get stuck.

Children’s choices of search engines differ only slightly from the preferences of adults. Google ranks most popular among children, followed by Yahoo, Google Image search, Microsoft’s Bing and Ask.com, according to the research firm Nielsen. (Among adults, Bing is ahead of Google Image.)

Irene Au, Google’s director of user experience, said that rather than develop a specific product for children, her team used research findings to inform how it could improve search for all ages. “The problems that kids have with search are probably the problems adults experience, just magnified,” Ms. Au said. “It’s helped highlight the areas we need to focus on.”

For example, Google has long known that it can be difficult for users to formulate the right keywords to call up their desired results. But that task can be even more challenging for children, given that they do not always have the right context for thinking about a new subject. One 12-year-old boy searching for information about Costa Rica used the search term “sweaty clothes” because that was what he associated with the jungle.

“If we can solve that for children we can solve that for adults,” Ms. Au said.

One way Google aims to overcome that problem is by showing related searches. Ms. Au said Google had tried various placements since related searches were introduced in 2007 and had found that it could be helpful to introduce such queries — or other content like video, images or news — at the bottom of the page.

A search on the word dolphins, for example, shows a set of related searches, (sharks, bottlenose dolphins) and two YouTube videos of dolphins at play. Ms. Druin called the bottom of the screen “valuable territory” because children often focus on their hands and the keyboard when they search and see that space first when they glance up.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May. “My daughter who’s 5, her typing skills aren’t great, but she can browse images of various dog breeds through visual search,” Mr. Weitz said.

In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel.

Children also tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent.

In September, Google also increased the length of its search box and the size of its font for related searches. Google said the change was meant to enhance ease of use for everyone.

Future trends in search may also be helpful to children. The move toward voice-activated search like the Google voice search on iPhones and Android phones and audio and video search will prove beneficial to children with limited abilities, experts say.

Benjamin Feshbach, who’s now considered a power searcher, has his own ideas.

“I think there should be a program where Google asks kids questions about what they’re searching for,” he said, “like a Google robot.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: The FT seasonal appeal - Room to Read

The FT seasonal appeal: Room to Read

By David Pilling

Published: November 27 2009 16:58 | Last updated: November 27 2009 16:58

Asha studies on the floor of her bedroom

It was during the 1999 Maghi festival, whose revelries grip western Nepal in mid-January each year, that Asha Tharu’s parents sold her. Asha, who was then five years old, fetched $40. In return for the money, Asha was sent to work for a year as a bonded labourer at the house of her new owner in Gularia, a town near her village of Khairapur.

“I had to get up very early and I had to clean the pots, clean the rooms and wash the clothes,” recalls Asha, now a bright 15-year-old. “I worked all day and I didn’t get enough sleep.”

I have come along jolting, unmade roads from Nepalgunj in western Nepal to meet Asha at her sister-in-law’s hut, a rather beautiful dwelling of unbaked mustard-yellow bricks, more African in appearance than Asian. In the main living area are two large, exquisitely fashioned mud urns built into the walls for storing rice. In the unfurnished room where the family sleeps, Asha sits on the dirt floor and tells me about her new life. She says she is happy in school and that, on the weekends, she works in a brick factory, earning $1.30 for an eight-hour shift. That is enough to buy rice and to help her elder sister pay for school.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

More than anything, Asha remembers the petty slights she endured during her eight years of servitude, which ended last year when her “master” agreed to release her. “They would give me scraps. I used to feel very hurt by that, receiving the left-overs of guests or the elder family,” she says, glancing occasionally at the dusty ground outside the mud hut where she now lives. “Sometimes I’d get rotten food, or half-stomach food, not enough to stop my hunger,” she says. “They would hit me or shout at me if I dared complain.”

Until she was freed, Asha, an extraordinary young woman with beatific self-composure and a dazzling smile, was a so-called Kamlari girl. The Kamlari system, an extension of a wider caste-based practice of adult bonded labour, is a form of indentured servitude that persists even today on the flat plains of western Nepal, a world away from the beauty of the mountain peaks that draw tourists to this Himalayan republic.

“Bonded labourers work as housemaids or on farms,” says Reema Shrestha of Room to Read, the educational charity that, as part of its work in several poor countries, helps Nepal’s former Kamlari girls return to school. Room to Read, which the Financial Times is supporting in this year’s seasonal appeal, provides counselling and extra tuition designed to help the girls slot back into the educational system from which they have been excluded. It then supports them to ensure they don’t fall behind or, worse, slip back into the world of indentured labour. Those unfortunate enough to remain Kamlari are virtually assured a life of illiteracy and poverty. “Sometimes they are trafficked across the border into India and into the sex industry,” says Shrestha, who runs Room to Read’s education programme for girls in Nepal.

Asha prepares some food for her family

The Kamlari system is, theoretically, illegal but every year, during the Maghi revelries, parents continue to strike contracts to place their daughters in servitude for an annual fee of as little as $30. Most families don’t see their child again until the following Maghi festival when contracts are renewed or renegotiated.

Many parents have little choice since the owners of the fields where they live and work as sharecroppers threaten to turf them off the land, and into certain penury, if they do not comply.

“Some send their daughters because it is tradition,” says Shrestha. “They don’t think of it as a shameful thing.” If they are struggling to keep children fed at home, parents fool themselves into believing that a more prosperous master will give their daughters better food and, perhaps, even send them to school. It almost never works out that way.

While Asha was in servitude she went to school sporadically, if at all. Some of her masters kept her locked up. Others made her sleep outside. Occasionally she was enrolled in school but was rarely able to attend. “There wasn’t enough time to study because of all the housework,” she says. As much as the lack of tutoring, she regrets her lost childhood. “When I went to be a Kamlari, I didn’t get any time to play. I had only work. My master’s children went to school, but I had no one to play with.”

Now she does. Asha is attending classes thanks to a scholarship provided by Room to Read, which also builds schools and libraries. The scholarship pays for Asha’s school fees, textbooks, writing materials and her blue school uniform. Room to Read has so far helped some 800 of the estimated 20,000 Kamlari girls still forced to work in this part of Nepal. The charity runs specially created three- to nine-month catch-up courses to get the girls, many of whom have missed years of schooling, up to a minimum level. Asha is now studying in year seven, where most of the girls are 13, two years younger than her. But she is already excelling. With a flashing smile, and the assured style with which she relates both the tragedies and triumphs of her life, she says simply: “I find maths very easy. I am always the first to solve the problem.”

John Wood, 45, the founder of Room to Read, was a senior Microsoft director until he quit 10 years ago to start the charity. He says it is “ridiculously inexpensive” to place a girl such as Asha in school, an average of about $250 a year. When I catch up with him in Nepal, he has just been inspecting schools and libraries that his organisation built in the foothills of the Annapurna mountain range.

Tanned, unshaven and wearing khaki shorts – he forgot the FT was bringing a cameraman – he is clearly exhilarated by the progress he has seen since he established Room to Read.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Literacy is key to improving prospects for the poorest

The Financial Times is delighted to be launching the 2009 seasonal appeal to readers. It is in support of Room to Read, which provides educational opportunities for some of the world’s poorest people.

Room to Read builds schools and libraries, publishes local language children’s books and supports girls’ education in south and south-east Asia and southern Africa.

David Pilling, the FT’s Asia editor, has travelled across the region taking a close look at Room to Read’s operations.

Over the next few weeks, he will report on aspects of the charity’s work in the weekday paper, in Weekend FT and on FT.com, which will also feature video reports and audio slideshows.

An important feature of the appeal is that three partners – Barclays Capital, Atlassian and Credit Suisse – have agreed to match readers’ donations up to £600,000 ($984,000) in all. These generous pledges mean readers can support the appeal knowing that their contributions will go twice as far.

The seasonal appeal, which runs until mid-January, has raised nearly £2.4m over the past three years for WaterAid and Camfed International.

Room to Read was chosen for 2009 in a vote of FT staff around the world. The FT believes literacy and access to education form one of the most powerful tools for promoting economic development. John Ridding, our chief executive, is on Room to Read’s board. We hope this appeal will not only raise vital funds for its work but increase awareness of the role education plays in raising living standards among the world’s poorest.

Lionel Barber

It was during a break from his relentless work schedule at Microsoft, when he was in charge of business development for greater China, that Wood first went trekking in Nepal. He was struck by the lack of educational opportunities: libraries without books and classrooms without teachers. What began as his fantasy of bringing books by yak to an individual school – he ended up hauling them up the mountain by donkey – took on a life of its own. Before he knew it, he had left Microsoft to begin a professional charity.

He built Room to Read to last. It would only construct schools or libraries if local communities were on board, a commitment it measured by a willingness to “co-invest” in projects, either in cash, labour or building materials. Even the impoverished parents of Kamlari girls, sharecroppers and subsistence farmers all, are encouraged to find money to pay for the hair ribbons worn by girls to school. “If you simply give stuff away, it is not valued. Nobody ever washes a rental car,” he says, quoting Michael Porter of Harvard Business School.

Room to Read’s model has allowed the charity to grow exponentially. In Nepal, for example, it has already brought rudimentary libraries to one in 10 schools, and it is on its way to achieving the same in Laos, another of the impoverished countries it supports. In the past 10 years, says Wood, who puts a running tally of projects at the foot of every e-mail he sends, Room to Read has built more than 750 schools, established 7,000 libraries containing 5m books, and funded nearly 7,000 long-term scholarships for girls.

From its single-country origins – the charity was originally called Books for Nepal – it has expanded to eight other locations, including Cambodia, where schools, teachers and libraries were systematically destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, as well as Vietnam, Laos, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Zambia and South Africa.

I had travelled to western Nepal from Kathmandu on a small prop plane operated by Yeti Airlines. From Nepalgunj, a town clogged with rubbish and lined with fetid open sewers, we lurched along heavily potholed roads, avoiding lumbering buffalo carts and three-wheeled rickshaws crammed with children on their way to school. After a couple of hours, I visited Man Bahadur Chhetri, whose Friends of Needy Children organisation shares tiny offices with Room to Read in Gulariya.

As well as poverty and a lack of land title, which obliges people to work as vulnerable sharecroppers, Chhetri attributes the Kamlari practice to a culture that undervalues women. Of the bidding process during the Maghi festival, Chhetri says: “Everywhere, we saw landlords and middlemen convincing parents to sell their daughters. It was like an auction for animals.”

Chhetri’s organisation has championed Kamlari girls, gaining the release of around 6,000. To persuade sometimes reluctant parents to take their daughters back, his organisation offers them a goat or a piglet, which they can later sell. The animals are used instead of cash so the fathers can’t spend the money on alcohol, he points out ruefully.

“After we have rescued them, we hand them into the care of Room to Read,” he says. “Most of the girls are happy to go to school. They feel free.”

The Kamlari system is so ingrained that it is not easy for an organisation such as Room to Read to have any influence. Yet, by educating girls, Wood says he hopes to break the cycle, one child at a time. “Our goal is to help parents and communities recognise the long-term pay-off to educating their daughters instead of focusing on the short-term monetary benefits of selling them into bonded labour,” he told me.

At nightfall, I am still talking to Asha as she prepares the food for her sister-in-law, who has been working in the fields, and her nephew and nieces. Now dressed in a pink salwar kurta with red trousers, she is bent over an open wood fire cooking a local type of gourd. The rice is already prepared. Later, she will study – for several hours, she says – by the light of a naked bulb.

It is time to take my leave of this remarkable teenager. On my way out I notice a goat tethered in the corner of the room. It is only later that it occurs to me to check where the goat came from. Sure enough, it had been an inducement to Asha’s family to take her back. Properly reared, it will one day be worth at least $60. Asha, you’ll recall, was sold for $40.

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

To make a donation go to the Room to Read special page

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Let the little children be

Let the little children be

By Susie Boyt

Published: November 21 2009 00:53 | Last updated: November 21 2009 00:53

I was listening with half an ear to a radio phone-in about children and the “marshmallow test”. The marshmallow test, for those who don’t know, means giving a child the choice of one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in an hour or two. Children who choose to wait and double up, new findings have found, are more successful in later life – become truer capitalists or have worse teeth, or something.

The implication, of course, is that two marshmallows are always better than one. I don’t agree with this. If, during that two hours, the child’s head is so filled with doubling the marshmallow stocks that nothing else registers, what exactly has been gained? And aren’t we supposed to discourage our children from eating sweets anyway? It’s a rather dark trick, not on the scale of Abraham and Isaac obviously, but people are always subjecting children to things they wouldn’t dream of expecting adults to endure. If a fellow says, “You can’t have a cup of tea now but you can have two at midnight and that will show me you are a good person,” I would threaten a thump. I’m not even certain that delayed gratification is something that properly belongs to childhood. A childhood hour is quite a high proportion of the junior lifespan.

I hate any kind of system that seeks to break children in or mould them. I like kindness and enthusiasm, but I don’t try and rig it up scientifically. It’s a great mistake when people decide that childhood is a preparatory state, for it’s a quarter or a fifth of life and must be regarded, from the kick-off, as the real thing. When parenting becomes obsessed with instilling skills that will lead to money-making in adulthood, I worry.

I text in to the radio show the following message: “Hi, great show! I used to save my treasured Easter eggs from spring until Christmas, whereupon they developed a pale bloom and crumbled and had to be thrown away. Lesson: do not delay gratification for too long. Although I adore her beautiful and anarchic prose, I don’t want my children to become Anita Brookner.”

I sit back and wait eagerly for my bons mots to be read out on air. They are not. Talk about delayed gratification.

As I listen I am shocked to hear the expression “tough love” being used to describe the appropriate behaviour of parents who wish success for their offspring. It’s a vile phrase. Tough love, originally, was coined to describe a distancing system of treatment deemed suitable for families of drug addicts and alcoholics keen to preserve some semblance of sanity in that peculiarly chaotic world. Why this phrase has been high-jacked by parenting gurus I do not know, but it isn’t savoury.

Tough love, in addiction circles, means not covering up for the addict. It means letting them take the full consequences of their actions – not paying creditors, nor providing alibis, nor providing food or shelter or money while they are in the thrall of drugs. This is a system of behaviour quite controversial even in the drugs world. It often boils down to the statement that, “You are making choices that I cannot support so, for now, I choose not to have you in my life.” It is founded on the belief that with addiction, unlike every other kind of illness, it is the illness that grows lively and strong as you tend to the sufferer.

Is that any way to treat a child who fancies a sweet? Of course, I know no one is suggesting we treat children with the complicated moral and emotional defences with which we might handle an addict in the family. Tough love in this context probably means putting the boundaries in place that all sensible, coping parents do, so a child knows where it is. Yet there is something nasty, something mildly sadistic, about the term. It seeks to rebrand parenting as a battle in which we rational beings must arm ourselves against the little manipulative rascals at all times, for if we give them an inch they will take a mile. We must be cruel to be kind, while honing our children’s business acumen, apparently. And what next? Spare the rod and spoil the child? Advice from a parenting book from the 1930s I once read that said that, in order not to overexcite children at bedtime, cuddles should be eschewed in favour of a calm handshake?

Let’s keep the boardroom – and the marshmallows – out of the nursery.

susie.boyt@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/boyt

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea

November 29, 2009

Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea

By MARTIN FACKLER

YEONGGWANG, South Korea — Just a few years ago, the number of pregnant women in this city had declined so much that the sparsely equipped two-room maternity ward at Yeonggwang General Hospital was close to shutting down. But these days it is busy again.

More surprising than the fact of this miniature baby-boom is its composition: children of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the offspring of Korean fathers and mothers from China, Vietnam and other parts of Asia. These families have suddenly become so numerous that the nurses say they have had to learn how to say “push” in four languages.

It is a similar story across South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of foreign women have been immigrating in recent years, often in marriages arranged by brokers. They have been making up for a shortage of eligible Korean women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas like this one in the nation’s southwest.

Now, these unions are bearing large numbers of mixed children, confronting this proudly homogeneous nation with the difficult challenge of smoothly absorbing them.

South Korea is generally more open to ethnic diversity than other Asian nations with relatively small minority populations, like neighboring Japan. Nevertheless, it is far from welcoming to these children, who are widely known here pejoratively as Kosians, a compound of Korean and Asian.

“We bring these children into the world, but sometimes I worry,” said Kwak Ock-ja, 48, head maternity nurse at Yeonggwang General, where a third of the 132 births so far this year have been of children of mixed background, up from almost none a decade ago. “Prejudice against these families is something society must resolve.”

The surge in births of mixed children is the product of the similarly explosive growth here in marriages to foreigners, as a surplus of bachelors and the movement of eligible women to big cities like Seoul have increasingly driven Korean men in rural areas to seek brides in poorer parts of Asia. In addition, a preference for male babies has helped skew the population so there are fewer native-born women to marry. The Ministry of Public Security says the total number of children from what are called multicultural families in South Korea rose to 107,689 in May of this year from 58,007 last December, though the ministry said it might have slightly undercounted last year.

That is only about 1 percent of the approximately 12 million children in South Korea under the age of 19. But if marriages to foreigners continue to increase at their current rate — they accounted for 11 percent of all marriages here last year — more than one in nine children could be of mixed background by 2020, demographic researchers say.

The trend is even more pronounced in rural areas, where most of these marriages take place. Among farming households, 49 percent of all children will be multicultural by 2020, according to the Agricultural Ministry.

This increase is coming as South Korea’s overall birthrate has fallen to about 1.22 children per woman of child-bearing age, one of the world’s lowest rates. While many Koreans say they hope that the rising number of mixed children will help rejuvenate their rapidly graying society, they also say they fear that a failure to assimilate them could create the sort of poor, alienated underclass of ethnic minorities they see in the United States and Europe.

The increase has also begun to prompt a national soul-searching here about what it means to be Korean. While most of these children have Korean fathers and Korean citizenship, their dual ethnicity still gives them an uncertain status in a society where membership was long seen as being based on blood.

“The hard reality of our low birthrate is forcing us to realize that we can’t be homogeneous anymore,” said Park Hwa-seo, a professor of migration studies at Myongji University in Seoul. “It isn’t easy, but there is no turning back but to embrace these more diverse families.”

The increase of mixed-background children is so recent that relatively few have even reached elementary-school age. Still, signs of strain are already appearing.

According to the Education Ministry, the dropout rate of mixed-background children from elementary school is 15.4 percent, 22 times the national average. Part of the problem, social experts say, is the mothers’ lack of Korean-language skills, which prevents them from filling the expected social role of guiding children through the nation’s high-pressure education system.

Compounding the risk is the fact that most of the foreign women marry older farmers or manual laborers. Some 53 percent of mixed families live on earnings at or below the national minimum hourly wage of 4,000 won, or less than $3.50, according to the Welfare Ministry.

However, social experts say the biggest threat to the mixed children is that they will be ostracized in a society that began grappling with ethnic diversity only when labor shortages forced South Korea to accept foreign workers in the 1990s. The risk has been underscored by recent studies showing that the children of mixed marriages are more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse or bullying in school.

“I’m afraid we are already too late in responding,” said Suh Hae-jung, a researcher on gender equality at the government-financed Gyeonggido Family and Women’s Research Institute in Suwon. “On top of getting slighted for their color, their learning is also falling behind.”

Such concerns are quietly felt by Vicky Merano, 29, who came here from the Philippines six years ago to marry a Korean rice farmer 18 years her elder. Their 5-year-old daughter, Kim Da-som, does well in a local kindergarten, and on a recent evening she proudly showed off her ability to read the Korean language’s script and several Chinese characters.

Her father, Kim Hee-jong, beamed with pride and said that his relatives accepted the girl, including his parents, who share their 80-year-old tile-roofed farmhouse. Ms. Merano agreed but said she worried about what might happen as Da-som advanced beyond elementary school.

“Maybe if they don’t see me, they’ll just think my daughter is Korean,” Ms. Merano said.

The South Korean government says it has tried to respond quickly, opening 119 multicultural family support centers across the country in the past three years to offer help in education and vocational training.

The one in Yeonggwang, a small provincial city of 57,000 residents, opened in January. On a recent afternoon, its four small rooms were filled with Chinese, Thai and Filipino women learning to use computers and sewing machines while staff members watched their young children. Teachers also offered Korean-language classes to the mothers and children.

One woman, Edna Dela Cruz, said she preferred raising a family here because South Korea had better schools and a higher standard of living than the Philippines, where she was born. But she also worries about her 6-year-old son, who wants her to speak to him only in Korean so his classmates will not treat him as a pariah.

“Koreans tell me my child will be insulted because of me,” said Ms. Dela Cruz, 33, who married a local farmer.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

TIME: Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China

Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009

Five Things the U.S. Can Learn from China

By bill powell / shanghai

On the evening of Nov. 15, President Barack Obama, the youthful leader of one of the world's youngest countries, begins his first visit to China, among the world's most ancient societies. Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, have much to discuss. Nukes in Iran and North Korea. China's surging military spending. Trade imbalances. Climate change.

But the visit comes at an awkward moment for the U.S. China, despite its 5,000-year burden of history, has emerged as a dynamo of optimism, experimentation and growth. It has defied the global economic slump, and the sense that it's the world's ascendant power has never been stronger. The U.S., by contrast, seems suddenly older and frailer. America's national mood is still in a funk, its economy foundering, its red-vs.-blue politics as rancorous as ever. The U.S. may be one of the world's oldest capitalist countries and China one of the youngest, but you couldn't blame Obama if he leaned over to Hu at some point and asked, "What are you guys doing right?" (See pictures of people around the world watching Obama's Inauguration.)

Could the world's lone but weary superpower actually learn something from China? It's a politically incorrect question, of course. China is an authoritarian nation; its ruling Communist Party deals ruthlessly with any challenge to its hegemony. It remains, relatively speaking, a poor, developing country with huge problems to confront, massive corruption and environmental degradation being Nos. 1 and 1a. Still, this is a moment of humility for the U.S., and China is doing some important things right. If the U.S. were to ask the Chinese what it could learn from their example, it might gain some insight into what it's doing right and wrong. Here are five lessons from China's success story:

1. Be Ambitious
One day this summer, Sean Maloney, an executive vice president at Intel, was bouncing from one appointment to another in northeastern China, speeding along in a van traversing newly built highways. He gazed out at one of the world's biggest construction projects: a network of high-speed train lines — covering 10,000 miles (16,000 km) nationwide — that China is building. As far as the eye could see, there sat vast concrete support struts, one after another, exactly 246 ft. (75 m) apart. Each was full of steel cables and weighed about 800 tons. "We used to build stuff too," Maloney mused, unprompted. "But now it's NIMBY [not in my backyard] every time you try to do something. Here," he joked, "it's more like IMBY. There's stuff happening here, everywhere and always." (See pictures of the largest military parade in China's history.)

It's not just NIMBYism that constrains the U.S. these days, of course. America is close to tapped out financially, with budget deficits this year and next exceeding $1 trillion and forecast to remain above $500 billion through 2019. But sometimes the country seems tapped out in terms of vision and investment for the future.

Some economists believe that given its stage of development, China spends too much on expensive items like high-speed rail lines. But step back from the individual infrastructure projects and the debates about whether a given investment is necessary, and what's palpable in China is the sense of forward motion, of energy. No foreigner — at least not one I've met in five years of living here — even bothers denying it. And the Chinese take it for granted. When a brand-new six-lane highway opened in suburban Shanghai in October, Zhong Li Ping, who shuttles migrant workers to the city and back to their hometowns, said, "I don't know what took them so long." In truth, it took about two years — roughly the time it would take to get the environmental and other regulatory permits for a new highway in the U.S. If, that is, you could get them at all. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Making of Modern China.")

There's no direct translation into Chinese of the phrase can-do spirit. But yong wang zhi qian probably suffices. Literally, it means "march forward courageously." China has — and has had for years now — a can-do spirit that's unmistakable. Americans know the phrase well. They invented it. It used to define them.

Critics of the authoritarian Chinese government would say it's a system more accurately called "can do — or else." And they have a point. No one in the U.S. would argue that it should adopt China's dictatorial style of government. America doesn't need to displace tens of thousands of people in order to build a massive dam, as China did in Hubei province from 1994 to 2006. (The value of checks and balances is, in fact, among the many things China could learn from the U.S.) But you don't have to be a card-carrying communist to wonder how effectively the U.S. develops and executes ambitious projects. Ask James McGregor. He's a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China and now a business consultant who divides his time between the two countries. "One key thing we can learn from China is setting goals, making plans and focusing on moving the country ahead as a nation," he says. "These guys have taken the old five-year plans and stood them on their head. Instead of deciding which factory gets which raw materials, which products are made, how they are priced and where they are sold, their planning now consists of 'How do we build a world-class silicon-chip industry in five years? How do we become a global player in car-manufacturing?'"

See 10 things to do in Shanghai.

See 10 things to do in Beijing.

Some of this is the natural arc of a huge, fast-growing country in the process of modernization. The U.S. in the late 19th century was nothing if not what Intel's Maloney would call an IMBY country. America was ambitious. There's no secret formula to help the nation get back its zeal for what it used to enthusiastically and sincerely call progress. But even though the U.S. is a mature, developed country, many economists believe it has shortchanged infrastructure investment for decades. It possibly did so again in this year's stimulus package. Just $144 billion of the $787 billion stimulus bill Congress passed earlier this year went to direct infrastructure spending. According to IHS Global Insight, an economic-consulting firm, U.S. spending on transportation infrastructure will actually decline overall in 2009 when state budgets are factored in — this at a time when the American Society of Civil Engineers contends that the U.S. should invest $1.6 trillion to upgrade its aging infrastructure over the next five years.

When the economic crisis hit China late last year, by contrast, almost half of the emergency spending Beijing approved — $585 billion spread over two years — was directed at projects that accelerated China's massive infrastructure build-out. "That money went into the real economy very quickly," says economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But it's not just emergency spending on bridges, roads and high-speed rail networks that's helping growth in China. Patrick Tam, general partner at Tsing Capital, a venture-capital firm in Beijing, says the government is aggressively helping seed the development of new green-tech industries. An example: 13 of China's biggest cities will have all-electric bus fleets within five years. "China is eventually going to dominate the industry for electric vehicles," Tam says, "in part because the central government has both the vision and the financial wherewithal to make that happen." Tam, a graduate of MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, says he does deals in Beijing rather than Silicon Valley these days "because I believe this is where these new industries will really take shape. China's got the energy, the drive and the market to do it." Isn't that the sort of thing venture capitalists used to say about the U.S.? (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)

2. Education Matters
On a recent Saturday afternoon, at a nice restaurant in central Shanghai, Liu Zhi-he sat fidgeting at the table, knowing that it was about time for him to leave. All around him sat relatives from an extended family that had gathered for a momentous occasion: the 90th birthday of Liu's great-grandmother Ling Shu Zhen, the still spry and elegant matriarch of a sprawling clan. But Liu had to leave because it was time for him to go to school. This Saturday, as he does every Saturday, Liu was attending two special classes. He takes a math tutorial, and he studies English.

Liu is 7 years old.

A lot of foreigners — and, indeed, a fair number of Chinese — believe that the obsession (and that's the right word) with education in China is overdone. The system stresses rote memorization. It drives kids crazy — aren't 7-year-olds supposed to have fun on Saturday afternoons? — and doesn't necessarily prepare them, economically speaking, for the job market or, emotionally speaking, for adulthood. Add to that the fact that the system, while incredibly competitive, has become corrupt.

All true — and all, for the most part, beside the point. After decades of investment in an educational system that reaches the remotest peasant villages, the literacy rate in China is now over 90%. (The U.S.'s is 86%.) And in urban China, in particular, students don't just learn to read. They learn math. They learn science. As William McCahill, a former deputy chief of mission in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, says, "Fundamentally, they are getting the basics right, particularly in math and science. We need to do the same. Their kids are often ahead of ours." (See pictures of China on the wild side.)

What the Chinese can teach are verities, home truths that have started to make a comeback in the U.S. but that could still use a push. The Chinese understand that there is no substitute for putting in the hours and doing the work. And more than anything else, the kids in China do lots of work. In the U.S., according to a 2007 survey by the Department of Education, 37% of 10th-graders in 2002 spent more than 10 hours on homework each week. That's not bad; in fact, it's much better than it used to be (in 1980 a mere 7% of kids did that much work at home each week). But Chinese students, according to a 2006 report by the Asia Society, spend twice as many hours doing homework as do their U.S. peers.

Part of the reason is family involvement. Consider Liu, the 7-year-old who had to leave the birthday party to go to Saturday school. Both his parents work, so when he goes home each day, his grandparents are there to greet him and put him through his after-school paces. His mother says simply, "This is normal. All his classmates work like this after school."

See pictures of Beijing.

Read "Can China Save the World?"

Yes, big corporate employers in China will tell you the best students coming out of U.S. universities are just as bright as and, generally speaking, far more creative than their counterparts from China's élite universities. But the big hump in the bell curve — the majority of the school-age population — matters a lot for the economic health of countries. Simply put, the more smart, well-educated people there are — of the sort that hard work creates — the more economies (and companies) benefit. Remember what venture capitalist Tam said about China and the electric-vehicle industry. A single, relatively new company working on developing an electric-car battery — BYD Co. — employs an astounding 10,000 engineers.

China, critics will point out, doesn't produce (at least not yet) many Nobel Prize winners. But don't think the basic educational competence of the workforce isn't a key factor in its having become the manufacturing workshop of the world. It isn't just about cheap labor; it's about smart labor. "Whether it's line workers or engineers, we're finding the candlepower of our employees here as good as or better than anywhere in the world," says Nick Reilly, a top executive at General Motors in Shanghai. "It all starts with the emphasis families put on the importance of education. That puts pressure on the government to deliver a decent system." (See pictures of the best-selling cars in China.)

And the Chinese government responds to that pressure in some intriguing ways. It insists that primary-school teachers in math and science have degrees in those subjects. (Less than half of eighth-grade math teachers in the U.S. majored in math.) There is a "master teacher" program nationwide that provides mentoring for younger teachers. Zhang Dianzhou, a professor emeritus of mathematics at East China Normal University in Shanghai who co-chaired a committee charged with redesigning high school mathematics programs across the country, says recent changes have begun to reflect more of a "real-world emphasis." Computer-science courses, for example, have been integrated into the math curriculum for high school students. And China is placing even more importance on teaching young students English and other foreign languages. If you think China's willingness to constantly fine-tune its educational system is not going to have much of an impact 20 years from now, there's a 7-year-old boy in Shanghai who'd be happy to discuss the issue with you. In English.

3. Look After the Elderly
it's hard to imagine two societies that deal with their elderly as differently as the U.S. and China. And I can vouch for that firsthand. My wife Junling is a Shanghai native, and last month for the first time we visited my father at a nursing home in the U.S. She was shaken by the experience and later told me, "You know, in China, it's a great shame to put a parent into a nursing home." In China the social contract has been straightforward for centuries: parents raise children; then the children care for the parents as they reach their dotage. When, for example, real estate developer Jiang Xiao Li and his wife recently bought a new, larger apartment in Shanghai, they did so in part because they know that in a few years, his parents will move in with them. Jiang's parents will help take care of Jiang's daughter, and as they age, Jiang and his wife will help take care of them. As China slowly develops a better-funded and more reliable social-security system for retirees — which it has begun — the economic necessity of generations living together will diminish a bit. But no one believes that as China gets richer, the cultural norm will shift too significantly. (See 10 health care–reform ads.)

To a degree, of course, three generations living under one roof has long happened in the U.S., but in the 20th century, America became a particularly mobile and rootless society. It is hard to care for one's parents when they live three time zones away.

Home care for the elderly will most likely make a comeback in the U.S. out of sheer economic necessity, however. The number of elderly Americans will soar from 38.6 million in 2007 to 71.5 million in 2030. But, says Arnold Eppel, who recently retired as head of the department of aging in Baltimore County, Maryland, "There won't be enough spots for them" in the country's overwhelmed nursing-home system. Appreciating the magnitude of the coming crisis, the U.S. government has begun to respond. Two new initiatives — Nursing Home Diversion and Money Follows the Person — expand subsidies for home elder care, and the Veterans Health Administration has just put in effect its own similar initiative. "The whole trend will be into home care, because nursing homes are too expensive," Eppel says, noting that nursing-home care in the U.S. costs about $85,000 annually per resident.

In China, senior-care costs are, for the most part, borne by families. For millions of poor Chinese, that's a burden as well as a responsibility, and it unquestionably skews both spending and saving patterns in ways that China needs to change (see Save More, below). For middle-class and rich Chinese, those costs are a more manageable responsibility but one that nonetheless ripples through their economic decision-making. Still, there are benefits that balance the financial hardship: grandparents tutor young children while Mom and Dad work; they acculturate the youngest generation to the values of family and nation; they provide a sense of cultural continuity that helps bind a society. China needs to make obvious changes to its elder-care system as it becomes a wealthier society, but as millions of U.S. families make the brutal decision about whether to send aging parents into nursing homes, a bigger dose of the Chinese ethos may well be returning to America.

See how to prevent illness at any age.

See pictures of Shanghai.

4. Save More
You've now heard it so many times, you can probably repeat it in your sleep. President Obama will no doubt make the point publicly when he gets to Beijing: the Chinese need to spend more; they need to consume more; they need — believe it or not — to become more like Americans, for the sake of the global economy.

And it's all true. But the other side of that equation is that the U.S. needs to save more. For the moment, American households actually are doing so. After the personal-savings rate dipped to zero in 2005, the shock of the economic crisis last year prompted people to snap shut their wallets. Now that it's pouring, in other words, American households have decided to save for a rainy day. The savings rate is currently about 4% and has gone as high as 6% this year. (See TIME's photo-essay "A New Look at Old Shanghai.")

In China, the household-savings rate exceeds 20%. It is partly for straightforward policy reasons. As we've seen, wage earners are expected to care for not only their children but also their aging parents. And there is, to date, only the flimsiest of publicly funded health care and pension systems, which increases incentives for individuals to save while they are working. But China, like many other East Asian countries, is a society that has esteemed personal financial prudence for centuries. There is no chance that will change anytime soon, even if the government creates a better social safety net and successfully encourages greater consumer spending.

Why does the U.S. need to learn a little frugality? Because healthy savings rates, including government and business savings, are one of the surest indicators of a country's long-term financial health. High savings lead, over time, to increased investment, which in turn generates productivity gains, innovation and job growth. In short, savings are the seed corn of a good economic harvest.

The U.S. government thus needs to get in on the act as well. By running perennial deficits, it is dis-saving, even as households save more. Peter Orszag, Obama's Budget Director, recently called the U.S. budget deficits unsustainable — this year's is $1.4 trillion — and he's right. To date, the U.S. has seemed unable to have what Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has called an "adult conversation" about the consequences of spending so much more than is taken in. That needs to change. And though Hu Jintao and the rest of the Chinese leadership aren't inclined to lecture visiting Presidents, he might gently hint that Beijing is getting a little nervous about the value of the dollar — which has fallen 15% since March, in large part because of increasing fears that America's debt load is becoming unmanageable. (See TIME's special report "Obama After a Year: What's Changed, and What Hasn't.")

That's what happens when you're the world's biggest creditor: you get to drop hints like that, which would be enough by themselves to create international economic havoc if they were ever leaked. (Every time any official in Beijing muses publicly about seeking an alternative to the U.S. dollar for the $2.1 trillion China holds in reserve, currency traders have a heart attack.) If Americans became a bit more like the Chinese — if they saved more and spent less, consistently over time — they wouldn't have to worry about all that.

5. Look over the Horizon
The energy that so many outsiders feel when they are in China and that President Obama may see when he is there comes not just from the frenetic activity that is visible everywhere. It comes also from a sense that it's harnessed to something bigger. The government isn't frantically building all this infrastructure just to create make-work jobs. And kids aren't studying themselves sleepless because it's a lot of fun. A few years ago, I interviewed Zhang Xin, a young man from a deeply poor agricultural province in central China. His parents were wheat farmers and lived in a tiny one-room house next to the fields. He had graduated from Tsinghua University — China's MIT — and gotten a job as a software engineer at Huawei, the Cisco of China. His success, Zhang told me one day, had changed his family forever. None of his descendants would "ever work in the wheat fields again. Not my children. Not their children. That life is over." (And neither would his parents. They moved to prosperous Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, soon after he started his new job.)

Multiply that young man's story by millions, and you get a sense of what a forward-looking country this once very backward society has become. A smart American who lived in China for years and who wants to avoid being identified publicly (perhaps because he'd be labeled a "panda hugger," the timeworn epithet tossed at anyone who has anything good to say about China) puts it this way: "China is striving to become what it has not yet become. It is upwardly mobile, consciously, avowedly and — as its track record continues to strengthen — proudly so."

Proudly so, because as Zhang understood, hard work today means a much better life decades from now for those who will inherit what he helped create. And if that sounds familiar to Americans — marooned, for the moment, in the deepest recession in 26 years — it should.

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China's schools are adding more creative and practical topics to their notoriously rigid curriculum.

China is experimenting with eco-friendly technologies, from electric cars to urban wind turbines like this one in southeastern Shanghai.

Masons at work in front of the China Pavilion at the future site of Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

Most Chinese seniors live with and are cared for by their relatives.

See pictures of China's electronic waste village.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1938671,00.html

NY times: On a Mission to Banish the Saggy Bottom

 

 

 

November 27, 2009

Advertising

On a Mission to Banish the Saggy Bottom

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER and ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

WHEN women try on pants, the first thing they do is turn around and look over their shoulders into the mirror. If Andy Dunn has his way, men will soon do the same.

Mr. Dunn, the co-founder and chief executive of Bonobos, an e-commerce company that sells men’s pants, is on a mission to give American men a complex about their backsides. The pants’ distinguishing feature is that they eliminate the sagging bottom of ill-fitting trousers.

“It’s like a shame campaign,” Mr. Dunn said.

As much as he is trying to improve the way men’s clothes fit, Mr. Dunn may be having more impact on the way men buy clothes. Bonobos, which is based in New York, has no stores in which people can try on the pants, even though its pitch is superior fit. Instead, it aims to use various Web technologies to make clothes-buying less of a chore.

Bonobos would not have broken even last year on $1.6 million in revenue if it had to pay for stores and sales clerks, he said. And the men it is focusing on — those who hate to shop and have not given much thought to the way their clothes fit — prefer the ease of going online and choosing from few options.

Most men have been brought down by “the revenue-maximizing Gap or Banana Republic cut,” made to fit the widest group of people, Mr. Dunn said. The secret to the fit of Bonobos pants, which start at $88 for basic khakis and go up to $188 for silk-lined wool, is the curved waistband, said Mr. Dunn, whipping off his belt to demonstrate how a properly fitting waistband arcs in the back. The $50 Gap versions do not curve.

•

Bonobos’ other co-founder, Brian Spaly, started making the trousers in 2007, while he and Mr. Dunn were housemates at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Mr. Spaly, a former athlete, could not find pants with both a slim waist and enough room in the rear and thighs.

The Bonobos pants, which come in straight leg and boot cut, are best for those with athletic builds, although it is developing pants for slimmer and bigger men.

Mr. Dunn is well aware that manufacturers could easily replicate Bonobos pants, so he is trying to distinguish the company with customer service, convenience and technology.

Many shoppers still prefer going to stores over shopping online because of the in-person help. But some unlikely online marketers have succeeded, like Zappos.com, the shoe seller that was acquired by Amazon.com for $1.2 billion this month. It offers free shipping both ways, allows returns for a year and answers customers’ questions on the phone and online.

Bonobos also offers free shipping both ways along with lifetime returns, and encourages people to buy and return several pairs of pants to find the right fit. Its so-called style ninjas are available by phone, e-mail and, soon, video chat, where they will assess fit and give style advice.

A few other online stores also sell men’s pants, with different marketing strategies. One, Cordarounds, is a two-man design shop that makes a rare item: pants made of corduroy with wales that run horizontally, instead of up and down. It manufactures a couple of hundred of each style and then moves on to the next. Another, called Bills Khakis, is more concerned with durability and comfort than the style and fit that Bonobos’ customers seek. It also sells in stores.

•

Bonobos, named after a promiscuous species of primates, is now preparing to pitch the pants to women with advertisements on Web sites including Refinery29.com and Jezebel.com and in magazines like OK! The ads urge women to “give the gift that fits” to husbands, boyfriends, sons and fathers. “Let your man wear the pants this holiday,” proclaims the ad copy in the internally produced campaign.

Men are being pitched too. An ad for Bonobos that appears in the November issue of Men’s Journal features a photo of a male from the waist down, modeling pants under the headline, “Here’s your chance to tell women, ‘Hey, my eyes are up here.’ ”

The ad, by the New York office of the Gate Worldwide, continues, “When you wear the world’s best-fitting pants, women tend to stare. Even gawk. If you can handle being seen as a sex object, visit bonobos.com and order a pair.”

During Bonobos’ first year it advertised only on Facebook, aiming at affluent men in the financial sector; it now casts a wider net. “We have tons of customers who are school teachers, because they have to wear a comfortable nonjean every day, and those finance guys are actually wearing a suit four times a week,” says Scott Peterman, vice president for marketing.

One advantage online stores like Bonobos have over those in the mall is the ability to track exactly who buys things, which sizes and styles they prefer and whether they return them.

Eventually, shoppers on the Bonobos Web site will have a personalized home page, based on what they like and their size and body type. Bonobos is also planning marketing campaigns that will include surprising pants customers with a free dress shirt.

Bonobos, which could bring in $4 million this year, plans to stick to the few types of men’s clothes that have fit problems, a lesson learned the hard way when a swimsuit line sold poorly. Men, it seems, do not have a problem with swimsuits that cling or droop. Bonobos makes shorts and polo shirts and is working on dress shirts that do away with the “muffin top” created by excess fabric around the waist. And it plans to make suits.

Bonobos is “crowdsourcing” the design of the dress shirts using TweetSwell, a program for conducting surveys on Twitter, to figure out what people want. This has provoked heated debates over things like whether there should be a placket and whether cuffs should have one button or two. Even men who aren’t sure what a placket is (it is the vertical strip of fabric sewn onto the front of the shirt to reinforce the button holes) seem to care whether or not their shirts have one.

Only about 10 percent of men can be classified as fashionistas, said Marshal Cohen, the chief industry analyst at NPD Group, though that is up from 3 percent two decades ago. “I can’t tell you how many times I stop a guy in a store and say something doesn’t fit right, and he says, ‘I don’t care,’ ” Mr. Cohen said. “So he’s got a big hill to climb.”

Ray Kramer, 27, a debt researcher at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who calls himself a fashion novice, has already started the uphill trudge. His wife, Dominika Smereczynski, often complained about the way his trousers fit, and was relieved when the seat of his pants tautened, with Bonobos’ help.

On a recent morning, Mr. Dunn visited Mr. Kramer’s closet, and took out a pale blue Brooks Brothers dress shirt. “Billowing. Billowing!” he exclaimed. “You should throw this out.” Another, blue with black checks, was deemed as a source of muffin top.

Mr. Kramer began to nod. “I see most guys at work, even the skinny guys, with this big puff coming out the back,” he said. “It’s kind of embarrassing, I don’t have shirts that fit well.”

Mr. Dunn had succeeded at his goal of giving another guy a fashion complex. “Oh man, we can help him so much,” he said on the way out the door.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Don't work with your spouse

Don’t work with your spouse

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: November 8 2009 18:46 | Last updated: November 8 2009 18:46

Last week, Westminster MPs were told to engage in wife swapping. The committee looking into their inflated expenses ruled that they could no longer employ their spouses, but said it would be fine if they employed each other’s wives instead.

While I can’t see how the taxpayer will gain from these wife swaps, it is nevertheless a great improvement on the current arrangement. To allow husbands and wives to co-work as well as co-habit has always struck me as a bad idea financially, socially, practically and emotionally. It is not only MPs who should be banned from doing it – everyone else should be, too.

But despite this, the workplace is stuffed with married couples who work side-by-side. I used to be half of one myself. There are high-profile examples in every type of occupation. In politics, there is Hillary Clinton and Bill; in philanthropy, there is Bill Gates and his wife Melinda. And in the specialised field of management gurudom, there is Jack Welch and Suzy – who share a bed as well as a syndicated advice column.

The fact that so many husbands and wives are cooped up together professionally and domestically stems from two different market failures.

The first is a failure in the dating market. Many people (like Bill and Melinda) meet their partners in the office – partly because they work such long hours they never go anywhere else, and partly because people can seem more alluring when being powerful at work than when being purposeless at play.

The other is a failure in the job market: spouses decide to work together out of laziness or lack of imagination or desperation – or all three. Out of the resulting round-the-clock proximity no good can come.

The first rule of portfolio management is diversification. If two people work for the same employer, both are at risk when it founders. Equally, if the marriage starts to founder, then the job of one or other side will start to be at risk, too.

The next problem is that working with your spouse can make you a narrower person. When you work with strangers you can have two personas: your office self can be quite different from your home one. If, however, your spouse is witness to your office persona, you either have to tone it down or carry on under their coolly appraising eye.

The presence of a spouse can also impede the forming of the most satisfactory of workplace relationships – the office spouse. The O.S. is one’s chosen partner for a sandwich at lunch, and a gossip at any time at all. A real spouse, unless unusually secure, may not look kindly on their platonic office equivalent.

Working with your husband or wife is also bad for conversation. It is all too tempting to say as one brushes one’s teeth: “Did you see that memo from ‘x’?”

If you don’t share an office, you have no choice but to talk about something proper instead.

Marital co-working has the apparent advantage that you see more of each other. But if your paths otherwise barely cross, the answer isn’t to work in the same place but to work less so that you can see each other more.

There are some couples who are so addicted to each other’s company that they even go to the supermarket together, and for them working together might seem an ideal arrangement. Alas it is less ideal for everyone else who has to put up with being a permanent gooseberry.

In all, I can only think of two good things about working with a spouse, and neither advantage survives closer inspection.

The first is that you can share a lift to work. I seem to remember doing this with my husband; but I also seem to remember a good deal of argy bargy as I was always ready to leave on time and he never was.

The second is that you can make sure that your other half is not getting up to mischief. But even this does not always work.

The European human resources director at Aviva found himself quite unable to keep track of his wife, who worked with him. Last month, it was revealed that she had been having a secret affair with Andrew Moss, the chief executive.

Result: the married couple are no longer co-working, as she has resigned, and no longer co-habiting – as she has left her husband in favour of the chief executive.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Post comments online at www.ft.com/managementblog

Read previous columns at www.ft.com/kellaway

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Britian's first female diplomats

For 26 years – from their entry into the Foreign Office until the marriage bar was lifted – the UK’s women diplomats had to choose between a husband and public service.

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Britain’s first female diplomats

By Alex Barker

Published: November 6 2009 14:25 | Last updated: November 6 2009 14:25

Lady Cicely Mayhew, first woman to join the British diplomatic service, this year

Cicely Mayhew, the first woman to join the British diplomatic service, lives in a handsome cottage near Blenheim Palace, on a street that once served as a set for “Miss Marple”. Now well into her eighties, her memory is not what it was. But she still recites long passages of Shakespeare, chants marching songs from Tito’s Yugoslavia and enjoys a pot of vanilla ice-cream most days to make up for wartime rationing.

She is remarkably matter-of-fact about having blazed a trail for women by becoming the King’s first female emissary in 1947. “My attitude was, about time too!” she says. Mayhew had already come up against the barriers that ambitious working women faced – during her wartime service at Bletchley Park, where the codes that protected German communications were cracked, she received lower pay and ranked beneath men who could not boast a first from Oxford. By comparison with that, the diplomatic service was a step forward, albeit a touch patronising. “Our new lamb, that’s what they called me,” Mayhew recalls. “They were all very kind, very courteous.”

The Foreign Office had fought for decades to keep Mayhew’s kind out, often going to great lengths to prove women unworthy. In response to one 1930s committee investigation, it called on every head of mission to consider the question of women in the service, the results of which FCO historians recently reprinted in a striking paper. Even by the standards of their era, the views are extraordinary.

One ambassador said it was “unthinkable” for a diplomat to “produce babies”. Our man in Berne feared that “the clever woman would not be liked and the attractive woman would not be taken seriously”. Then there was this from Bucharest: “The hard-bitten Englishwoman nurtured in the London School of Economics, with a Marx and Engels outlook; the product of Girton or Somerville, interested chiefly in ancient Greek theatre, but wielding from time to time a forceful hockey stick; the shires girl who breakfasts off an ether cocktail and who will abandon the Chancery entirely for the polo field – none of these would be suitable representatives.”

When women, led by Mayhew, finally breached the Foreign Office ramparts, little was changed to accommodate them. Old habits endured. New applicants were still taken to a grand country house, plied with stiff Martinis and tested after dinner, without warning, on administering a fictitious island. There was no special guidance for female entrants and, in age-old Foreign Office tradition, no training either. “You were just flung into a department head-first and told to get on with it,” said Rosamund Huebener, who joined the year after Mayhew. “I had no idea what I was doing and nobody knew what to do with me. It was tremendous fun.”

Some continents, however, remained out of bounds: the Middle East and, more surprisingly, South America. “They thought any young woman would suffer what was euphemistically called a fate worse than death at the hands of some Latin lover,” says Dame Margaret Anstee, who went on to a glittering career with the UN in Bolivia among other places.

Lady Cicely Mayhew in Yugoslavia in 1948

For her first posting, in the late 1940s, Mayhew asked to “have a look behind the Iron Curtain” and embarked on an adventure to Belgrade with her shaggy dog, Hamlet, at her side. Her next assignment was Geneva. It didn’t last long. A dashing foreign office minister – dubbed “the Socialists’ most eligible bachelor” – arrived on an official visit in 1949. At dinner Mayhew commended a speech the minister had delivered earlier that day. “Then he said something about how he had another speech to make – and proposed,” Mayhew recalls. “I was so surprised I said yes.”

And that was the end of Cicely Mayhew’s career as a diplomat. More than anything else, her future had depended on one thing: staying single. Along with all female diplomats, Mayhew’s letter of service stated that she would be “required to resign on marriage”. Other Whitehall departments had dropped the so-called “marriage bar” after the war. The one exception was the diplomatic service.

Very little official explanation was offered, save that diplomats could be sent anywhere in the world at short notice, a condition deemed incompatible with married life. (What on earth would their husband do?) Diplomatic Service Regulation No 5 was just “the order of things”. Those women who left to marry were stripped of their pensions and given a dowry, amounting to a month’s salary for every year they had served. The marriage bar remained in place, rigorously enforced, until 1973.

For 26 years, from the moment women were admitted to the diplomatic service to the point the marriage bar was lifted, Britain’s pioneering female diplomats faced the starkest choice possible between their careers and their private lives, between public service and a husband. There was no middle way.

. . .

The Foreign Office’s decision to do away with the marriage bar was inevitable. Debate was already under way in Britain about the need to guarantee basic equality in the workplace and elsewhere, and in 1975, Harold Wilson’s Labour government passed the Sex Discrimination Act. If the Foreign Office had not removed the bar voluntarily, it would not have been long before it was forced to do so. The mandarins knew they would eventually have to bend with the times.

But – bizarre anachronism though it now appears – the existence of the marriage bar for female diplomats as recently as 36 years ago underlines both how much has changed in the relationship between people and their jobs, and how little. Society still agonises over trade-offs made by working mothers and the halting progress women are making towards equal representation, particularly in senior executive and professional positions. The solution has been to seek – and to legislate for – the “work-life balance”, a state of being we are all enjoined to achieve.

The pioneering female diplomats who served in the Foreign Office between 1947 and 1973 had that balance struck for them. Their superiors concluded that no accommodation between career and family was possible – at least not one involving a husband or children. It was a bar that at some point applied to professions ranging from teaching to the law (see panel below). The tide of equality legislation swept it away, implying to the generations who followed that no job is inherently incompatible with a family life.

But, as any female diplomat will attest, some jobs lend themselves less well to family responsibilities. The barriers may have gone, but the personal trade-offs remain. Moving across continents every three or four years takes a toll on any family or relationship. Women remain significantly underrepresented. To this day the Foreign Office struggles to design a system that is flexible, meets equality legislation, is fair to both sexes, is kind to families and effective. It may be a puzzle with no solution.

. . .

Faced with the stark choice between professional ambition and desire for domesticity, most of Cicely Mayhew’s contemporaries also chose a husband over a career. Mayhew, in common with others, admits it was not a straightforward decision to leave the job she loved. “It is silly to pretend I didn’t have doubts, then or later,” she said. “Did I do the right thing? Should I have stayed? Now of course I have my family, two boys, two girls. How could I possibly wish them away?”

Departures such as hers touched off something of a brouhaha among the male superiors left behind. “The Foreign Office is perturbed,” declared one newspaper article (which described Mayhew as a “glamour girl”). “Its women diplomats are so attractive that it is losing them too fast. All their training and experience is being lost.” In the face of this exodus, foreign secretary Ernest Bevin apparently snapped: “We’ve turned the Foreign Office into a matrimonial bureau!”

Dame Anne Warburton, our first female ambassador

Of course, it was not the marriage bar that was blamed so much as the fact that women had been allowed into the service at all. Grace Gardner, who joined in 1947, came up against similar bunkum. When she announced she was leaving, a “rather crusty” senior colleague blurted out: “The trouble with you women is that you will go and get married.”

“You’ve had 11 of the best years of my life,” Gardner replied. “What are you grumbling about?”

Yet it is wrong to assume that the pioneering female diplomats saw the marriage bar as unjust at the time. The gravity of the choice it forced upon them certainly added an extra edge to marriage proposals (one Foreign Office veteran admitted that it took her six years to decide). But many took the marriage bar for granted or never thought of mixing a family and a career, regardless of the rules. There was no push to remove it.

Some of those who persevered came to rationalise the direction their careers had taken as the result of never having met the right person. One put it this way: “If you are very much in love, it is pretty clear what you do.” Some pioneers are candid about the emotional price of a career in diplomacy, of options narrowed, of paths chosen “in spite of yourself”. But none admits to having forgone pure love for a job.

“It didn’t bother me very much. If I wanted to marry, I would have been ready to leave the service,” Anne Warburton told me as we sat drinking coffee, looking out at her Suffolk garden. “There were times when I enjoyed that side of life, but not to the point of wanting to leave the service. I was enjoying life as I was.”

Warburton became Britain’s first female ambassador, presenting her credentials to the Danish court in 1976. Others followed, but there were no more than a dozen senior women through the 1970s and 1980s, and until 1987, when Veronica Sutherland took up her post in the Ivory Coast, every British female ambassador was unmarried and childless.

Warburton is still regarded inside the diplomatic service with some awe. But she is unassuming and modest to a fault. If there were barriers in her way because of her sex, she bears no grudges. She recalls the odd case of discrimination. (Our ambassador in Helsinki once turned down a woman for a posting, claiming “policy is so often made in the sauna”.) But Warburton was never seriously put out. “If you arrive as the herald of other people, maybe you feel that that’s good, that’s progress and you don’t start complaining.”

Some pioneers acknowledge that later generations may find it odd that they did not protest more. “If the Service has changed its attitudes, so too have the women who belong to it,” explained Juliet Campbell, the former ambassador to Luxembourg and probably the first to lead a majority-female mission overseas. “In retrospect, I am struck by how those of us among my contemporaries who thought of ourselves as feminists felt we had to prove ourselves, without concessions. To have suggested that any special allowance be made was a tacit admission of inferiority.”

Juliet Campbell, former ambassador to Luxembourg

Campbell married in her mid-forties, long after the marriage bar had gone. Had she come close to leaving? “I did have moments. But, to be honest, I used to ask myself why I didn’t get married, and I think maybe belonging to the Foreign Office was part of it,” she said. “You had this life, you moved on every two or three years or whatever, and you didn’t form quite the same forms of relationship.”

It is a common gripe. Diplomacy is a peripatetic business that leaves little time for blossoming romances or ageing parents. Every diplomat’s contract includes a mobility clause, meaning they can be sent anywhere at any time. “There was an assumption that you couldn’t expect to spend all your time in green pastures,” said Campbell. “I remember being told that it was time to go and get my knees brown. You couldn’t expect because you had children or, as I later discovered, elderly parents, to think that this was a reason you could stay in easy touch, because you would be told, rather briskly, ‘we all do at this stage of life’.”

A stint as a single woman in Bangkok was particularly hard. “Society moved in certain sorts of groups and circles and as a relatively senior woman you were neither fish nor fowl, nor good red herring,” she said. “There were the wives, there were what were then known as dolly-birds, the pretty secretaries, and there were lots of gorgeous Thai girls all over the place. I somehow felt I didn’t belong. That’s probably the biggest price, at times: you can gather I’ve had a pretty good life and I’m not fussing, but I would say I had periods of being acutely lonely.”

. . .

There was no party to say goodbye to Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones when she left the Foreign Office. It was Christmas 1995 and she was a 32-year veteran, the most senior woman diplomat of her time and arguably the most influential the service has ever had. But there was no card, no carriage clock, no leaving do. “You must be joking,” she told me as we sat in her small Chelsea house. “I just left. It was not very nice. Everybody had a sense it was a failure, which it was, in a way.”

Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, whose glittering Foreign Office career ended in regret

Too much time has passed to unpick properly the rights and wrongs of why she resigned. One fact stands out: she is the only political director in living memory not to move on to a top ambassadorial post. She wanted Paris, the plum appointment, and asked not to return to Bonn, where she had just served. In the event, a man six years her junior was given Paris, while she was only offered a ticket to Germany. She walked.

Neville-Jones admits playing her hand badly. But she is still smarting at the sniping that followed her exit. Anonymous diplomats were quoted saying her mind was not up to scratch, that she was “strong-willed and abrasive”, not “sufficiently emollient for the niceties of diplomatic life”, a touch heartless. “It’s unpleasant, isn’t it?” she said, jumping forward in her chair. “That is not something that you would ever hear about a man.”

Who did she confide in during this difficult period? “Well that’s one of the hard things about not being married, because you’ve nobody else to talk to. I talk a bit with my brother, my brother’s very supportive,” she said. “My mother couldn’t begin to understand what was happening. Though, interestingly enough, she said to me afterwards, ‘I sensed you were unhappy in that job.’ So it must have shown.”

She pressed on in business, and recently joined the Conservatives as David Cameron’s national security adviser. But almost 15 years on, her premature departure still splits opinion. The controversy survives, in part, because the women’s diplomatic revolution is unfinished. Not long after Neville-Jones, another senior woman fell at the Paris hurdle. And a woman has yet to hold one of the seven top Foreign Office jobs.

I wondered if Neville-Jones sacrificed anything to the marriage bar. “Well, I’m not married,” she said, after a moment’s pause. Over the years she rejected a few suitors, but only came close to accepting one proposal, and even then never really “agonised about it”. She admits the marriage bar played a part. “Do I regret it?” she went on, anticipating my question. “It would be nice to be married. But do I look back and say, this is a fearful regret? No, I don’t. The one thing I do think about my life is – for God’s sake – don’t complain. You choose to do something, you take what goes with the territory.”

. . .

Yet there is little doubt that, from a woman’s perspective, what goes with the territory is changing. The marriage bar is long gone. Our man in Havana is now our woman. The number of women in senior management remains woefully low – 21 per cent of the total and just four out of the top 29 jobs – but compared even with a decade ago, when the proportion was 6 per cent, it is a small triumph.

The new watchword is flexibility. Sir Peter Ricketts, the well-regarded head of the Foreign Office, has introduced schemes to help balance family and career. A “mobility clause” still appears in every contract, but it is far less strictly enforced. Job shares are more common: a husband and wife team now head the mission to Zambia. So is remote working. So the schemes are in place – the real battle is to change the culture. A Foreign Office survey found that more than 40 per cent of staff still feel issues of work-life balance and flexible working cannot be openly discussed.

Anne Pringle, ‘rock chick’ and Britain’s first female ambassador to Moscow

One symbol of the new female-friendly service is Anne Pringle, the first female ambassador to Moscow since diplomatic links were established 450 years ago. A self-described “rock chick”, she joined the service four years after the marriage bar was lifted and benefited from the new regime. Early on, she still sensed that “people didn’t hear the message till a bloke had said it”. But once she started being noticed, she was supported.

As a man who has just married a diplomat, I’m understandably concerned about the peripatetic lifestyle. Moving countries every four years – kids and careers in tow – sounds like the opposite of settling down. Pringle spoke to me with some trepidation – knowing my wedding was just a few weeks away. “I hope I don’t put you off,” she said.

She didn’t. But her lifestyle would not suit everyone. Since they married 20 years ago, her Moscow posting is the first time she has worked in the same country as her husband. “I don’t think anyone would pretend it’s easy. I’d say my husband and I are past masters at shuttle diplomacy,” she told me. For a while it was Paris and Brussels, then Singapore and London. “It is quite a long haul. But it’s worked for us. We have barely missed a beat and certainly barely ever missed a weekend,” she said.

At this point, she must have noticed the wobble in my voice. “Most people find it slightly bizarre that we are still very, very together. But you have just got to find what works for you. The joy of nowadays is that you are not in a straitjacket. Spouses 30 years ago were in quite a straitjacket in terms of not having many choices for what to do. Now things are a bit more flexible and that helps both sides.” I do hope she is right.

Alex Barker is an FT political correspondent

...............................................................

A brief history of the marriage bar

Airline stewardesses
c. 1930-1968

Boeing Air Transport’s hire of eight young nurses as flight attendants in 1930 set the precedent for employing only attractive, unattached women, writes Sonia Van Gilder Cooke. In the 1960s, stewardesses challenged the industry’s tacit marriage bar and in 1968, airlines dropped the policy along with forced retirement at the age of 32.

Postal workers
1875-1946

In the early 1870s, the Post Office opened the doors of its Returned Letter Office and Savings Bank to women workers. In 1875, however, the Office introduced a marriage bar that stayed in place for seven decades, until 1946.

Bank workers: Barclays
c.1915-1961

Women first joined Barclays during the first world war, yet had to wait until 1961 to retain their positions after marriage. The Bank of England and Lloyds Bank had abolished their marriage bars by 1952, but Barclays continued the policy, with its chairman suggesting as late as 1964 that “family commitments” rather than career should be the priority of young female employees.

Broadcasters: BBC
1932-1944

Despite the eminence of many married female employees in its early years, the BBC adopted a marriage bar in 1932. The bar was jettisoned in 1944, the same year the BBC reporter Audrey Russell became the nation’s first accredited female war correspondent. Gender discrimination persisted, however: women could not become general trainees or newsreaders until 1960.

Teachers
1923-1935

In 1923, London County Council banned the hiring of married women teachers; it was followed by educational authorities nationwide. The National Union of Women Teachers argued that marriage brought “human understanding” to the classroom and won the right to continue working after marriage in 1935.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

TIME: The Four-Day Workweek Is Winning Fans

Monday, Sep. 07, 2009

The Four-Day Workweek Is Winning Fans

By Bryan Walsh

In an era when most of us seem to be working more hours than ever (provided we're still lucky enough to have jobs), 17,000 people in Utah have embarked on an unusual experiment. A year ago, the Beehive State became the first in the U.S. to mandate a four-day workweek for most state employees, closing offices on Fridays in an effort to reduce energy costs. The move is different from a furlough in that salaries were not cut; nor was the total amount of time employees work. They pack in 40 hours by starting earlier and staying later four days a week. But on that fifth (glorious) day, they don't have to commute, and their offices don't need to be heated, cooled or lit.

After 12 months, Utah's experiment has been deemed so successful that a new acronym could catch on: TGIT (thank God it's Thursday). The state found that its compressed workweek resulted in a 13% reduction in energy use and estimated that employees saved as much as $6 million in gasoline costs. Altogether, the initiative will cut the state's greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 12,000 metric tons a year. And perhaps not surprisingly, 82% of state workers say they want to keep the new schedule. "It's beneficial for the environment and beneficial for workers," says Lori Wadsworth, a professor at Brigham Young University who helped survey state employees. "People loved it." Those who didn't tended to have young children and difficulty finding extended day care. (See 10 ways your job will change.)

Managers from around the world have gotten in touch with Utah officials, and cities and towns including El Paso, Texas, and Melbourne Beach, Fla., are following the state's lead. Private industry is interested as well — General Motors has just instituted a workweek of four 10-hour days at several of its plants. "There is a sense that this is ready to take off," says R. Michael Fischl, an associate dean at the University of Connecticut's law school, which is organizing a symposium on four-day weeks.

The advantages of a so-called 4-10 schedule are clear: less commuting, lower utility bills. But there have been unexpected benefits as well, even for people who aren't state employees. By staying open for more hours most days of the week, Utah's government offices have become accessible to people who in the past had to miss work to get there in time. With the new 4-10 policy, lines at the department of motor vehicles actually got shorter. Plus, fears that working 10-hour days would lead to burnout turned out to be unfounded — Wadsworth says workers took fewer sick days and reported exercising more on Fridays. "This can really make a difference for work-life balance," says Jeff Herring, Utah's executive director for human resources.

Of course, in the age of the BlackBerry, fewer days in the office may not make much of a difference in terms of workload. But as energy prices start rising again, it makes sense to be flexible and find savings where we can. 10-4, 4-10.

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1919162,00.html

Copyright © 2009 Time Inc.

WSJ: Housework Pays Off Between the Sheets

WORK & FAMILY

OCTOBER 21, 2009

Housework Pays Off Between the Sheets

• By SUE SHELLENBARGER

Housework may seem like the ultimate romance-killer. But guess what?

A new study shows that for husbands and wives alike, the more housework you do, the more often you are likely to have sex with your spouse.

Earlier studies have hinted at this connection for men; the sight of a husband mopping the floor or doing dishes sparks affection in the hearts of many wives. But the more-housework-equals-more-sex link for wives, documented in a study of 6,877 married couples published online recently in the Journal of Family Issues, is a surprise.

Scrubbing the floor is no aphrodisiac, and seeing your spouse doing it usually isn't either. "My husband loves doing laundry, yet I don't get any thrill out of his doing it," says Chicago writer Julie Danis. And "I don't think he thinks it's sexy when I go around gathering the detritus of his daily life."

But for some high achievers who take a "work hard, play hard" approach to life, researchers say, working hard in one domain produces more energy for others. The study also found a correlation between hours spent on paid work and the frequency of sex in marriage.

"Rather than compromise their sex life" because of time demands at work or at home, "this group of go-getters seems to make sex a priority," says Constance Gager, lead researcher and an assistant professor of family and child studies at Montclair State University, Montclair, N.J. The study doesn't measure what proportion of spouses fall into this group, but she believes "they are on the leading edge of couples we expect to see more of in the future."

Many husbands and wives I interviewed offered an additional explanation—that housework may be a proxy for a general willingness to invest in shared interests, a symbol of commitment to home and hearth. Perhaps "working on the same task … makes the couple remember why they married—to be on the same team, to build a life," Ms. Danis says.

Tom Doran, a Plymouth, Mich., engineer, says doing housework "promotes friendship and intimacy" for him and his wife, an executive assistant. And John Rogitz, a San Diego attorney who has been married for 30 years, says, "If you're both around doing housework, that also means you are alone together, and in a place where both are relaxed and comfortable." He adds, "It's pretty hard to have sex when you're not together in a place that permits it."

“Wives in the study spent an average 41.8 hours a week on housework, compared with 23.4 hours for husbands.”

Another husband, a St. Paul, Minn., accountant who describes himself as happily married for 20 years, says housework reflects a deeper bond. Although he does plenty of housework, "to me it's not the dishes, laundry, vacuuming (or Viagra) that matters," he writes. Sharing chores reflects a "willingness to hold my wife's needs and wants on a par with my own. For us, the key to intimacy is the sharing and minimization of selfishness." His wife, a nurse, agrees, saying that "doing the household chores is certainly part of the sharing."

It's also possible that one reward of doing chores—a serene, well-tended home—can be conducive to intimacy. Tracy Evans, New York, says she and her husband "definitely can relax better if the house is clean," she says—to a point.

But plunging too deeply into chores also can have the opposite effect, she says, if it is linked to "this perfectionistic type of thing where you want to get everything done"—for example, deciding you can't rest until your entire spice rack is in alphabetical order. "Before you know it, it's one in the morning and you haven't spent any time with your spouse," Ms. Evans says. Researchers didn't explore whether housework reached a point of diminishing returns—where time on chores expanded so much that it choked off intimacy.

One might suspect that the housework-sex connection was related to couples' views of appropriate gender roles. A wife who embraces a traditional female role, for example, might tend to regard both doing lots of housework and having frequent marital relations as part of her responsibilities.

But Dr. Gager and her co-author, Scott Yabiku, associate professor of sociology at Arizona State University, Tempe, controlled the results for "gender ideology" and found the housework-sex link remained true, regardless of people's views on roles. Results from the data, taken from the National Survey of Families and Households, were controlled for age, health, duration of couple's relationship, religion, income, education and marital satisfaction.

The study defined housework as nine chores: cleaning, preparing meals, washing dishes, washing and ironing clothes, driving family members around, shopping, yard work, maintaining cars and paying bills. Wives in the study spent an average 41.8 hours a week on these tasks, compared with 23.4 hours for husbands—a split that is fairly typical, and often regarded by wives as unfair. However, the effects of any fairness concerns among wives weren't measured in this study.

Outside the home, husbands spent an average 33.8 hours a week on paid work, compared with 19.7 hours for wives. Couples reported having sex 82.7 times a year on average, or 1.6 times a week, about the same as in other studies.

After a long national decline in time spent on housework, the study joins a growing body of research on how chores shape the dynamics of marriage. A survey of 2,020 U.S. adults placed "sharing household chores" as the third most important factor in a successful marriage, behind faithfulness and a happy sexual relationship, says the nonprofit Pew Research Center. That's a sharp increase; 72% of respondents gave high importance to housework, up from 47% in a comparable study in 1990. In respondents' minds, housework outranked even such necessities as adequate income and good housing, Pew says.

A 2003 study by Scott Coltrane, a sociology professor at the University of California, Riverside, linked fathers' housework to more feelings of warmth and affection in their wives. And a survey of 288 husbands, reported in Neil Chethik's 2006 book "VoiceMale," linked a wife's satisfaction with the division of household duties with her husband's satisfaction with their sex life.

One husband, Mr. Chethik says in an interview, reported that his wife enjoyed flowers or a candlelit dinner out; but "if he wants to be sure of a romantic evening, he goes for the vacuum cleaner."

Other research supports the "work hard, play hard" thesis. Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has found that it doesn't lead to less intimacy in marriage when wives hold paid jobs.

"Some people are high-energy people, and others are not very high-energy," she says. Those who like juggling a lot of roles are often energized by the process, she says. "Work hard, play hard" may not work for everybody, but there is certainly a group for whom it does work."

That usually requires conscious effort. Mary Miller, a marketing executive, says that while she and her husband talk at home in the evening about making time for each other, "we are often too tired once we finish cleaning up the place," she says. Recently, they have begun planning to reserve down time for themselves, "almost like adding it to the chores," she says.

Could the study spark a national housework craze? Like a number of spouses I interviewed, Lawrence Lamb is skeptical. At home, the Birmingham, Ala., medical-school professor unloads the dishwasher and puts away laundry while his wife, a teacher, does laundry and cooks. "But that has nothing to do with the sex life," he says. For him and his wife, career achievement and the energy and attitudes they bring to their relationship provide more of a spark, he says. The bottom line, he adds: "It's chemistry."

But another married man, a communications manager attending a panel discussion at which the research was mentioned, quickly announced that he was leaving. "Gotta go," he said. "I need to run home and put in a load of laundry."

—Email sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Leaders' spouses make the best truth-tellers

Leaders’ spouses make the best truth-tellers

By Michael Skapinker

Published: October 12 2009 22:24 | Last updated: October 12 2009 22:24

At a recent lunch the Financial Times hosted for management consultants, one of them introduced us to the “spouse test”. Before you submit a proposal to a potential client, the consultant said, ask your spouse to read it. If he or she can’t make sense of it, rewrite it.

The role of spouses in telling us when we are going wrong at work is largely hidden. This is understandable; married life is private. Almost the only time we get a glimpse of what a spouse has contributed to a senior executive’s career is when the couple gets divorced.

Even then, the courts typically concentrate on what the wife (usually it is the wife) has done to maintain a comfortable home and bring up the children, freeing her husband to focus on making his entrepreneurial or corporate fortune.

Occasionally, the judges will go a little further, as in the important English case of Charman v Charman, where the Court of Appeal in 2007 referred to the man being ousted from his company, after which “the parties grew close and the wife gave the husband considerable emotional support”.

Emotional support is often as far as spouses are expected to go. Colette Young, founder of ExecuMate, which counsels corporate spouses, advises forbearance too. “As a spouse, you can’t say ‘put that BlackBerry away’. You have to know part of that life is they’re on 24/7,” Ms Young – whose husband Larry Young is chief executive of Dr Pepper Snapple, the drinks company – told Associated Press.

Should spouses go further? A public declaration of devotion to the boss is usually embarrassing and not very effective.

Sarah Brown’s lauding of her husband at last month’s Labour party conference – “my husband, my hero” – does not seem to have done an enormous amount for the prime minister’s electoral prospects.

Linda Lay’s public defence in 2002 of her husband Ken, the former chief executive of Enron – she called him a “moral human being” and said that they had lost millions of dollars too – was widely held to have been a public relations disaster.

There must be more to being a leader’s spouse than this. Who better to moan to about your cabinet colleagues and the ungrateful voters – or about the board, the shareholders and the staff? Who better to advise you to cancel the furious e-mail you were about to send?

A recent (unauthorised) book about their marriage reports that Michelle Obama advised her husband against making Hillary Clinton his running mate and insisted, against his initial judgment, that the “Yes we can” campaign slogan would be a winner.

Denis Thatcher did not give interviews, but his wife knew the difference his business experience could make to her political judgment. “Nothing escaped his professional eye – he could see and sense trouble long before anyone else,” Margaret Thatcher wrote in The Downing Street Years.

She said that her husband’s knowledge of the oil industry meant she had someone to turn to during the second oil price shock of 1979. “Being prime minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone,” she said.

However, the signal service spouses can render is to tell leaders what no one else dares to.

In June 1940, Clementine Churchill wrote a letter to her husband, tore it up and then wrote it again. Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Winston Churchill, described the letter as “terrifying”, which it must have been – both for the writer and the recipient.

“My darling,” Mrs Churchill began. “I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know. One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner. If an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas – good or bad – will be forthcoming. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you – I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’.”

“My Darling Winston – I must confess I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be cannot bear that those who serve the Country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you – Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness.”

“Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful Clemmie.”

You don’t get that quality of advice from many management consultants.

michael.skapinker@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/skapinker

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics

October 20, 2009

Findings

For Decades, Puzzling People With Mathematics

By JOHN TIERNEY

For today’s mathematical puzzle, assume that in the year 1956 there was a children’s magazine in New York named after a giant egg, Humpty Dumpty, who purportedly served as its chief editor.

Mr. Dumpty was assisted by a human editor named Martin Gardner, who prepared “activity features” and wrote a monthly short story about the adventures of the child egg, Humpty Dumpty Jr. Another duty of Mr. Gardner’s was to write a monthly poem of moral advice from Humpty Sr. to Humpty Jr.

At that point, Mr. Gardner was 37 and had never taken a math course beyond high school. He had struggled with calculus and considered himself poor at solving basic mathematical puzzles, let alone creating them. But when the publisher of Scientific American asked him if there might be enough material for a monthly column on “recreational mathematics,” a term that sounded even more oxymoronic in 1956 than it does today, Mr. Gardner took a gamble.

He quit his job with Humpty Dumpty.

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/10/20/science/20tierney_puzzle.ready.html

On Wednesday, Mr. Gardner will celebrate his 95th birthday with the publication of another book — his second book of essays and mathematical puzzles to be published just this year. With more than 70 books to his name, he is the world’s best-known recreational mathematician, and has probably introduced more people to the joys of math than anyone in history.

How is this possible?

Actually, there are two separate puzzles here. One is how Mr. Gardner, who still works every day at his old typewriter, has managed for so long to confound and entertain his readers. The other is why so many of us have never been able to resist this kind of puzzle. Why, when we hear about the guy trying to ferry a wolf and a goat and a head of cabbage across the river in a small boat, do we feel compelled to solve his transportation problem?

It never occurred to me that math could be fun until the day in grade school that my father gave me a book of 19th-century puzzles assembled by Mr. Gardner — the same puzzles, as it happened, that Mr. Gardner’s father had used to hook him during his school days. The algebra and geometry were sugar-coated with elaborate stories and wonderful illustrations of giraffe races, pool-hall squabbles, burglaries and scheming carnival barkers. (Go to nytimes.com/tierneylab for some examples.)

The puzzles didn’t turn Mr. Gardner into a professional mathematician — he majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago — but he remained a passionate amateur through his first jobs in public relations and journalism. After learning of mathematicians’ new fascination with folding certain pieces of paper into different shapes, he sold an article about these “flexagons” to Scientific American, and that led to his monthly “Mathematical Games” column, which he wrote for the next quarter-century.

Mr. Gardner prepared for the new monthly column by scouring Manhattan’s second-hand bookstores for math puzzles and games. In another line of work, that would constitute plagiarism, but among puzzle makers it has long been the norm: a good puzzle is forever.

For instance, that puzzle about ferrying the wolf, the goat and the cabbage was included in a puzzle collection prepared for the emperor Charlemagne 12 centuries ago — and it was presumably borrowed by Charlemagne’s puzzlist. The row-boat problem has been passed down in cultures around the world in versions featuring guards and prisoners, jealous spouses, missionaries, cannibals and assorted carnivores.

“The number of puzzles I’ve invented you can count on your fingers,” Mr. Gardner says. Through his hundreds of columns and dozens of books, he always credited others for the material and insisted that he wasn’t even a good mathematician.

“I don’t think I ever wrote a column that required calculus,” he says. “The big secret of my success as a columnist was that I didn’t know much about math.

“I had to struggle to get everything clear before I wrote a column, so that meant I could write it in a way that people could understand.”

After he gave up the column in 1981, Mr. Gardner kept turning out essays and books, and his reputation among mathematicians, puzzlists and magicians just kept growing. Since 1994, they have been convening in Atlanta every two years to swap puzzles and ideas at an event called the G4G: the Gathering for Gardner.

“Many have tried to emulate him; no one has succeeded,” says Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego. “Martin has turned thousands of children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children.”

Mr. Gardner says he has been gratified to see more and more teachers incorporating puzzles into the math curriculum. The pleasure of puzzle-solving, as he sees it, is a happy byproduct of evolution.

“Consider a cow,” he says. “A cow doesn’t have the problem-solving skill of a chimpanzee, which has discovered how to get termites out of the ground by putting a stick into a hole.

“Evolution has developed the brain’s ability to solve puzzles, and at the same time has produced in our brain a pleasure of solving problems.”

Mr. Gardner’s favorite puzzles are the ones that require a sudden insight. That aha! moment can come in any kind of puzzle, but there’s a special pleasure when the insight is mathematical — and therefore eternal, as Mr. Gardner sees it. In his new book, “When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish,” he explains why he is an “unashamed Platonist” when it comes to mathematics.

“If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared,” he writes, “there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime even if no one had proved them prime.”

I share his mathematical Platonism, and I think that is ultimately the explanation for the appeal of the puzzles. They may superficially involve row boats or pool halls or giraffes, but they’re really about transcendent numbers and theorems.

When you figure out the answer, you know you’ve found something that is indisputably true anywhere, anytime. For a brief moment, the universe makes perfect sense.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

TIME: Why Women Have Sex

Tuesday, Oct. 06, 2009

Why Women Have Sex

By Alyssa Fetini

While figuring out what women want has stumped men for centuries, understanding how they think about sex may have just gotten easier. Cindy Meston and David Buss, psychologists at the University of Texas, interviewed over 1,000 women around the world for their book Why Women Have Sex and managed to come up with 237 reasons, ranging from the predictable — commitment — to the puzzling — curing a headache. Spoiler alert: love may be further down on the list than one might think. TIME spoke to Buss about the myriad mind games, turn-ons and turn-offs involved in female sexuality, and what a guy can do to stand a chance.

You co-authored a famous 2007 study "Why Humans Have Sex." Why focus on women this time around?
We discovered that women's sexual psychology turned out to be far more complex than we envisioned. [It] deserved an entire book-length treatment. (See photos: "The Best of the Bond Girls")

What differences between men and women did you notice?
There are important gender differences in sexuality, but these must be interpreted within the context of a high level of similarity. Both women and men have sex because they are physically attracted to the person, for pure pleasure, because they are in love, or simply because they are horny. But within the overall similarity, I'd say women's sexuality tends to be more linked with love and emotional bonding. Women, more than men, like sex when there's some kind of emotional connection. Men were more likely to have sex simply because the opportunity presented itself. Women tend to be pickier, especially for short-term sexual encounters. And men are more motivated to have sex to boost their status among their peers, although some women in our study also had sex for precisely this reason. (Read more about the chemistry of desire.)

What are the main reasons why women have sex?
The most frequent reasons include: sexual attraction to the person, the desire for physical pleasure, to express affection, to express their love for a person or because they were sexually aroused and wanted release.

Other important reasons are to boost their self-esteem or sexual esteem, to get revenge, to secure "mate insurance" in case a partner dumps them, to relieve pain, to achieve health benefits such as getting rid of a headache — yes, it works — to decrease stress, to lose weight and as a sleep aid. We devote one chapter to "sexual economics," which focuses on all the ways in which women have sex as an exchange for other benefits, such as getting her partner to take out the garbage, securing free dinners or getting expensive gifts. We also devote one chapter to what we call "the dark side" of women's sexuality — when women have sex because they were deceived, coerced or forced into it. (See photos: "Same-Sex Overtures Across Species")

Any particularly surprising findings?
I was surprised by the importance of revenge. A few had sex in order to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease. More commonly, women's revenge sex involved getting back at a cheating partner, or having sex with the partner of a friend who had poached her partner. Actually, the frequency of mate-poaching also surprised me — the frequency with which women try to lure men who are already "taken," either for a short-term sexual liaison or a longer-term relationship. Most women have experienced mate-poaching in one form or another, either as the mate poacher or as the victim.

How does evolution explain some of these complexities?
Sexual attraction often boils down to what Darwin called "female choice." Modern women are the descendants of a long and unbroken line of ancestral mothers who made wise sexual choices. As descendants of these successful women, modern women carry with them the sexual psychology — the ancestral wisdom — that led to the success of their female forebears. So women find cues to health, status and protection to be sexually attractive. These are all qualities that led to better survival and reproductive outcomes.(Read about teen girls and sex.)

On the competition side, evolution by selection is an inherently competitive process. It's a cliché that "the good men are all taken, permanent bachelors or gay." And there's some truth to this. The number of truly desirable and available men is limited. So women are in sexual competition with other women for access to the most desirable men. Modern women are the descendants of ancestral mothers who succeeded in besting other women in these sexual competitions.

What physical features do women tend to find most attractive in men?
Body is important to women. Women are sexually attracted to men with a V-shaped torso, or a high shoulder-to-hip ratio, and men who are taller than average. Interestingly, women do not like muscle-bound men, and men misperceive how muscular women want them to be. The face is also critical. A symmetrical face is a health cue, as are a good head of hair and masculine features such a strong jaw and a deep voice. Women generally don't find feminine-looking or feminine-sounding men to be sexually attractive.

What advice could you give to the men out there not blessed with Michael Phelps' torso and George Clooney's face? What can they do to stay in the game?

Have good hygiene. Sense of smell is critical. A man who smells bad, or who has bad breath — that can be a sexual kill switch for women. Interestingly, women have a keener sense of smell than men, so men are sometimes oblivious to how bad they smell to women. A man's scent conveys critical information to women about a man's health status.

The other thing to note about what women find sexually attractive centers on cues that convey personality, sense of humor, self-confidence and social status. These things can transform an average-looking man into a sexually attractive man in the minds of many women.

Read more about Americans and sex.

Find this article at:

• http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1928189,00.html

Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

FT: Adopted Chinese daughters seek their roots

Adopted Chinese daughters seek their roots

By Patti Waldmeir

Published: September 25 2009 21:33 | Last updated: September 25 2009 21:33

Patti Waldmeir with her daughter, Grace

We have all seen them: adorable Chinese girls holding the hands of their (usually elderly, often overweight, but definitely doting) Caucasian parents, strolling the streets from New York to New South Wales, growing up in a white, white world, far away from the land and culture where they were born.

In some ways, they are a permanent blot on the image of China: surplus daughters the country couldn’t care for, unintended consequences of the 30-year-old “one-child” policy that led to the abandonment of hundreds of thousands if not millions of female infants at birth. But now, as the balance of global economic and political power shifts subtly in favour of China, Beijing is reaching out to all these lost daughters – and welcoming them back home.

China has invited thousands of foundlings back to their birthplaces for government-sponsored “homeland tours” which, like last year’s Beijing Olympics or next year’s Shanghai World Expo, give the country a chance to show off to the world. On one level, what the Chinese adoption authorities call “root seeking tours” – filled with extravagant expressions of love and kinship and lavish gifts for the returning orphans – are a transparent public relations exercise aimed at raising money for Chinese orphanages, justifying the decision to export surplus children and countering decades of unfair international criticism that Chinese people “hate girls”.

But for the children involved – one of whom is my nine-year-old daughter, Grace Shu Min, who attended a 20-year reunion at her orphanage in March, along with two of her closest orphanage friends – their hometown trip was more like therapy. China put its best foot forward for the returning children (all girls), treating them like celebrities, showering them with presents, laying on magicians and puppet shows, kindness and warmth. It was the kind of mythical homecoming we all hope for – but few can ever achieve.

For the girls who attended the Yangzhou reunion, aged from eight to 18, it could prove a priceless boost to their self-esteem, a chance to view the dark facts of their short lives – abandonment at birth by a mother they will never know, institutionalisation and exile from their homeland – through rose-tinted spectacles handed to them by the Chinese government.

Some 36 families – from the US and the Netherlands, Sweden and ­Canada – made the trip last March to their girls’ hometown of Yangzhou, an elegant and increasingly prosperous city of 4.5 million in eastern China. Yangzhou greeted them with a whirlwind of banquets and traditional celebrations. Local families opened their hearts and homes to the visitors, and the orphanage greeted them with the sound of giant kettle drums and gifts of life-sized teddy bears, plus a wall plastered with their baby photos and a shower of hugs and tears from many of the same nannies who looked after them as infants. To the maudlin strains of “There’s no Place like Home”, the deputy mayor of the city told the children at a welcome banquet: “You are not guests, you are family.” The evening became more surreal and saccharine with each advancing hour, ending with a lady in a pink frock singing “Auld Lang Syne” from behind a cloud of Lawrence Welk-style bubbles.

Grace (pictured centre) with her friends Lily (left) and Natalie: the girls spent the first eight months of their lives together at the Yangzhou orphanage and “on some level are clearly sisters”

Many of us had been to Yangzhou before – including the Mueller, Petro and Waldmeir families, who adopted Yang Yu Yao, Yang Yi Lin and Yang Shu Min in one weepy ceremony on August 1 2000, and renamed them Lily Mueller, Natalie Petro and Grace Waldmeir.

The Yangzhou girls, now nearly 10, were born in the same fortnight and raised together for the first eight months of their lives, cuddling up two or three to a crib in the then-meagrely staffed and provisioned Yangzhou orphanage. Now they live in America. Nearly once a year, they have ­gathered together to celebrate a joint birthday or an adoption day – together with Maya O’Brien, the former Yang Xue, who could not join them on the homeland tour. (A fifth friend, Emma Raff, formerly Yang Yu Nong, lives in Paris but keeps in frequent touch by e-mail).

They are forever friends. From the moment Grace, Lily and Natalie saw each other on our return trip to Yangzhou, they were inseparable: the three girls held hands, giggled, whispered and squeezed into two seats on our massive tour bus, always together. They may not be biologically related, but on some level they are clearly sisters.

. . .

Grace and Lily (in a green top) at Yangzhou Zoo

We visited the orphanage together as families when we adopted them in August 2000, but when we returned together in March 2009, we were astounded at what a difference a decade makes. The road to the orphanage had been paved; there were many more toys, and many more nannies (all clad in pink uniforms so new they still showed the creases), not to mention a brand new, nearly complete five-story baby wing that looks more like a luxury resort than an orphanage.

But those signs of prosperity are hardly a shock, given China’s explosive growth in the past decade. Much more surprising was what we did not see at the orphanage: where are all the babies? And especially, what has happened to all the healthy infant girls that made China such a Mecca of international adoption?

According to Yangzhou orphanage officials, adoptions from the orphanage have plummeted from 150 a year when our girls were born to 10 or 20 a year. There are so few healthy infants that the orphanage has even been able to find homes for nearly all its older children, many of whom are mildly disabled. There are a handful of as-yet unadopted toddlers with special needs, but the majority of Yangzhou’s 80-odd infants have special needs, roughly half boys and half girls. Most have only minor problems, like cleft lips or palates, or congenital heart disease. Many will be adopted, either domestically or by foreigners, after their disabilities are repaired.

What the orphanage does not have is a surfeit of healthy infant girls – a situation mirrored by many other orphanages throughout China. The shortage of healthy babies has led to a dramatic decline in overseas ­adoptions from China: in America, the biggest international home for ­Chinese adoptees, annual adoptions have halved since 2005, from nearly 8,000 then to less than 3,000 last year.

The stark reality of the falling numbers has great personal significance for our family: it means that, if I wanted to adopt Yang Shu Min now, I could not become her mother; nor could I be mother to her eight-year-old sister Lucy, the former Fu Xinke, from Chuzhou in Anhui Province (China has stopped single parents like me adopting, in an attempt to reduce demand for scarce orphans).

But the figures also tell a remarkable tale about a society in transition: a China where attitudes to fertility, abandonment and the value of girls have shifted dramatically in ways that could profoundly influence its future – not to mention the self-image of Natalie and Lily, Maya, Emma and Grace, as they enter the penumbra of their puberty.

Already in their short lives, our daughters have heard too often that Chinese people “hate girls”: hardly an irrational conclusion to be drawn from the fact that almost all of the 110,000 children adopted internationally from China in the past two decades are girls – but still wrong. China is never that simple. In 1999, when Yang Shu Min was born, abandoning a girl may have been the only rational thing her birthmother could do. Most of us would have done the same. In a country with only a rudimentary or non-existent system of old-age support, especially in the countryside, boys are rural China’s pension system. As in many Asian societies, girls owe fealty to their husband’s parents once they marry; parents without a son are left with no one to support them in their dotage. What rational person would not prefer a boy?

Grace at the spot where she was found as an infant

My daughter’s birthmother almost certainly did: so she swaddled her six-day-old infant against the cold of a November dawn, and placed her in a spot dangerously close to the local police station. She risked her freedom to place my child in a spot where she would quickly be discovered – and that act of courage still makes me weep. If she had been caught at it, she could have been severely punished, since abandoning a child in China is a crime, and a violation of a population policy aimed at preventing excess births in an overpopulated country of 1.3 billion. Grace laughs when I grow tearful at the thought: but she is slowly beginning to understand the risk her birthmother ran to protect her. It is a lot for a nine-year-old to take in. But as our Chinese daughters grow to womanhood, these are the hard facts of their past that they cannot ignore.

One of those tough facts is the orphanage itself: every parent who takes their adopted child back for an orphanage visit in China fears a reality overdose. We Yangzhou parents need not have worried: our return to the orphanage was larded with so much fantasy, so much singing and ­dumpling-making and present-giving and heartfelt speeches that reality hardly made an appearance. The kids complained that the day was ­unseasonably hot, and some of the speeches were boring. But remarkably few showed any negative reaction to the place they called home as infants: even the teenagers among them – surely the most likely to find an orphanage hard to integrate into their blossoming self-image. Most said they liked seeing “their” nannies cuddling the babies, and appreciated such a splendid homecoming.

Several children told me afterwards that it might have been fun growing up around so many other kids – a reaction that surprised me, and made me grateful to those whose artifice had produced such a positive experience for so many of our children.

. . .

There were tears – but not for the reasons one might imagine. I cried a lot (to the constant admonishment of Yang Shu Min); many other parents teared up from time to time; and there were inevitable meltdowns among children who had missed naps, were too hot or hungry, overexcited or simply exhausted by the gruelling timetable of our tour. Viewing our children’s orphanage files caused pain for some and joy for others: most files bear scant information about where the child was found, what police station she was taken to, whether she was born with one ­eyelid or two. There is no record of a birthmother’s anguish at a child carried nine months and then relinquished, no genetic information that could be useful for medical care in later life, no evidence with which to weave a life’s story.

Our daughters have birthmothers and birthfathers, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers – and almost certainly siblings whom they may never know. The lucky among us found an anonymous note from a birthparent in their child’s orphanage file, stating the date and time of birth. Others hoped to obtain the original of such a “finding note”, but were left with only a copy provided at the time of adoption. Most found nothing, an empty file. A void where other children have DNA, family trees and intimate portraits in the hospital delivery room. For some of the girls, finding that void was a difficult moment (especially if an adopted sister had a finding note, and they did not), but most moved on quickly to the next game with their Yangzhou “sisters”.

Grace on the tour bus A sign typifying the expressions of love and kinship which now greet returning adoptees

And one American mother who visited the orphanage squat toilet with her nine-year-old Yangzhou girl reports that the child gripped her hand as she perched precariously above the evacuation hole, and proclaimed that she was glad she had not been left there forever. Those of us who live in China (as my family does) know that squat toilets are a trial for any westerner. They are a wake-up call that, to those used to western toileting ways, China is still a foreign country.

Still, everyone seemed to enjoy the visit to the babies who live at Yangzhou now. The orphanage authorities, understandably eager to put their best foot forward to the world, had spruced the place up almost beyond recognition – but not quite. It was easy to spot the room where our Yangzhou girls spent their first few months of life – the dark and dingy rooms that we photographed surreptitiously when we adopted our girls, to the manifest displeasure of orphanage authorities who back then did not want international publicity. As a journalist, I was so terrified of their disapproval that I took no photos – and burst into tears after passing the final immigration check on departure at Shanghai airport, so afraid that my daughter would be seized from me, because the visibility of my profession made me an undesirable parent.

Now the same rooms are open for international viewing: filled with colourful quilts and pastel, hand-knitted outfits for the infants, the result of an inflow of government and foreign money and an outpouring of philanthropy from a local population that, after a decade of prosperity, has started giving its time and money to the local foundlings. Our children were transfixed with the babies they found there: the infant girl with blue-tinged skin, whose nanny said she had a heart problem but would soon be adopted; the children with parts of their palate protruding through their lips; and many more infants recuperating from recent operations.

My Yang Shu Min loves babies, and she had visited the orphanage once before since we moved to China in June 2008, so she seemed to take the visit in her stride. But later that night, in our hotel room, she asked me about Ling Ling, an 18-year-old orphan, blind in one eye, who had never been adopted and has since acted as unofficial “mother” to many of the younger orphanage occupants. And with that began the tale of how China has changed since she was born: especially in its attitude to girls.

. . .

The handprints of the girls adopted from the Yangzhou orphanage, which will be made into a wall: government cash has now transformed the orphanage, but the number of healthy girls available for adoption has dropped dramatically

Exact figures are impossible to come by, but most adoption ­professionals both within and outside the Chinese government agree that the number of healthy abandoned girls in China has declined dramatically. When I adopted Grace, the waiting took only nine months; now overseas parents seeking a healthy infant girl wait three to five years – so long that many have given up. Orphanages in Guangzhou province, temporary home to a large number of migrant workers, report a large number of healthy infants of both sexes. But in the rest of the country, the number of normal infant girls has declined significantly.

That does not necessarily mean that every female foetus is greeted with joy: China’s sex ratio at birth remains skewed strongly toward males, with 120 boys born for every 100 girls. Ironically, modern technology has made it easier to choose a boy: sex-selective abortion means parents who want a boy can choose one before birth. But nowadays, girls who are born in China are often raised by their parents or other “child-hungry” families, and only seldom abandoned, says Shang Xiaoyuan, of the University of New South Wales and Beijing Normal University, one of the few Chinese academics who has published research recently on Chinese orphanages.

Parents of disabled children still have little option but to put them in orphanage care (though the Chinese government is trying to increase incentives to raise them at home). But normal girls are much more likely to grow up in a home – theirs or that of another Chinese family.

Ji Gang, director of the China Centre for Adoption Affairs, a Chinese government body, says many more people can afford to raise children than in the past – and their mentality has changed from the traditional “more children, more lucky” to “less children, better life”. In Chinese cities, many urban people prefer daughters, arguing that they are more caring in old age and less expensive: bearing a son means buying him an expensive flat when he marries. Girls are definitely cheaper – and if they can migrate to factory jobs in export industries, their economic value is even higher.

The Chinese government is doing all it can to encourage more equal gender practices. It recognises that the so-called one-child policy – which was never a monolith, since parents in rural and minority areas were ­permitted more than one daughter, and the policy was selectively enforced – led to a dangerous imbalance among the sexes, and a shortage of wives for a whole generation. China’s “care for girls” policy varies by province, but parents of only girls may get as much as Rmb900 (£80) per month in old-age pension, or preferential access to land or a house. Only daughters in Hebei province will now be granted extra points on their university entrance examination – the make-or-break exam for Chinese prosperity. Beijing is doing all it can in the short term to encourage rural Chinese to bear daughters; solving the old-age support problem longer term will take time.

But for our Yangzhou girls, what matters most is that the atmospherics have changed: Chinese people have started adopting children themselves, and they have largely stopped abandoning girls: what a difference a decade makes; what a difference to our children’s self-image.

Patti Waldmeir is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent. With additional reporting by Shirley Chen.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

ST: Why Singapore needs more people to study physics

Sep 19, 2009

Why S'pore needs more people to study physics

A waning interest in physics here has raised questions about how this will affect Singapore's economic progress. Amresh Gunasingham speaks to former chief defence scientist Lui Pao Chuen, who is trying to turn the situation around. What is the level of interest in physics here? We are fortunate in Singapore that more than 67 per cent of our kids complete their secondary education with a good maths and science foundation, and proceed to polytechnics, junior colleges and institutes of higher education taking courses in science, engineering and information technology. We are fortunate to have young people who are not afraid of maths and science. In fact more than 80 per cent of every cohort does science at the A levels. But there are dark clouds in the sky. The enrolment in physics in junior colleges has declined from 80 per cent in 2000 to about 40 per cent today. Something must be done soon to reverse this, or it will have serious consequences for our nation's economic development in all technology-related sectors, as well as other equally serious consequences for the nation's capabilities in key areas such as defence and education. What can this decline be attributed to? A brainstorming session was held earlier this year among members of a physics task force consisting of academics. A few areas were identified. We found, among other things, that there was a perception among students that the subject was difficult to grasp conceptually, as well as one that was difficult to do well in during exams. Another reason identified was that teaching methods used may not be interesting, resulting in more students dropping physics through upper secondary, junior college and university. Parents also play an important role. There is a misconception among some parents about the career prospects for physics graduates. They encourage their children to take up more professional courses such as engineering, which is perceived as having a more established base in Singapore. Another factor identified was that the previous requirement of having to take physics for engineering courses at the Nanyang Technological University and at the National University of Singapore (NUS) had been relaxed. Why is it critical for Singapore to have a reliable supply of graduates in the sciences? Singapore has progressed from a labour-intensive economy in the 1960s to a technology-intensive economy in the 1990s. But clearly, the playing field was changing, with low-cost centres attracting industries to relocate from Singapore. Something had to be done. A ministerial committee under the chairmanship of Dr Tony Tan, then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, concluded a decade ago that our economy must be transformed into one based on innovation and entrepreneurship. The Technopreneurship 21 programme was launched in 1999. The growth of research accelerated in 2006 with the establishment of the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council, chaired by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The council provided strategic direction for national research and development, supported by the National Research Foundation. This new economy depends on a reliable supply of graduates in science and engineering.With the transformation of Singapore's economy, there will be ample employment opportunities for scientists and engineers. Graduates in physics will be required as their problem-solving, analytical and experimental abilities will be much sought after. Today's physicists are employed across a broad spectrum of careers because their education and training can be applied in academia and industry, and even in financial services. Besides our need for scientists and engineers with a strong background in physics, we also need teachers to inspire our kids to understand and enjoy physics. What can be done to reverse the trend? The crucial age group to target is the 10- to 14-year-olds. Improving the teaching of science at the upper primary and lower secondary levels is key to ensure they continue with physics. We know kids are excited about computer games. So, for example, they could be challenged to learn physics through computer games, advancing to the highest levels in games by learning about various topics in science and physics. Then we can expect the competitive spirit of our kids to drive their learning. Another possible reason students are uninspired could be because many physics teachers in secondary schools are not physics majors, but have engineering degrees instead. Though these teachers are self-motivated to learn more about physics, a more structured approach with formal courses, for example, a master's programme specially designed for physics teachers, would be very helpful. Our physics task force has recommended targeting 250 such teachers now for upgrading, and more in the coming years. Among other things, we also recommended that the NUS physics department should target an annual increase of up to 15 students enrolled at the undergraduate level. This should be increased every year until the department has an annual enrolment of about 120 undergraduates, up from an average of 60 in the last 10 years. A greater effort should also be made to emphasise the career prospects in a number of new industries. For example, the push towards developing a clean energy sector here in terms of using solar or nuclear energy will open up many new prospects. === Science and tech pioneer PROFESSOR Lui Pao Chuen, 67, is considered a true pioneer in the development of science and technology in Singapore. He was born in Shanghai, China, but moved here when he was eight. Graduating from the then University of Singapore in 1965 with a major in physics, Prof Lui went on to work as special projects director at the Singapore Armed Forces, where he was responsible for the engineering of major weapons systems.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

ST: Rajaratnam, keeper of the faith

Sep 20, 2009

Rajaratnam, keeper of the faith

The Pledge is the enduring legacy of the late minister, to whom Singapore was worth fighting and dying for

By Irene Ng

Mr Rajaratnam understood the power of language and of ideas. And the idea he loved most was: A Singaporean Singapore where its citizens transcend their boundaries of race, religion and language, and unite to become one people. -- ST FILE PHOTO As any writer knows, first drafts are subject to revision. Good writers hone, sculpt and polish their drafts to make sure that their final versions sparkle. Mr S. Rajaratnam, who drafted Singapore's national Pledge, was a very good writer. Before he joined politics in 1959, he had distinguished himself as an influential newspaper columnist and a short-story writer. He understood the power of language and of ideas. And the idea he loved most was: A Singaporean Singapore where its citizens transcend their boundaries of race, religion and language, and unite to become one people. The Pledge and its origins have been much discussed recently. The subject is of particular interest to me as I am writing Mr Rajaratnam's biography for the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. In the course of my research over the last five years, I have gained a deeper appreciation of how the Pledge came about and why it stands as Mr Rajaratnam's enduring legacy to Singapore. Before the then Foreign Minister put his mind to the wording of the Pledge in 1966, the initial idea, as envisaged by the then Education Minister Ong Pang Boon, was that the Pledge would be recited by students in classrooms and during flag-raising ceremonies. The original idea arose, in fact, as a sort of administrative compromise, given the constraints of schools. It can be traced back to October 1965, shortly after Singapore's separation from Malaysia. The Education Ministry wanted to inculcate national consciousness and patriotism among students in schools by assembling them for a flag-raising ceremony to the strains of the National Anthem. However, the mass singing of the anthem, to be accompanied by a brass band, required a large field or assembly hall. Many schools lacked such facilities. Even those with the facilities could not carry out the flag-raising ceremony daily because of the tight curriculum. In a letter dated Oct 20, 1965, Mr Willie Cheng, the Ministry of Education's principal assistant secretary (administration), proposed that the flag-raising ceremonies be carried out in the classroom instead, where students would salute the flag. In a response dated Oct 22, 1965, Mr Kwan Sai Kheong, acting permanent secretary and director of education, wrote that Mr Ong had suggested, as a compromise, a pledge of two to three lines to be recited in the classroom, in place of singing the national anthem. On that basis, two earlier versions of the Pledge were produced. The first, dated Dec 17, 1965, was by Mr Philip Liau, adviser on textbooks and syllabuses. He used the American Students' Pledge as a reference: 'I pledge (reaffirm) my allegiance (loyalty) to the Flag of Singapore, and to the country for which it stands; one sovereign nation of many freedom-loving people of one heart, one mind and one spirit, dedicated to a just and equal society.' The second version, dated Dec 30, 1965, by Mr George Thomson, director of the Political Study Centre, read: 'I proudly and wholeheartedly pledge my loyalty to our flag of Singapore and to the honour and independence of our Republic whose banner it is. We come from different races, religions and cultures, but we are now united in mind and heart as one nation, and one people, dedicated to build by democratic means a more just and equal society.' Both versions were submitted to Mr Ong on Jan 26, 1966. His senior staff preferred the first version, considering it shorter and less abstract. It was no surprise that Mr Ong then turned to Mr Rajaratnam, a master stylist known for his strong convictions on building a common national identity. In a letter to Mr Rajaratnam dated Feb 2, 1966, Mr Ong asked him for comments on the two versions and for 'whatever amendments you wish to suggest'. By the time Mr Rajaratnam reverted with his earliest draft dated Feb 18, 1966, the Pledge was completely transformed. While the first two versions were all about pledging loyalty to the flag and country, Mr Rajaratnam's was about pledging to shared ideals, to a vision of Singapore that was, to his mind, worth fighting and dying for. And while the first two versions used the personal pronoun 'I', Mr Rajaratnam opted for the collective 'We, as citizens of Singapore'. Defying the evidence before his eyes, he imagined a nation pulsating as one people. Only he would have the boldness to envision a people giving voice to such ideals in unison, declaring their identity as 'citizens of Singapore', as opposed to 'the Malays', 'the Chinese', 'the Indians' and so on. More profoundly, he changed the entire premise for the Pledge as originally conceived by the Education Ministry. It was not just a few lines to be recited to the flag. It was a promise made to oneself, to each other and to future generations. Mr Rajaratnam's earliest draft which we have on record went: 'We, as citizens of Singapore, pledge to forget differences of race, language and religion and become one united people; to build a democratic society where justice and equality will prevail, and where we will seek happiness and progress by helping one another.' When he wrote 'to forget differences of race, language and religion', it was not a call for collective amnesia. He was not enjoining the people to deny their differences. He was calling on them to disregard these differences in their quest for a Singaporean Singapore. As his speeches during that period show, he was not blind to the fact that these differences were deeply rooted. On the contrary, he was all too conscious of their potency after the trauma of the racial riots in 1964 and the Separation in 1965. He was subjected to repeated reminders of the emotive power of appeals to these differences. During the years of merger, he was the strongest advocate for a Malaysian Malaysia, as opposed to a Malay Malaysia. Indeed, it was he who coined the slogan 'Malaysian Malaysia'. What he did not foresee was that Singapore would be expelled. The Separation in 1965 was, as he put it, 'the crushing of my dreams'. 'I believed in one nation, regardless of race and religion. My dreams were shattered,' he said. In the wake of that agonising moment came another test. Shortly after the Separation, a group of Chinese chauvinists, aware that their community now constituted 75 per cent, wanted Chinese language and culture to be the dominant consideration in government policy. Mr Rajaratnam recounted: 'They charged the PAP government with betraying Chinese language and culture. They believed that, in a predominantly Chinese Singapore, where the Chinese had overwhelming strength, the Government could be panicked into opting for Chinese chauvinism.' The minorities, particularly the Malays, were fearful of what Singapore would be like. When Mr Rajaratnam wrote his first draft of the Pledge, asking people to 'forget their differences', it was in the context of such anxious times. Disregard these differences of race, language and religion; do not let them stand in the way of becoming a united people, to the dream of creating a Singaporean Singapore, where justice and equality will prevail. Help one another to seek happiness and progress. Do this regardless of race, language or religion, we are implicitly urged. This ideal permeates many of his speeches on the topic at the time. Indeed, he was the first minister to use the phrase 'unity in diversity' in the 1960s, enjoining people to come together while celebrating the diversity among them. From available records, we can ascertain that the Pledge - as is used today - was finalised in July 1966. There is unfortunately a gap in the historical records on the revisions between Mr Rajaratnam's first draft, dated Feb 18, 1966, and the final one. But knowing how he worked and liked to work, in his days as a journalist as well as a politician, he would have refined it along the way, taking into account various views. As part of this process, he consulted the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. According to Mr Lee's recollection, as related in an interview with me, he had pointed out to Mr Rajaratnam that some words sounded too idealistic. Mr Lee also tightened the draft. Unlike the Singapore flag which was discussed in the Cabinet in 1959, there is no record of any discussion in Cabinet on the Pledge. A search of the Cabinet minutes of meetings and papers in 1965 and 1966 revealed nothing on it. From this and available records, one can conclude that the final version was firmed up between individual ministers with input from Ministry of Education officials. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that the final words, spirit and sentiments of the Pledge owed much to Mr Rajaratnam. Mr Lee rightly described him as 'a great idealist'. He was also a great visionary. Without such qualities, the Pledge would not have been the imaginative leap that it was. He had great faith in the power of the human will to overcome the differences of race, language, and religion, and to transform the separate communities into a nation. After Mr Rajaratnam left the Cabinet in 1988, he became concerned with policies which appeared to encourage Singaporeans to assert their communal identities. In 1990, he spoke up against what he perceived as a dangerous form of Chinese self-assertion in the Speak Mandarin campaign. While making clear that he supported the campaign just as he would for others encouraging people to speak 'Malay, Tamil, French, Japanese, or even better English', he took issue with the campaign's slogan 'if you are Chinese, make a statement - in Mandarin'. This, for the nervous minorities, would carry the subliminal message that the Chinese are different, he warned. Had he been asked, he would have suggested this slogan instead: 'Make a Singaporean statement in Mandarin.' Such episodes underscored the importance of Mr Rajaratnam's role as the keeper of the faith, a role which few others could play with equal conviction. He became an institution as a protector of the vision in the national Pledge - his enduring legacy to Singapore. The writer is a Member of Parliament and writer-in-residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Iseas). The first volume of Mr S. Rajaratnam's two-part biography will be published by Iseas by early next year.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

Washington Post: Lost in a World Without Courtship

Lost in a World Without Courtship

By Michael Gerson
Wednesday, September 16, 2009

There is a segment of society for whom traditional family values are increasingly irrelevant, and for whom spring-break sexual liberationism is increasingly costly: men and women in their 20s.

This is the period of life in which society's most important social commitments take shape -- commitments that produce stability, happiness and children. But the facts of life for 20-somethings are challenging. Puberty -- mainly because of improved health -- comes steadily sooner. Sexual activity kicks off earlier. But the average age at which people marry has grown later; it is now about 26 for women, 28 for men.

This opens a hormone-filled gap -- a decade and more of likely sexual activity before marriage. And for those in that gap, there is little helpful guidance from the broader culture. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, argues that the "courtship narrative" in the past was clear: dating, engagement, marriage, children. This narrative has been disrupted without being replaced, leaving many 20-somethings in a "relational wasteland."

The casual sex promoted in advertising and entertainment often leads, in the real world of fragile hearts and STDs, to emotional and physical wreckage. But it doesn't seem realistic to expect most men and women to delay sex until marriage at 26 or 28. Such virtue is both admirable and possible -- but it can hardly be a general social expectation. So religious institutions, for example, often avoid this thorny topic, content to live with silence, hypocrisy and active singles groups.

In the absence of a courtship narrative, young people have evolved a casual, ad hoc version of their own: cohabitation. From 1960 to 2007, the number of Americans cohabiting increased fourteenfold. For some, it is a test-drive for marriage. For others, it is an easier, low-commitment alternative to marriage. About 40 percent of children will now spend some of their childhood in a cohabiting union.

How is this working out? Not very well. Relationships defined by lower levels of commitment are, not unexpectedly, more likely to break up. Three-quarters of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents split up by the time they turn 16, compared with about one-third of children born to married parents. So apart from the counsel of cold showers or "let the good times roll," is there any good advice for those traversing the relational wilderness? Religion and morality contribute ideals of character. But social science also indicates some rough, practical wisdom.

First, while it may not be realistic to maintain the connection between marriage and sex, it remains essential to maintain the connection between marriage and childbearing. Marriage is the most effective institution to bind two parents for a long period in the common enterprise of raising a child -- particularly encouraging fathers to invest time and attention in the lives of their children. And the fatherless are some of the most disadvantaged, betrayed people in our society, prone to delinquency, poverty and academic failure. Cohabitation is no place for children.

Second, the age of first marriage is important to marital survival and happiness. Teen marriage is generally a bad idea, with much higher rates of divorce. Romeo and Juliet were, in fact, young fools. Later marriage has been one of the reasons for declining national divorce rates. But this does not mean the later the better. Divorce rates trend downward until leveling off in the early 20s. But people who marry after 27 tend to have less happy marriages -- perhaps because partners are set in their ways or have unrealistically high standards. The marital sweet spot seems to be in the early to mid-20s.

Third, having a series of low-commitment relationships does not bode well for later marital commitment. Some of this expresses preexisting traits -- people who already have a "nontraditional" view of commitment are less likely to be committed in marriage. But there is also evidence, according to Wilcox, that multiple failed relationships can "poison one's view of the opposite sex." Serial cohabitation trains people for divorce. In contrast, cohabitation by engaged couples seems to have no adverse effect on eventual marriage.

There is little use in preaching against a hurricane of social change. But delaying marriage creates moral, emotional and practical complications. The challenge, as always, is to humanize change. The answer, even in the relational wasteland, is responsibility, commitment and sacrifice for the sake of children.

mgerson@globalengage.org

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

FT: Singapore to rein in immigration

Singapore to rein in immigration

By Kevin Brown in Singapore

Published: September 16 2009 16:35 | Last updated: September 16 2009 16:35

Singapore is to impose curbs on immigration amid fears of social friction between citizens and hundreds of thousands of foreign workers who have poured into the country over the past decade.

Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister, said Singapore had taken in more than 100,000 foreign workers a year for several years as high economic growth burnished the lure of south-east Asia’s richest country.

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“We will not continue to admit people at this pace,” Mr Lee said. “We know we cannot take in unlimited numbers of foreign workers.”

The announcement follows moves to restrict immigration in several other countries, including the US, Australia and the UK, which have sought to target migrants with in- demand skills.

However, the prime minister’s comments, made to a group of students on Tuesday night, appeared designed to soothe public concern at the surge in migrants rather than signal a clampdown.

Mr Lee gave no details of how immigration would be reduced, which groups of potential migrants might be targeted, or how big the cut in numbers might be. Officials said there were no plans beyond an intention to “moderate” the flow.

The prime minister said the government understood public concerns about the level of immigration, and promised to shore up the attractions of citizenship in response to claims it confers few useful benefits that are not available to permanent residents.

However, Mr Lee also said that a “sustained, calibrated inflow” of immigrants was the only way for Singapore to maintain its international competitiveness, adding “Singapore will need new immigrants for the indefinite future”.

Trading Places: Migration in the Crisis

The economic downturn has inevitably hit migrant workers hard. Here, reporters from the FT’s foreign bureaux investigate the plight of migrants from Poland and the US to Brazil and China, to see which groups are returning home and which are finding innovative ways to survive the downturn abroad.

About 3.2m of Singapore’s 4.8m people are citizens, according to the government statistical service’s 2008 estimates, with a further 478,000 living in the island state as permanent residents. About 1.2m foreign workers without permanent residency make up 25 per cent of the population.

This compares with just 312,000 foreign workers without permanent status in 1990, who then accounted for 10 per cent of a total population of just over 3m.

Permanent residents cannot vote, are not eligible for some benefits and tax concessions available to citizens, and cannot purchase subsidised government-built housing. However, they are not required to do two years’ national service, although their male children are.

Concern about the influx of foreigners – many of whom are relatively unskilled migrants from Indonesia and mainland China – has mounted as the economy has slowed in the face of the global financial crisis. The government is forecasting that the economy will contract by 4 to 6 per cent this year.

Contributors to one popular blogging site listed a range of complaints on Wednesday, including claims that foreigners had pushed up residential property prices. However, some also defended immigration as a means of accessing essential skills.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Insead redraws the map

Insead redraws the map

By Della Bradshaw

Published: September 13 2009 22:55 | Last updated: September 13 2009 22:55

On September 12 1959, 57 men walked into the Château de Fontainebleau, the former country house of French kings, to begin a programme that would change fundamentally the way business schools operate. They were the first cohort of the Insead MBA.

Although Insead was not the first European business school – ESCP Europe in Paris, founded in 1819, holds that accolade – Insead’s establishment 50 years ago this week revolutionised management education.

In particular, Insead created and legitimised the one-year MBA programme, introduced the concept of global management and proved that a private, independent business school could operate outside the university system in Europe.

Interactive timeline

Fifty years of Insead, the school that broke the mould

With decades of hindsight, the creation of an MBA programme that was less than a year in duration – half the length and cost of the traditional US degree – looks inspired. But, says Claude Janssen, one of the founders of the school, the decision was determined as much by necessity as by design. “We thought a one-year MBA programme would be more appealing ... But we also didn’t have many faculty,” he concedes.

Perhaps even more innovative was that the five founders of the school, all fresh-faced Frenchmen and recent graduates from Harvard Business School, decided that from the outset the school had to be international. Planning their venture little more than a decade after the end of the second world war and at the birth of the European Union – the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 – they saw the school as part of the healing process for Europe.

“We thought we could contribute,” says Mr Janssen. “We decided that no more than one third of the students, board or faculty could be of one nationality.” In the event, 17 nationalities were represented in that first class and the first professor appointed was German.

Today, most top business schools, particularly in the US, still cannot match the cultural diversity that Insead established at the outset. According to Daniel Muzyka, dean of the Sauder school at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and former MBA director at Insead, the school created a “learning alchemy ... It always got its graduates to understand the power of diversity.”

And, says Prof Muzyka, an American: “Insead gave a platform and a voice to something other than the US-centric view of the world.”

Although the Paris Chamber of Commerce gave the fledgling business school seed funding, Insead had to pay its own way through accrued fees. “We made a programme that was expensive in Europe where education is free, but we were never worried about students coming. We always had more applicants than we could take care of,” says Mr Janssen.

It was this independence from the university system that made Insead successful, he says. “It made us entrepreneurial and closer to business.”

Frank Brown, the current dean, agrees. “Would Insead have had the freedom to do what it has done if it were part of a university?” he asks. “I doubt it.”

Being a stand-alone business school is not always positive, says Arnoud de Meyer, who taught at Insead for 23 years and is dean of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He says working in a university allows interaction between the business school and diverse departments.

“It [being independent] is a real disadvantage in this respect. Insead has tried to overcome this through close contact with business and alumni. And the alumni are very willing – Insead has fantastic alumni.”

But Prof de Meyer agrees that this independence gave Insead its strength. The school is run like a business and is prepared to take risks and cut its losses if things do not work out, he says. “There is a desire to experiment and a willingness to try out new things . . . If you had an idea you could always do it. Nobody ever said, ‘an academic institution doesn’t do that’.”

Tom Robertson, dean of the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, with which Insead has a research and exchange alliance, says Insead’s independence meant it had to be entrepreneurial and innovative and as a result attracted entrepreneurial faculty. And the creation of a second campus in Singapore a decade ago was “very, very brave”.

Insead does not intend to stop there. It runs programmes in Abu Dhabi, which is likely to become a third full campus. And Mr Brown says Insead has been at the forefront of developments in the virtual world Second Life.

These days, Insead MBA students can study anything – complex financial instruments, consumer marketing, or entrepreneurship. In 1959, things were more limited. Insead introduced a course on Europe, The Institutional, Economic and Social Aspects of European Affairs. It also included a business simulation game, sponsored by IBM, the computer maker. But the process was slightly different back then. With no computer on the site, computer punch cards had to be sent overnight to Paris for processing.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.