"Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning." - Marlo Thomas

***

“That is the way the world is. I have explained this. I think I lost votes after I explained the awful truth. Nobody believed it, but slowly it dawned on them – especially the graduates – that yes, you marry a non-graduate, then you worry about whether or not your son or daughter is going to make it to the university!” - Minister Menthor Lee Kwan Yew


Naturally, there is an uproar about his remarks on "assortative mating", and he's dismissed as silly, a racist, a eugenicist, offensive and distasteful, compared to Hitler and all the usual.

Of course, what he should have said was:

"A very large proportion of what we call 'intelligence' (i.e. the conventional concept, rather than the bastardised concept of 'multiple intelligences' or 'emotional intelligence' rubbish) is inherited, though environmental and random factors affect it also.

However, education is a good proxy for intelligence because it's easy to find out someone's educational level (as opposed to his IQ or even 'intelligence' - which is unmeasurable), and education is relatively accessible for poor people in Singapore so even poor people can go to university.

So if you want your children to go to university, it is a good idea to marry a graduate, all things being equal.

However, if you don't treat children as a natural resource like I do, this probably won't matter very much to you"

However, he would've had to prepare this instead of ad-libbing it, everyone would have fallen asleep, no one would've understood what he was saying and he would have overrun his time.

(See also: Mainstream Science on Intelligence)