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By Ray Fisman
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2011, at 1:38
PM ET
Amy Chua's "tiger mom" approach to
childrearing has become a national topic
of discussion bordering on obsession. She
has clearly tapped into deep-seated
anxieties among American parents and
educators about the country's children
increasingly slipping behind their
counterparts in the rising economic
giants of the East. The Tiger Mother
phenomenon came on the heels of global
math and science results that put
Chinese students (or, at least, the ones
who had migrated to Shanghai) well
ahead of the rest of the world, with
America's misdirected youth firmly
buried in the bottom half. It's easy to
imagine that soon the tables of the globaleconomy will be turned, with innumerate
Americans working for pennies an hour
on assembly lines producing next-
generation iPhones designed by Chinese
eggheads. The theme was even picked up
by President Obama in his State of the
Union call to reinvigorate American
global competitiveness.
While we shouldn't excuse the dismal
showing of U.S. high school students in
math and science, we may also not want
to push America's next generation to
compete head-on with the tiger childrenof the East. We may be wiser to celebrate
the aspects of American culture and
education—promoting free-thinking and
creativity over rote memorization—that
are well-suited to America's current place
in the global economy. Let China—with
its armies of flawless test-takers—
produce automobiles and computer chips
with error-free precision; we'll focus on
generating a few revolutionary ideas to
ensure the next iPhone or Facebook is
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Mary Gates and Karen Zuckerberg Weren't Tiger
MomsIs the Amy Chua approach bad for the American economy?
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conceived and designed in America.
One of the basic insights of modern
economics is that countries are better off
focusing on producing whatever it is that
they do relatively well—their so-called
comparative advantage. So, for example,if the United States has a particular
knack for producing Hollywood
entertainment, we'd do well to focus on
exporting blockbusters and use the
proceeds to buy T-shirts, sneakers, and
food.
It turns out, though, that global trade
isn't simply a matter of poor countries
sending iron ore and plastic toys to richnations to be exchanged for
supercomputers and action movies. Rich
countries trade a lot with other rich
countries. Some years ago, Gene
Grossman and Giovanni Maggi, a pair of
international economists, came up with a
clever explanation for at least some of
this trade between countries that would
seem to have similar skills for producing
sophisticated goods. If we buy their
story, it may have implications for what
the United States should take as its
priorities in keeping its competitive edge.
Their insight comes from the observation
that for some goods—like automobiles
and semiconductors—the value of the
final product can be undermined by any
problem in the design process or along
the production line. One poorly designed
or installed brake pedal, and the wholepackage is worth a lot less than that of
your error-free competitors. Economists
refer to this kind of production—where
the value of what's being produced is
undermined by one weak link—as O-ring
production, in reference to the space
shuttle Challenger, which exploded 25
years ago as a result of the failure of one
seemingly irrelevant O-ring seal in its
rocket booster.
But in other industries, it doesn't matter
how many mistakes you've made inexperimenting with new ideas as long as
someone has an "aha" moment now and
again. Pharmaceutical companies, for
example, are always looking for the next
blockbuster drug that will emerge amid
thousands of failed attempts.
The authors argue that precision-minded
societies—like Germany, Japan, and,
increasingly, China—have a relativeadvantage in churning out identical
copies of well-engineered products. They
produce armies of well-trained
technicians and scientists well-suited to
O-ring design and production.
By contrast, the U.S. contributes to the
global economy goods that require a few
talented people and their bright ideas—
we excel in areas like software design,
drug development, and financial services,
which we trade to the Germans, Japanese,
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and Chinese for automobiles and
computer chips. (Foreigners may no
longer appreciate our genius for financial
innovation, given the supposedly risk-
free mortgage-backed investments that
American bankers passed off onto
German bankers and Taiwaneseinsurance companies, investments that
turned out to be worthless.)
Aspects of our education system—the
progressive-education movement; the
science-fair tradition—may in fact be
well-suited to producing the labor force
that will allow us to continue to compete
on this basis. And even Amy Chua
describes her approach to learning as joyless and focused single-mindedly on
rote repetition and memorization at the
expense of free-thinking creative
development. The debate on the future of
American education reflects this tension
between teaching basic skills that
generate higher test scores and fostering
the blue-sky creativity that wins science
fairs and creates great scientists. Indeed,
some blame our increasing obsession
with test results for an equally alarming
decline in creativity.
This point was picked up by Larry
Summers—hardly known as lackadaisical
in personality or parenting style—who
pointed out in a debate with Chua at
Davos that if Karen Zuckerberg and Mary
Gates had been tiger moms, they never
would have let young Mark or Bill leave
Harvard to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, and we might not have Facebook
or Microsoft (though America would
probably have two more very competent
dentists or lawyers).
Of course, it's hard to invent Facebook or
design the iPhone without developing
sound foundations in math and science,
the kind of preparation that Gates,
Zuckerberg, and others born to privilege
receive in America's elite private schools.
The dismal showing of American
students in international tests impliesthat we're limiting the pool of possible
innovators by failing to provide this
training to most children.
It also doesn't mean that tiger moms
should be any more forgiving in strict
violin practice schedules or demands for
A+'s in everything (except gym and
art): That depends on whether they're
willing to give up stronger prospects of Ivy League acceptance for the long shot
of producing the next Bill Gates. But for
the American economy to exploit its
relative advantages fully, we may in fact
be better off with a few more easygoing
parents and fewer tiger moms.
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