Jon: Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean who is/was a fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs and is currently a Singapore diplomat and ambassador to the UN, just published a book entitled: "Can Asians Think?" According to an interview I read with him recently, he believes that they can't, based on some disastrous political-socio-economic choices made by various Asian nations over the last thousand years. Unreal. Can you imagine the uproar in this country if someone wrote a book entitled, "Can Catholics Think?" or "Blacks", or "Jews" or "Muslims?" We'd lynch them.
The book may be quite interesting, but I'm not exactly going to buy and read it on the train between Queens and Manhattan... I'd be killed. Jon Me: I was on the CFIA's Student Council for several years (it's now the WCFIA if anyone cares - I doubt it). He was before my time - 1991-2. One of our most distinguished fellows, though, although not quite as much as the current President of South Korea, who was one for a year as well. His views aren't really all that popular anymore, though. He was one of the foremost proponents of the "Asian values" school, IIRC, and the United States's rapid recovery from its brief 1991 recession, combined with the 1998 Asian collapse, has made that argument a lot less promising. Gautam
