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Chua’s argument goes against years of scientific research into what makes kids truly happy—and successful—in life.  Moreover, it rests on a faulty premise: Rather than being overly permissive, many American parents—especially the well-educated, affluent Americans reading excerpts in the WSJ or on Slate.com—are overly focused on achievement already.

Chua defines success narrowly, focusing on achievement and perfection at all costs: Success is getting straight As and being a violin or piano prodigy.  Three decades of research clearly suggests that such a narrow focus on achievement can produce wildly unhappy people. Yes, they may boast perfect report cards and stunning piano recitals. But we are a country full of high-achieving but depressed and suicidal college students, a record number of whom take prescription medication for anxiety and depression.

Chua argues that happiness comes from mastery, and that mastery is achieved through “tenacious practice, practice, practice.”  She’s right here—practice does fuel success—but she’s wrong that forced mastery will lead to happiness.  “Once a child starts to excel at something,” she writes, “he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.”

A country with an economic system that is not adequately flexible to allow its own individual citizens to choose for themselves their own answers to their economic problems and challenges has limited, or restricted, career choices. In such a country “success” is not broadly defined, it is narrowly defined. In other words, authoritarian governments, dictatorships, or whatever you want to call them, have few options for their people to attain “success” other than for their citizens to shoehorn their lives into regimented lifestyles. This should be no surprise to anyone; regimes create regimented lifestyles because those are the only lifestyles that lead to success within those economies.

Universities are also being used as flag carriers for national economic ambitions - driving forward modernisation plans. For some it's been a spectacularly fast rise. According to the OECD, in the 1960s South Korea had a similar national wealth to Afghanistan. Now it tops international education league tables and has some of the highest-rated universities in the world. The Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea was only founded in 1986 - and is now in the top 30 of the Times Higher's global league table, elbowing past many ancient and venerable institutions. It also wants to compete on an international stage so the university has decided that all its graduate programmes should be taught in English rather than Korean.

governments want to use universities to upgrade their workforce and develop hi-tech industries.

"Universities are being seen as a key to the new economies, they're trying to grow the knowledge economy by building a base in universities," says Professor Altbach. Families, from rural China to eastern Europe, are also seeing university as a way of helping their children to get higher-paid jobs. A growing middle-class in India is pushing an expansion in places. Universities also stand to gain from recruiting overseas. "Universities in the rich countries are making big bucks," he says. This international trade is worth at least $50 billion a year, he estimates, the lion's share currently being claimed by the US.

Technology, much of it hatched on university campuses, is also changing higher education and blurring national boundaries.

It raises many questions too. What are the expectations of this Facebook generation? They might have degrees and be able to see what is happening on the other side of the world, but will there be enough jobs to match their ambitions? Who is going to pay for such an expanded university system? And what about those who will struggle to afford a place?

The success of the US system is not just about funding, says Professor Altbach. It's also because it's well run and research is effectively organised. "Of course there are lots of lousy institutions in the US, but overall the system works well." Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Developed economies are already highly dependent on universities and if anything that reliance will increase” End Quote David Willetts UK universities minister The status of the US system has been bolstered by the link between its university research and developing hi-tech industries. Icons of the internet-age such Google and Facebook grew out of US campuses.

Some markets have local firms that compete on price to offer legitimate content (think the US, which has companies like Hulu, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft that compete to offer legal video content). But the authors conclude that, in most of the world, legitimate copyrighted goods are only distributed by huge multinational corporations whose dominant goals are not to service a large part of local markets but to “protect the pricing structure in the high-income countries that generate most of their profits.”

This might increase profits globally, but it has led to disaster in many developing economies, where piracy may run north of 90 percent. Given access to cheap digital tools, but charged terrific amounts of money for legitimate versions of content, users choose piracy.

In Russia, for instance, researchers noted that legal versions of the film The Dark Knight went for $15. That price, akin to what a US buyer would pay, might sound reasonable until you realize that Russians make less money in a year than US workers. As a percentage of their wages, that $15 price is actually equivalent to a US consumer dropping $75 on the film. Pirate versions can be had for one-third the price.

Simple crackdowns on pirate behavior won't work in the absence of pricing and other reforms, say the report's authors (who also note that even "developed" economies routinely pirate TV shows and movies that are not made legally available to them for days, weeks, or months after they originally appear elsewhere).

The "strong moralization of the debate” makes it difficult to discuss issues beyond enforcement, however, and the authors slam the content companies for lacking any credible "endgame" to their constant requests for more civil and police powers in the War on Piracy.

piracy is a “signal of unmet consumer demand.

Our studies raise concerns that it may be a long time before such accommodations to reality reach the international policy arena. Hardline enforcement positions may be futile at stemming the tide of piracy, but the United States bears few of the costs of such efforts, and US companies reap most of the modest benefits. This is a recipe for continued US pressure on developing countries, very possibly long after media business models in the United States and other high-income countries have changed.

Some European leaders, including Angela Merkel, may be backtracking fast on their commitment to nuclear power, but despite yesterday's escalation of the ongoing crisis in Fukushima, Japan, there appear to be no signs that India, China and other emerging economies will succumb to a similar backlash. For the emerging economies, overcoming poverty and insecurity of supply remain the overriding priorities of energy policy.

This wasn’t the case everywhere. Germany’s standards agency, established in 1887, was busy setting rules for everything from the content of dyes to the process for making porcelain; other European countries soon followed suit. Higher-quality products, in turn, helped the growth in Germany’s trade exceed that of the United States in the 1890s. America finally got its act together in 1894, when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics. And, in 1901, the United States became the last major economic power to establish an agency to set technological standards. The result was a boom in product innovation in all aspects of life during the 20th century. Today we can go to our hardware store and choose from hundreds of light bulbs that all conform to government-mandated quality and performance standards.

Technological standards not only promote innovation — they also can help protect one country’s industries from falling behind those of other countries. Today China, India and other rapidly growing nations are adopting standards that speed the deployment of new technologies. Without similar requirements to manufacture more technologically advanced products, American companies risk seeing the overseas markets for their products shrink while innovative goods from other countries flood the domestic market. To prevent that from happening, America needs not only to continue developing standards, but also to devise a strategy to apply them consistently and quickly.

The best approach would be to borrow from Japan, whose Top Runner program sets energy-efficiency standards by identifying technological leaders in a particular industry — say, washing machines — and mandating that the rest of the industry keep up. As technologies improve, the standards change as well, enabling a virtuous cycle of improvement. At the same time, the government should work with businesses to devise multidimensional standards, so that consumers don’t balk at products because they sacrifice, say, brightness and cost for energy efficiency.

This is not to say that innovation doesn’t bring disruption, and American policymakers can’t ignore the jobs that are lost when government standards sweep older technologies into the dustbin of history. An effective way forward on light bulbs, then, would be to apply standards only to those manufacturers that produce or import in large volume. Meanwhile, smaller, legacy light-bulb producers could remain, cushioning the blow to workers and meeting consumer demand.

Technologies and the standards that guide their deployment have revolutionized American society. They’ve been so successful, in fact, that the role of government has become invisible — so much so that even members of Congress should be excused for believing the government has no business mandating your choice of light bulbs.

China also sees hypocrisy in American discussions of Internet freedom. China comes in regularly for criticism over its "Great Firewall," but it suggests that the US government also restricts the Internet. While advocating Internet freedom, the US in fact imposes fairly strict restriction on cyberspace. On June 24, 2010, the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which will give the federal government "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. Handing government the power to control the Internet will only be the first step towards a greatly restricted Internet system, whereby individual IDs and government permission would be required to operate a website. The United States applies double standards on Internet freedom by requesting unrestricted "Internet freedom" in other countries, which becomes an important diplomatic tool for the United States to impose pressure and seek hegemony, and imposing strict restriction within its territory. An article on BBC on February 16, 2011 noted the US government wants to boost Internet freedom to give voices to citizens living in societies regarded as "closed" and questions those governments' control over information flow, although within its borders the US government tries to create a legal frame to fight the challenge posed by WikiLeaks. The US government might be sensitive to the impact of the free flow of electronic information on its territory for which it advocates, but it wants to practice diplomacy by other means, including the Internet, particularly the social networks. (The cyberspace bill never became law, and a revised version is still pending in Congress.)

Finally, there's pornography, which China bans. Pornographic content is rampant on the Internet and severely harms American children. Statistics show that seven in 10 children have accidentally accessed pornography on the Internet and one in three has done so intentionally. And the average age of exposure is 11 years old - some start at eight years old (The Washington Times, June 16, 2010). According to a survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 20 percent of American teens have sent or posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves. (www.co.jefferson.co.us, March 23, 2010). At least 500 profit-oriented nude chat websites were set up by teens in the United States, involving tens of thousands of pornographic pictures.

Just as a robust economic system is one that encourages early failures (the concepts of "fail small" and "fail fast"), the U.S. government should stop supporting dictatorial regimes for the sake of pseudostability and instead allow political noise to rise to the surface. Making an economy robust in the face of business swings requires allowing risk to be visible; the same is true in politics.

Both the recent financial crisis and the current political crisis in the Middle East are grounded in the rise of complexity, interdependence, and unpredictability. Policymakers in the United Kingdom and the United States have long promoted policies aimed at eliminating fluctuation -- no more booms and busts in the economy, no more "Iranian surprises" in foreign policy. These policies have almost always produced undesirable outcomes. For example, the U.S. banking system became very fragile following a succession of progressively larger bailouts and government interventions, particularly after the 1983 rescue of major banks (ironically, by the same Reagan administration that trumpeted free markets). In the United States, promoting these bad policies has been a bipartisan effort throughout. Republicans have been good at fragilizing large corporations through bailouts, and Democrats have been good at fragilizing the government. At the same time, the financial system as a whole exhibited little volatility; it kept getting weaker while providing policymakers with the illusion of stability, illustrated most notably when Ben Bernanke, who was then a member of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, declared the era of "the great moderation" in 2004.

Washington stabilized the market with bailouts and by allowing certain companies to grow "too big to fail." Because policymakers believed it was better to do something than to do nothing, they felt obligated to heal the economy rather than wait and see if it healed on its own.

The foreign policy equivalent is to support the incumbent no matter what. And just as banks took wild risks thanks to Greenspan's implicit insurance policy, client governments such as Hosni Mubarak's in Egypt for years engaged in overt plunder thanks to similarly reliable U.S. support.

Those who seek to prevent volatility on the grounds that any and all bumps in the road must be avoided paradoxically increase the probability that a tail risk will cause a major explosion.

In the realm of economics, price controls are designed to constrain volatility on the grounds that stable prices are a good thing. But although these controls might work in some rare situations, the long-term effect of any such system is an eventual and extremely costly blowup whose cleanup costs can far exceed the benefits accrued. The risks of a dictatorship, no matter how seemingly stable, are no different, in the long run, from those of an artificially controlled price.

Such attempts to institutionally engineer the world come in two types: those that conform to the world as it is and those that attempt to reform the world. The nature of humans, quite reasonably, is to intervene in an effort to alter their world and the outcomes it produces. But government interventions are laden with unintended -- and unforeseen -- consequences, particularly in complex systems, so humans must work with nature by tolerating systems that absorb human imperfections rather than seek to change them.

What is needed is a system that can prevent the harm done to citizens by the dishonesty of business elites; the limited competence of forecasters, economists, and statisticians; and the imperfections of regulation, not one that aims to eliminate these flaws. Humans must try to resist the illusion of control: just as foreign policy should be intelligence-proof (it should minimize its reliance on the competence of information-gathering organizations and the predictions of "experts" in what are inherently unpredictable domains), the economy should be regulator-proof, given that some regulations simply make the system itself more fragile. Due to the complexity of markets, intricate regulations simply serve to generate fees for lawyers and profits for sophisticated derivatives traders who can build complicated financial products that skirt those regulations.

The life of a turkey before Thanksgiving is illustrative: the turkey is fed for 1,000 days and every day seems to confirm that the farmer cares for it -- until the last day, when confidence is maximal. The "turkey problem" occurs when a naive analysis of stability is derived from the absence of past variations. Likewise, confidence in stability was maximal at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007.

The turkey problem for humans is the result of mistaking one environment for another. Humans simultaneously inhabit two systems: the linear and the complex. The linear domain is characterized by its predictability and the low degree of interaction among its components, which allows the use of mathematical methods that make forecasts reliable. In complex systems, there is an absence of visible causal links between the elements, masking a high degree of interdependence and extremely low predictability. Nonlinear elements are also present, such as those commonly known, and generally misunderstood, as "tipping points." Imagine someone who keeps adding sand to a sand pile without any visible consequence, until suddenly the entire pile crumbles. It would be foolish to blame the collapse on the last grain of sand rather than the structure of the pile, but that is what people do consistently, and that is the policy error.

Engineering, architecture, astronomy, most of physics, and much of common science are linear domains. The complex domain is the realm of the social world, epidemics, and economics. Crucially, the linear domain delivers mild variations without large shocks, whereas the complex domain delivers massive jumps and gaps. Complex systems are misunderstood, mostly because humans' sophistication, obtained over the history of human knowledge in the linear domain, does not transfer properly to the complex domain. Humans can predict a solar eclipse and the trajectory of a space vessel, but not the stock market or Egyptian political events. All man-made complex systems have commonalities and even universalities. Sadly, deceptive calm (followed by Black Swan surprises) seems to be one of those properties.

The system is responsible, not the components. But after the financial crisis of 2007-8, many people thought that predicting the subprime meltdown would have helped. It would not have, since it was a symptom of the crisis, not its underlying cause. Likewise, Obama's blaming "bad intelligence" for his administration's failure to predict the crisis in Egypt is symptomatic of both the misunderstanding of complex systems and the bad policies involved.

Obama's mistake illustrates the illusion of local causal chains -- that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect. The final episode of the upheaval in Egypt was unpredictable for all observers, especially those involved. As such, blaming the CIA is as foolish as funding it to forecast such events. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.

Political and economic "tail events" are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.

Most explanations being offered for the current turmoil in the Middle East follow the "catalysts as causes" confusion. The riots in Tunisia and Egypt were initially attributed to rising commodity prices, not to stifling and unpopular dictatorships. But Bahrain and Libya are countries with high gdps that can afford to import grain and other commodities. Again, the focus is wrong even if the logic is comforting. It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied -- what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the terrain are studied rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

When dealing with a system that is inherently unpredictable, what should be done? Differentiating between two types of countries is useful. In the first, changes in government do not lead to meaningful differences in political outcomes (since political tensions are out in the open). In the second type, changes in government lead to both drastic and deeply unpredictable changes.

Humans fear randomness -- a healthy ancestral trait inherited from a different environment. Whereas in the past, which was a more linear world, this trait enhanced fitness and increased chances of survival, it can have the reverse effect in today's complex world, making volatility take the shape of nasty Black Swans hiding behind deceptive periods of "great moderation." This is not to say that any and all volatility should be embraced. Insurance should not be banned, for example.

But alongside the "catalysts as causes" confusion sit two mental biases: the illusion of control and the action bias (the illusion that doing something is always better than doing nothing). This leads to the desire to impose man-made solutions

Variation is information. When there is no variation, there is no information. This explains the CIA's failure to predict the Egyptian revolution and, a generation before, the Iranian Revolution -- in both cases, the revolutionaries themselves did not have a clear idea of their relative strength with respect to the regime they were hoping to topple. So rather than subsidize and praise as a "force for stability" every tin-pot potentate on the planet, the U.S. government should encourage countries to let information flow upward through the transparency that comes with political agitation. It should not fear fluctuations per se, since allowing them to be in the open, as Italy and Lebanon both show in different ways, creates the stability of small jumps.

As Seneca wrote in De clementia, "Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all . . . just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches." The imposition of peace through repeated punishment lies at the heart of many seemingly intractable conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. Furthermore, dealing with seemingly reliable high-level officials rather than the people themselves prevents any peace treaty signed from being robust. The Romans were wise enough to know that only a free man under Roman law could be trusted to engage in a contract; by extension, only a free people can be trusted to abide by a treaty. Treaties that are negotiated with the consent of a broad swath of the populations on both sides of a conflict tend to survive. Just as no central bank is powerful enough to dictate stability, no superpower can be powerful enough to guarantee solid peace alone.

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, "A little bit of agitation gives motivation to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace so much as freedom." With freedom comes some unpredictable fluctuation. This is one of life's packages: there is no freedom without noise -- and no stability without volatility.∂

Only one other country, Chile, has written network neutrality requirements into its telecommunications law. The Chilean law, which was approved in July 2010, took effect in May.

In the US, an attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to impose a similar set of network neutrality restrictions on American operators has been tied up in legal challenges from the industry.

Trade in humans and their bodies is not a new phenomenon, but today’s businesses are historically unique, because they require advanced biomedicine, as well as ideas and values that enhance the trade in organs. Western medicine starts from the view that human illness and death are failures to be combated. It is within this conceptual climate – the dream of the regenerative body – that transplantation technology develops and demand for biological replacement parts grows.

In an era of transplants on demand, there is no way around this dilemma. The biological imperatives that guide the priority system of transplant waiting lists are easily transformed into economic values. As always where demand exceeds supply, people may not accept waiting their turn – and other countries and other peoples’ bodies give them the alternative they seek.

While colleges have been trumpeting the power of social media as an educational tool, here in Asia, going public with classwork runs counter to many cultural norms, surprising transplanted professors and making some students a little uneasy.

Publicly oriented Web 2.0 tools, like wikis, for instance, run up against ideas about how one should treat others in public. "People were very reluctant to edit things that other people had posted," said American-trained C. Jason Woodard, an assistant professor of information systems who started the wiki project two years ago. "I guess out of deference. People were very careful to not want to edit their peers. Getting people out of that mind-set has been a real challenge."

Students are also afraid of embarrassing themselves. Some privately expressed concern to me about putting unfinished work out on the Web for the world to see, as the assignment calls for them to do

faced hesitancy when asking students to use social-media tools for class projects. Few students seemed to freely post to blogs or Twitter, electing instead to communicate using Facebook accounts with the privacy set so that only close friends could see them

In a small country like Singapore, the traditional face-to-face network still reigns supreme. Members of a network are extremely loyal to that network, and if you are outside of it, a lot of times you aren't even given the time of day.

In fact, Singapore's future depends on technology and innovation at least according to its leaders, who have worked for years to position the country as friendly to the foreign investment that serves as its lifeblood. The city-state literally has no natural resources except its people, who it hopes to turn into "knowledge workers" (a buzzword I heard many times during my visit).

Yet this is a culture that many here describe as conservative, where people are not known for pushing boundaries. That was the first impression that Giorgos Cheliotis had when he first arrived to teach in Singapore several years ago from his native Greece.

he suspects they may be more comfortable because they are seniors, and because they feel that it has been assigned, and so they must.