Ngiam Tong Dow:There may be no second chance the next time around

IN THE aftermath of GE 2011, a new buzzword entered our political vocabulary. Political reporters wrote about the ‘new normal’ of Singapore politics. Being an ‘old normal’, I wondered what was new.

From third world to first: Like any other country in the world, Singapore now competes in a global economy. In such an economy, importing cheap foreign labour is no longer a viable strategy. It is a dead end.

That was until I spoke to NUS undergraduates at a ‘tea chat’ as a guest of the Master of Cinnamon College, one of seven new colleges forming part of NUS’s new University Town. I wanted to understand the mindset of the younger generation compared with the old mindset of my generation.

Except for the few activists of the University Socialist Club, my contemporaries at university were politically passive but not naive. In the political environment we were then in, we thought it prudent to keep our thoughts to ourselves.

In contrast, NUS undergraduates today are more articulate. They have courage of their own convictions, expressing their views vigorously at tutorials or the cafeteria.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has to deal with an electorate that is vastly different from the old normal of his father’s generation. The command politics of his father no longer works. While Mr Lee Kuan Yew appealed to emotions, PM has now to appeal to reason.

In my synopsis, I posed the question: Though Singapore has held seven general elections, can Singapore be considered a democratic state?

Let me state what we are not. We are not a theocratic state like the Vatican or present day Iran. We are definitely not ideological states like North Korea, Cuba or China.

The western concept of democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people. China’s emperors had to gain the consent of the people to earn the mandate of heaven to rule. In my view, the core purpose of government is to raise the livelihood of the people.

The People’s Action Party (PAP) has won every one of the seven general elections since independence in 1965. The PAP won the mandate to govern because it delivered jobs and housing. Singapore is almost a model state attracting some of the ablest people in the world to work here. Would they also live here and raise their families?

There are two competing strands in our body politic. The first strand is meritocracy. It is modelled on the Chinese imperial scholar system where the best minds compete in nationwide examinations presided over by the emperor himself. The Singapore President Scholar is akin to the Chinese Imperial Scholar. Both systems aim at identifying the best talent to serve the country.

The second strand relates to the system of selecting leaders. It is modelled on Plato’s Republic. In the Republic, peers select their own leaders until the philosopher king emerges. As the first among equals, he is accountable to no one but himself.

Over time, peer selection breeds a leadership that becomes complacent. Though our state is rooted in meritocracy, we must beware of the dead hand of peer selection. Elitism creeps in imperceptibly.

The recommendation by the ministerial salaries review committee to peg ministerial salaries to the median income of the top 1,000 income earners reflects an elitist mindset which is troubling. If the primary purpose of government is to raise the livelihood of the people, a better statistical measure of livelihood would be the median income of all workers, not just the top 1,000 income earners or the MX9 salary scale of the Civil Service.

Curiously, both the government and the Workers Party accept that ministerial salaries be pegged to high income earners rather than the median of the work force, which is $3,070 a month as at June 2011.

The term first world is the vocabulary applied to wealthy European countries in the early 20th Century. In the early 1900s, Argentina was considered a first world country. Dr (Henry) Kissinger praised Singapore for moving from third to first world. Singaporeans may agree with the first but not the second half of his compliment.

Singaporeans of my generation remember vividly the slums, joblessness, dirt and disease of the 1950s. Through dint of hard work and discipline, we moved rapidly from a labour to a skill-intensive economy. By the early 1970s, we achieved full employment with an unemployment rate of 3 per cent.

The great challenge for us today is that we have reached the limits of our skill-based model of growth. Nothing stands still. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are rapidly catching up on the United States, Japan and Europe in the automotive industry. China and Japan are embarking on the design and manufacture of commercial aircraft. But it will take considerably more time to succeed in the production of jet engines, landing gears and constant speed drives – key components of an aircraft.

Singapore has to move from a skill to a knowledge-based economy. The products and services of such an economy are characterised by high technological content. To position ourselves for such an economy, Singapore devotes the greater part of our national budget to education and training.

When I was in school in the 1950s, only three out my O level class of 40 went on to university. Today, 30 per cent of a primary school cohort enrol in tertiary education. Raising our average educational level from primary to post-secondary should make a world of difference for our international competitiveness.

So I observe with some dismay that the manufacturing share of our GDP dropped from a high of 30 per cent in the 1980s to 20 per cent currently. We need to ask ourselves why our concentration on engineering and science-based education is not yielding dividends in productivity and innovation.

Instead, the employment share of low-wage, low-skilled personal services is rising. Are we overeducating our children? This is a heretical thought contrary to all my basic EDB instincts. In EDB, our article of faith is that the higher the education level, the more rewarding will our jobs become. Our total factor productivity should be rising not stagnating.

In my view, productivity and real wages of the bottom 20 per cent of our work force have not risen because our labour policies allow employers easy access to low wage foreign labour. In national accounting, low wage foreign labour may not be as low-cost as employers believe. If we add the cost of housing, transportation, health and other social services which employers have to provide for their foreign work force, they may be better off training and equipping their Singaporean employees to raise their productivity. Rising productivity enables workers to be paid more. Inflation sets in only when wages are raised without any increase in productivity.

Productivity can only be raised when CEOs leave their comfort zones and take direct charge of the production process. They have to be hands on, not resorting to outsourcing. Productivity should be the key KPI (key performance indicator) for the award of bonuses to CEOs and management.

At the national level, PM is the CEO. Bonuses for the Cabinet should be pegged to increases in the median income of the work force, rather than the GDP.

Like any other country in the world, Singapore now competes in a global economy. In such an economy, importing cheap foreign labour is no longer a viable strategy. It is a dead end.

The 2012 budget is politically adroit, replete with spending proposals which basically are income transfers from the taxpayer to the poorly paid, the disadvantaged and the aged. Income transfers are palliatives, temporary reliefs to abate rising social discontent. They do not help to raise productivity. The real challenge is to grow the economy by raising total factor productivity.

It is not easy. A Japanese scholar pointed out in an article in Japan Echo that the optimum rate of productivity increase achieved by his country averaged 4 per cent annually. We need to remember that the Japanese are one of the most diligent people in the world. Singapore is already straining at the seams with a current resident population of five million. We are embarking on a crash programme to build more MRT lines, hospitals, HDB flats, schools and universities to accommodate the sudden surge in population.

The economic assumption is that we can increase our GDP if we can accommodate more people. In my view, even doubling our population to 10 million people will not make things better. More likely, a larger population can only make matters worse.

We have to grow through raising productivity, not higher headcount. We need to be smart enough to produce more with less. Our higher education levels and superior infrastructure enable us to compete in knowledge-based industries and services. We transformed ourselves in the 1970s from a labour to a skill-intensive economy.

There is one reality our younger generation has to face. In a global economy, you will be competing not only with friends and classmates but with the best and brightest of your generation in India, China, Brazil, Russia and Eastern Europe.

University graduates in China and India are willing to work for a tenth of what our young engineers and scientists expect. If we fail to raise our total factor productivity, Singapore would just be an also-ran in the race to be a knowledge-based economy.

When Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore in 1819, his town planner demarcated the town into several ethnic enclaves. Kampong Glam (Malays/Arabs), Chinatown (Hokkiens, Cantonese, Teochews), Little India (Tamils), and Tanglin (Europeans).
Empress Place on the left bank at the mouth of Singapore River was the administrative and civic centre. The British governor presided from the Istana. The Istana where our President and Prime Minister have their offices is the seat of government.

Each racial group was free to conduct their own trades, practice their own religions, set up their own schools, and largely married within their own race and ethnic group.

The colonial government provided the overarching framework of law and order and schooling in the English medium. Being a British colony, the language of administration was English. Access to English medium schools was open to all races. English became the lingua franca acceptable to all the races as none has any in-built advantage over the other.

From 1819 to 1959 when Singapore was granted self-government, our different races lived lives of passive co-existence. Even then, Singaporeans witnessed at first hand the madness of three racial riots in the 1950s-60s. Learning from bitter experience, our government established the inter-religious council and enacted legislation to protect minority rights.

Income gaps
In 2012, what will be the threat to social stability? In a society that is racially diverse and practising different faiths, it is matter of pride for me as a Singaporean that we have learnt to treat our neighbours as our friends. Future social unrest will arise not from racial or religious differences but from the growing class divide caused by widening income gaps. The top 1,000 earn million-dollar annual salaries while the rest a monthly median income of US$3,070. The gap is untenable.

Paradoxically, this income divide is seeded in our deep belief in meritocracy. In the past, equal opportunities in education have provided the social mobility to enable the bright boy from a poor family to make good. The playing field was level for all students.

The spread of private tuition has changed the educational playing field. During my school days, only the academically weak students of rich parents take remedial tuition. Taking private tuition was not a badge of honour. Today, any parent who can afford the fees will send their children not for remedial but enhancement classes to give their children a head-start over their classmates.

Though there will still be the exceptional individual who triumphs against all odds, more and more of our state scholars will come from upper, middle income families with professional parents. There is no easy answer to the problem of an uneven playing field in our schools. In itself, private tuition is unalloyed free enterprise which society should encourage, not frown upon.

The challenge is to level up, not to level down. One suggestion I have is to make classes for academically weaker children smaller. The student-teacher ratio should be more favourable than in brighter classes so that the teacher can give more personal attention to each student, which is what private tuition is all about.

The elitist among us will invariably ask the question whether this is the right allocation of teaching resources. This was the very question I asked of my late EDB colleague Ong Wee Hock who requested more funds to expand our industrial training centres. The ITCs are the precursor of our ITEs. I had to eat my own words later when our ITC trainees with barely O levels went on to start their own factories producing parts and components for MNCs.

It is hard to find the university graduate who becomes a successful entrepreneur. The prevailing reward system drives our graduates to become bureaucrats/managers both in government and business. White collar jobs pay better than blue collar jobs.

In the early 1970s when we achieved full employment, some of us in the EDB began to ask the question about the critical size of populations. We did some desktop research and found that there were several industrialised European countries with population size of around 5-6 million. These were Israel, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Our town planners went to work and concluded that Singapore with a land area of 670 square kilometres can comfortably accommodate a population of 5-6 million.

Flying on auto-pilot, we allowed in one million foreigners in the last decade. As we arrive at our numerical target of five million, Singaporeans find themselves squeezed on crowded MRT trains and buses. Low wage foreign workers replaced older Singaporean workers in menial jobs.

As our births fell below replacement levels, we resorted to immigration as an instrument to top up the babies that young Singaporean couples are not having. There are also elements of political re-engineering. Submerged in our immigration policies is the belief that to maintain racial harmony, we need to keep the current population balance constant.

I have come to the conclusion that we have been peering at the wrong end of the population telescope. Since the 1970s when job hopping became a bottleneck, computer technology has made many manual operations in production obsolete.

The key is to produce more with less manpower. The window to raise total factor productivity through application of knowledge and training is fast closing with the opening up of India, China and Indonesia. Singapore has lost two decades relying on low-wage, low-skilled foreign labour to drive economic growth.

Our managers and administrators are among the best paid in the world. They will have to get off their high horse and personally lead the drive for higher productivity. Outsourcing is a bad word in my vocabulary. Companies and government ministries should figure out how to train their staff and redesign jobs and processes to achieve more with less.

Grants should not be given to management (consultants) to do a job they are already paid to do. Instead, interest free loans should be given to enterprises with clear roadmaps to re-equip and raise the productivity of their workers.

I am against job credits in any form because they are simply wage subsidies which do not raise productivity in any way. My personal observation is that job credits simply add to the bottom line for payment of bonuses to management who do not have to lift a finger to raise the productivity of their enterprises.
We failed to bite the bullet in the 1980s to restructure our economy. There may be no second chance the next time around.

life

If you are not prepared to do national service, don’t become a PR.

Responding to MP Hri Kumar Nair’s suggestion to impose an NS tax on PRs and foreigners, Dr Ng said, “If you are not prepared to do national service, don’t become a PR. 

It’s a very clear message because in our system.

If you don’t fulfil your NS liabilities, you just can’t pay a fine. 
The penalties are very severe 

and it’s way beyond monetary penalties.

bore

14 days have passed since I resigned from work. Although I said to myself."I am enjoying my life now. I am free---I can sleep anytime I want, wake up anytime I want. I don't need to worry about me working the next day. (I need to be on bed at this hour, wake up at this hour, be at work at this hour, need to cook for my packed lunch or dinner, etc, etc}

But I'm starting to get really bored. That's the problem, though. Coz I've been working for 22 years already.

what population white paper did not tell you..

in the executive summary, speaking of getting “3% to 5% Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth on average” between now and 2020, and 2% to 3% thereafter. Strictly speaking, these were not assumptions. They were arbitrarily laid down targets, but once laid down, they effectively determined the result — which is that population has to rise to as many as 6.9 million. We can see the problem straight away: why is GDP growth rate the driver of any population policy? It’s like this: GDP growth comes from two broad elements: productivity growth and an increase in labour force. That is: existing hands creating more output by working more efficiently and productively, plus more hands coming on deck. It is a known fact that over the longish term, productivity growth rarely exceeds 2 percent per annum. Especially for a developed economy, even 2% might be a struggle; it could be 1%. Hence, if the laid-down target is 3 – 5% GDP growth, inescapably it must mean more hands on deck. The choice Singaporeans should be asked to consider is this: Do we prefer to have a more slowly-growing economy (1 to 2 % a year) with no further increase in population or do we prefer a faster-growing one with more foreigners in our midst? The White Paper does not give Singaporeans this choice. We’ve been using immigration to top up the population, but with such a low TFR, a high rate of immigration is needed. Moreover, it is a never-ending problem. So long as TFR remains this low, a high intake will be needed indefinitely. Such a prospect is virtually impossible to sell politically. what is a “demographically healthy” society? Well, it is a sort of idealised society that has a stable population from generation to generation; it is sustainable. It is not lumpy and schizoid like Singapore’s population, bursting upwards in one generation followed by a baby-bust in the next. The old-age dependency ratio in this idealised society is 2.25. There are 2.025 million persons in the working age range of 20 to 64 years compared to 900,000 persons aged 65 and older. You can check the calculation from Table 3 yourself. What does this tell us? It tells us that there is something wrong with the White Paper’s interpretation of good and bad. Our idealised ratio of 2.25, which is compatible with a demographically healthy society, is a lot closer to their “shock-horror” 2.1 than to the current 5.9, let alone the nostalgic 13.5 of 1970.

May this by-election provide the ‘Punggol Slap’ which the PAP will never forget!

Workers’ Party chief Low Thia Khiang reviving his infamous trademark "co-driver" analogy from the 2011 general election, Low said

policies must be devised to benefit the nation as a whole, instead of a smaller section of the population

. He said that if the latter situation occurs, the policy in question had failed. Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot afford to put our lives in the hands of a sleepy driver. Do not put another sleepy driver into Parliament

,” he said with gusto, to loud cheers from an estimated 8,000-strong rally crowd, its biggest turn-out of the three rallies. “May this by-election provide the ‘Punggol Slap’ which the PAP will never forget!”

PAP-AIM: how deep is the hole?

Referring to the controversial sale of management software by PAP town councils to Action Information Management (AIM), which is owned by the ruling party, party chairman Sylvia Lim said that even though the software was created using taxpayers' money, it was sold to an entity belonging to PAP. She said after the party won the contest at Aljunied GRC in 2011, they were able to “dig into documents” pertaining to the running of town councils. “There were aspects which showed how political, town management had become,” she said to an estimated crowd of about 7,000 people at an open field in Rivervale. “For instance, I have come across a few contracts signed by town councils, carrying a clause allowing for

termination of services if there should be a change in the composition of town council management, in other words, change of political management”.

The party chairman questioned the intention of such a clause, and asked if the ruling party was so determined to “trip” incoming opposition, even though

such an arrangement may not be in the public interest.

She said it was akin to sending soldiers to war, but taking away their ammunition in the field.

be free

free yourself. free your mind. do the things you like to do is happiness. and to live this world breathing the very fresh air is blessing indeed. life is indeed simple, why make it complicated.

PAP, AIM and the fat white elephant

In the end, only AIM submitted a bid on 20 July 2010

tender was close on 14th July 2010, and yet AIM submitted on 20th July 2010, 6 days after it has closed and they have awarded the contract. furthermore, they are the only bidder. moreover, it is linked to PAP as three directors are from former PAP MP. In page 6 of Jan 5th 2012 of today's The New Paper one of the companies that collected the tender document, Hutcabb Consulting, shed some light on what was in the documents. Hutcabb Consulting has an office located in Jalan Kilang and counts the Attorney-General Chamber and Ministry of Foreign Affairs as its clients: Chief Executive of Hutcabb Consulting, Mr. Oliver Tian told The New Papar that his company did not bid for the software because the town councils did not provide sufficient information about it in the tender document. "It was very hard to make a decision based on what was provided. After paying more than $200, we simply got a thin stack of documents and the town councils were unable to provide us with more information" - he said - The New Paper, Pg 6, 5 Jan 2013.

Christmas' eve

it has been a good year, 2012. and we wishes for another best year yet for next year, 2013. God has been good to all of us and we are delighted that we have done all our best. Life is full of ups and downs. we have been in the darkest valley and also highest mountain top. those feelings are hard to described and we have to thank God for his grace and goodness as well. we wishes all the best.

the world

The world we seen is the world we created in our mind.

the agony

there are certain things best not to talk about it. the recent incident on 19th Sept and 25th Sept 2012 are something that we will remembered for life as we are too self-centered. especially the latter date. we thought of ourselves and we have asked people about it. now we knew. when people slept in that room, and we are forced to rest elsewhere and being caught, the first thing that came to our mind that they have harmed us. instead, after much thoughts and pondering, we are at fault: there are other places that we have the keys! alas.

You didn't build that

You didn't build that" is a phrase from an election campaign speech delivered by President Barack Obama on July 13, 2012 in Roanoke, Virginia

On a campaign swing through Virginia, Obama stopped in Roanoke to speak to supporters.
In his remarks Obama noted that while he was willing to cut government waste, he would not gut investments that grow the economy or give tax breaks to millionares like himself or Mitt Romney. Obama went on to say that rich people did not get rich solely due to their own talent and hard work, but that, to varying degrees, they owe some of their success to good fortune and the contributions of government. Obama said in this context:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me – because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t – look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
Obama then cited the funding of the G.I. Bill, the creation of the middle class, the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam, inventing the Internet, and landing on the moon as examples of what he was talking about.

singaporean unemployed while foreigners working

we have ourselves to blame, and no one else.
no one owned you a living!

1 in 2 people in Singapore being either a foreigner or permanent resident.

As of December 2011, Singapore’s total population stands at 5.26 million, of which, 2 million or 38 per cent are permanent residents (0.54 million) and non-residents (1.46 million), which largely consist of work permit holders. There are currently 3.27 million Singapore citizens. That works out to roughly 1 in 2 people in Singapore being either a foreigner or permanent resident.

contented

never in my life be contented with what i have.
truly blessed and counted myself and my sisters and brother as well.
we are fortunate.
the most important things in life is family.
it is true.

For the last 20 years productivity in USA has been rising and real wages has remain stagnant

Lets get this very clear. Low wage workers are lowly paid not because of globalisation or technology. Our low wage workers are the lowest paid in the developed world as a result of the massive foreign influx in the last 10 years. Yet on Labour Day the PAP message to workers is they have to get their productivity up first before wages rise. Our workers have been underpaid for the current productivity level due to PAP policies. When the income gap, structural unemployment and low wage problems showed up a decade ago, the PAP insisted that skills upgrading and retraining was the solution to these problems - under these programs low wage workers were retrained to do one low wage job after another. After one decade of applying the wrong remedy, they now claim that increasing productivity is the key. However, we know this is not true, in the US where productivity has been increasing there was no corresponding increase in wages due to the wage-productivity gap. The increased productivity simply went to raising profit margins and CEO salaries. Singapore workers have far less power than Americans to bargain for better wages when productivity goes up because of the foreign influx. Also, as long as companies have access to cheap foreign labour, there is little incentive to improve productivity. I'm certain, based on the current set of policies, we are going to waste another decade and hundreds of thousands of low wage workers will continue to struggle in the coming years. Lets get this clear : the large foreign influx of the last 10 years was not about maintaining our workforce due to declining TFR but to expand the workforce - the numbers of 100,000 (2008) is just too big to justify using declining TFR. Also, when you import an adult, you're compensating for lower TFR of 20-30 years ago when that adult should have been born in Singapore - our TFR was about 1.7 to 1.8 during that time. By expanding the workforce so rapidly in the last 10 years, we have a even bigger ageing workforce to replace in 2030 .....the PAP worsened the original problem through its liberal immigration policy now tells us that it needs to import people to fix it! For the last 20 years productivity in USA has been rising and real wages has remain stagnant. This is known as the wage-productivity gap. Where did all the money go when productivity of workers go up? In a society where income inequality is very high, it goes to the top management as excessive compensation packages.

City will celebrate their first title in 44 years

Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany hails' crazy win: it was the best, but never again this way please Vincent Kompany described Manchester City’s injury-time title triumph as a ‘miracle’ after the most dramatic ending to a Premier League season

clear

I Love You

boy to girl:thank you so much hon!! I enjoy every single moment to be with you..I'm Happy that you are my gf and I Love You!!

girl to boy: am also happy bein wid you hon,,u are ONE in a million in dis planet..am so blessed for havin you in my life! i love you too..

You only need one person

You only need one person” my high school cross country coach once told me. At the time I thought she was referring to her – my coach whose job it was to guide me, teach me, keep me motivated, and remind me to stay focused. Turns out she meant me; I was the only person I needed.

I didn’t quite get her life lesson until much later in life and I’ve been relearning it and going through the lesson repeatedly ever since.

You only need one person – one person to believe in you, one person to push you, one person to stand up for you when others don’t. I get her lesson now. I have to be that one person because if I can’t be this one person to me than I can’t expect others to. More importantly though, I shouldn’t need to depend or expect others to join me in this role in my life so when it happens it’s should be respected, appreciated and regarded as pure bonus.

They support me but only as far as they can understand and grasp what it is they’re supporting. That’s where I need me to believe in me.

We all need this one person; we all need to be that one person to ourselves.

So to those who continually believe in me and in what I’m doing, thank you. From the bottom of my heart thank you. I can’t help but feel like I’ve let you down with my official record but I know that it’s one thing to talk it’s a whole different thing to do, to do what I do, and nobody can ever take that away from me.
I believe in me. I believe in what I stand for and in what I’m doing. I am the one person I need and everyone else is pure bonus.

be free

godfather

nose pain

fall in love, yet again.

fate

girl

miss you love

I'm gonna do what I have to do in order to get back to the people who are important to m

In 2003, 27-year-old Colorado native Aron Ralston was rock-climbing in Bluejohn Canyon in Utah when he accidentally set loose an 800-pound rock.

Trapped with only a liter of water, no jacket and a small, dull knife, Ralston realized what he'd have to do.

"It was a conversation I had out loud with myself. You're gonna have to cut your arm off, Aron. 'I don't want to cut my arm off.' Dude, you're gonna have to cut your arm off," he told CBS News.

Ralston considered suicide, but ultimately chose to break his own bones, cut off his own arm, rappel down a 60-foot cliff, then hike seven miles before being rescued by a helicopter that his mom had sent out.

"This is something I would not have believed that I was capable of doing. If you had told me eight years ago that I would do this, I wouldn't have believed it," he told CBS.

Rather than an animal instinct to survive, Ralston says he simply did what he had to do to see his loved ones again.

"Really it was a very simple thing, like, 'I'm gonna do what I have to do in order to get back to the people who are important to me,'" he said.

We'd want to see our loved ones again too

alien

less is good

less is good.

crab mentality

you're really such a nice and kindhearted man..appreciate it so much..though we are not same race, you cared and listened..it is just so sad sometimes that people of your own race are the one whose pulling you down., "crab mentality"?

Happiness

Happiness is a mental state of well-being characterized by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.[1] A variety of biological, psychological, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources.

humans seem happiest when they have
Pleasure (tasty foods, warm baths, etc.),
Engagement (or flow, the absorption of an enjoyed yet challenging activity),
Relationships (social ties have turned out to be extremely reliable indicator of happiness),
Meaning (a perceived quest or belonging to something bigger), and
Accomplishments (having realized tangible goals).

The Chinese Confucian thinker Mencius, who 2300 years ago sought to give advice to the ruthless political leaders of the warring states period, was convinced that the mind played a mediating role between the "lesser self" (the physiological self) and the "greater self" (the moral self) and that getting the priorities right between these two would lead to sage-hood. He argued that if we did not feel satisfaction or pleasure in nourishing one's "vital force" with "righteous deeds", that force would shrivel up (Mencius,6A:15 2A:2). More specifically, he mentions the experience of intoxicating joy if one celebrates the practice of the great virtues, especially through music.[7]