This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on September 4, 2017 - September 10, 2017
You had my brother when you were 18 years old. Three years later, I came out. The odds were stacked against us. Single parent with two boys by the time you were 21 years old. Everybody told us we weren’t supposed to be here … we weren’t supposed to be here.”
When Kevin Durant, one of the world’s two best basketball players, won the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Most Valuable Player award in 2014, these were some of the things he said to his mother at the event’s press conference. He has a point. What odds would you give a 21-year-old single mother with two young sons to raise a player who would one day win the NBA’s most elite individual award, making millions of dollars along the way? They weren’t supposed to be there.
I think about this a lot. Not Kevin Durant’s speech per se, although I would encourage everyone to listen to it for it is a Hall-of-Fame worthy speech, but the idea of “we weren’t supposed to be here”. We see this often. The nature of life is such that the circumstances of a person’s birth are totally out of his control. Be lucky enough to be born healthy to a stable, loving and relatively well-off couple and you can expect to be set for life. Be unlucky enough to be born into an unstable home environment with constantly bickering parents with a low-income background in a low-income neighbourhood or country and, while you may still achieve success, the odds are stacked against you from the very start.
Of course, not everyone is destined for athletic success. The very best athletes necessarily work incredibly hard and are dedicated to the extreme to their craft, but they are also blessed with extraordinary natural talents and physical abilities. Yet, perhaps those who were not born with such gifts are the more remarkable, at least with regard to the idea “they weren’t supposed to be there”.
One story that is indelibly imprinted on my mind is of K Phugeneswaran, a student of SMK Seri Bintang Selatan, Cheras, who scored 7As in the 2015 SPM examination. So, what makes his story so special? Attaining 7As is a solid achievement but then we know of those who have achieved 10As or more in SPM. Well, try getting 7As with no water and electricity in your home because your parents cannot afford to pay for these. Try getting 7As while studying and sleeping in the school canteen or assembly area for two years. Try getting 7As while being a part-time pizza maker in a supermarket two months before the SPM examination just to pay for books for extra classes and tuition. Try getting As in SPM when you had scored just one A in PMR.
The odds of a student under such constraints achieving 7As are almost like the odds of getting heads 15 times in a row in a fair coin flip. Phugeneswaran wasn’t supposed to be there. But he was. And while I am sure there are other stories and students like him who perhaps did not get media coverage, I think we should all take a sobriety check and recognise that Phugeneswaran and students like him are the exception rather than the norm. They’re not supposed to be there. But they are.
In some ways, I do think of Malaysia as a country that isn’t supposed to be where it is today. In the economics literature on ethnic conflict, a widely held view put forth by London School of Economics professor Francesco Caselli is that the relationship between ethnic conflict and the size of the strongest ethnic group is an inverted U. If the strongest ethnic group is very large and, therefore, society is almost fully homogenous, the probability of ethnic conflict is very low. After all, no such conflicts could arise if nearly everyone were of the same ethnicity. But if the strongest ethnic group is very small and, therefore, society is almost fully heterogeneous, the probability of ethnic conflict is also very low as no one group would have enough support and power to seize control of resources or public goods.
Therefore, ethnic conflict is highest where there are a few large groups. According to a mechanism put forward by economists Bill Easterly and Ross Levine, ethnic fractionalisation between groups large enough to wield power against one another implies conflicts between groups, which may, therefore, imply an inability or unwillingness to generate broad public or democratic support for such things as the right education policy or appropriate infrastructure allocation. This makes countries worse off in the long run. As would have surely crossed your mind by now, Malaysia’s demographics put us squarely in the few large groups scenario that predicts a higher probability of ethnic conflict, which would deplete our economic development prospects.
Yet, from 1957 until today, after 60 years of independence, Malaysia has been among the most successful countries in the world in terms of economic growth. Yes, having abundant natural resources helps, being located in a favourable geographical area helps and being historically primed to undertake international trade helps but to be among the world’s fastest-growing countries over the past 60 years? And to do that despite a history of colonial institutions that propagated divide and rule? And despite economic theory telling us that we should see a much higher incidence of ethnic conflict? We aren’t supposed to be here. But we are.
What’s more, there is room for optimism. A recent BCA Research argues that based on measures of institutional strength and economic complexity, in the long term, Malaysia has the highest potential productivity score and the second highest potential growth score among all emerging market economies. The Transformasi Nasional 2050 (TN50) initiative holds great promise and has big potential to unite Malaysians under a shared vision of the future. There is much to be optimistic about and much potential to have.
And yet, I keep coming back to this — we aren’t supposed to be here. But we are. What we have today, we should not take for granted and, at the same time, what we can improve, we should work harder than anybody else to undertake those improvements because the odds are we will either regress to the mean or give in to what all known literature tells us about where we “should” be. Can we do much better? Yes, we can, but we should not forget that we have achieved a lot. Can we improve our national cohesion? Yes, we can, and we must, but let’s not forget how far we have come, even with the hiccups along the way. After all, no one gets everything right and the grand experiment that we call the Malaysian nation is bound to experience missteps and misjudgements along the way. Our responsibility as Malaysians is to learn from and fix those missteps and misjudgements as quickly and proficiently as possible.
And so, in my participation in the TN50 experiment, perhaps my vision of Malaysia and who we are just comes down to this. Maybe we’re the nation that’s not supposed to be among the best. But we are. And that’s who we are — we are the gritty and persistent nation who will do everything we can to punch above our weight and, more importantly, we are the people who will do everything we can to ensure everyone — Malaysians like Phugeneswaran and non-Malaysians alike — gets a decent shot at a good life. We aren’t supposed to be here. But we are.
Nicholas Khaw is an economist with the Khazanah Research and Investment Strategy Division
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