MM Lee On "Assortative Mating"

Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew first brought this up in the early 1980s but it is possibly the first time he gave it a fancy name: "assortative mating".

According to Channel News Asia, LKY explained to the 700 delegates at the Human Capital Summit in Singapore yesterday that "assortative mating" means "finding a spouse that is at your level".

“That’s the way the world is. If I have explained this, I think I will lose votes after I explain the awful truth. Nobody believes it, but slowly it will dawn on them, especially the graduates, yes. You marry a non-graduate, then you are going to worry if your son or daughter is going to make it to the university,” added MM Lee.

Watch the MM Lee speech on Channel News Asia (thanks to Wayang Party for putting this up)

Also from the Wayang Party website, past reminders that LKY always held this belief (as evidenced by his past National Day rally speeches):

“If you don’t include your women graduates in your breeding pool and leave them on the shelf, you would end up a more stupid society… So what happens? There will be less bright people to support dumb people in the next generation. That’s a problem.” - 1983 National Day Rally speech

“We must encourage those who earn less than $200 per month and cannot afford to nurture and educate many children never to have more than two… We will regret the time lost if we do not now take the first tentative steps towards correcting a trend which can leave our society with a large number of the physically, intellectually and culturally anaemic“. - 1967 National Day Rally speech

After the then-Prime Minister's speech in 1983, the government set up the Social Development Unit (SDU) in 1984 to “promote marriage among graduate singles".