Given the popularity of last week’s posts on microfinance (see here and here), I continue blogging about the topic this week and the next.
This week, however, I am blogging about microfinance as seen from within the industry. As such, I am blogging the five-point response a friend of my wife’s and mine — whom I refer to by the pseudonym “Chad” — has made to my previous two posts.
Chad works for a microfinance private equity firm and used to work for a leading online microfinance website. He has studied in the very best universities for both his undergraduate and subsequent professional degrees. More importantly, Chad has traveled extensively to the field to meet with stakeholders among the microfinance supply chain. See here for his first point.
Chad’s second point was:
On “Chinese” Mothers (Updated)
Because my wife (and erstwhile coauthor) is Chinese-American, some people have asked me over the last few days what I thought of Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal piece last weekend trying to explain the superiority of Chinese mothers.
For the record, even though my wife and I were “parented” in (sometimes very) different ways, we more or less got to the same point, so I really have no particular insight about parenting, Chinese or otherwise.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t give any attention to what I see as Amy Chua’s all-too-obvious play to sell more books, but The Last Psychiatrist has a post that is too good not to link to about Chua’s piece.
The Last Psychiatrist’s point is that Amy Chua isn’t trying to raise children, she’s trying to raise children who will get into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Heaven forbid they should “only” get into Cornell or Duke.
The best parts of The Last Psychiatrist’s post are: