The inspiration for the post came about because I am currently reading Private Education Singapore : Contemporary Issues and Challenges by Sam Choon-Yin, the Dean of PSB Academy. I picked this book up out of personal curiosity and, given my career plans, I really have no business sticking my nose into Private Education industry in Singapore but the information contained within the tome is too interesting for me to miss out on it. More details will follow once I finish the book but I just want to share some ideas surrounding Singapore's inherent hypocrisy around academic achievements and how we can employ some economic concepts to understand why people sometimes act like hypocrites when it comes to academic performance in our neurotic society today. I think the starting point is to understand what a positional good in economics is all about. A positional good has this property whereby the benefits ......