The article focuses on a research paper by Alwyn Young, a business professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which looks at how Hong Kong, China and Singapore became such economics giants. Hong Kong and Singapore started on a similar footing in 1945. Both were city states, British colonies making their living as trading ports. Both climbed the same industrial ladder, moving up from textiles to plastics to consumer electronics to financial services. The sources of growth in the two territories turned out to be startlingly different. In the two decades after 1970, Hong Kong's output per worker went up more than 2.5 times, Singapore's a little more than twofold. By the mid-1980s Singapore's incremental capital-output ratio was twice Hong Kong's. Hong Kong seemed to benefit so much from the better education of its people.