When Dr Mahathir Mohamad took over the reigns of government in Malaysia, there was only one dilemma which was expressed in his book, The Malay Dilemma . Now after a quarter of a century, there are three dilemmas instead of one.

The second dilemma is that almost our entire adult population is mortgaged to the banks over permanently depreciating assets like motor cars. When you buy a house or apartment, most of the time it appreciates. Only in times of severe recession does it depreciate and even then, there is always a healthy residual value.

Not so with the purchase of a car. Whether in good or bad economic times, the car value will invariably depreciate until it reaches zero. Thus investing in a car is not a sensible economic proposition unless your level of income is well above normal.

To seduce the general population to buy cars whether the people can afford it or not seems irresponsible to me. I maintain the word 'seduce' is the proper word because many of these people would have better use for their earnings, eg to better educate their children or give them better things of deeper value.

Not only that, the locals are paying higher prices for their cars than purchasers from overseas countries. Thus, they are made to subsidise the local car industry which is only a public company. Any benefit of this goes to the shareholders, not the general population. This is the danger of becoming a 'me too' country without thinking things out.

Japan and Korea succeeded; so can we. Sometimes, our leaders have to think things out clearly rather than following the success of other countries blindly. A case in point was our 'sogasoshas' (large general trading frim). We jumped onto the bandwagon without realising we did not have a strong SMI manufacturing base to supply goods to these sogasoshas.

Very soon, they were reduced to competing with the rubber and palm oil trading fraternities which had well-established connections in the trade. In Japan, there was a strong SMI manufacturing base which needed centralised marketing to save on marketing costs and also because of the language problem.

In other words, the sogasoshas sprang out of a natural need for their existence. There was a cart laden with goods and they needed a horse to take it to the market. We bought a horse and looked around for a cart, never mind whether it is laden with goods or not, we just needed a cart.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but it often leads to disastrous results. The Japanese used their own local people to pay dearly for their manufactured goods in order to reach an early break even point so that their goods could be sold cheaply overseas to earn foreign exchange.

Eventually, the cost of living became so prohibitive as a result of this burden placed upon the Japanese people that what resulted is what I call 'economic progeria' and Japan has been languishing in deflation for the last 10 years. For those who do not understand the term 'progeria', it is a disease in which a young boy of 10 ages like a man of 60.

While Europe and the developed world had long periods of prosperity before they slid into their current state, not so with many Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan. They have brief periods of prosperity before becoming an aging economy. If we do not watch it, Malaysia may soon join the ranks.

The third dilemma is the educational problem. To ride on emotionalism as a vehicle to political popularity is easy but it destroys the nation in the end. It is said that the difference between a politician and a statesman is that whereas the politician thinks about the next election, the statesman thinks about the next generation.

We are now caught in the throes of an educational problem that will take many years to rectify. I am not trying to blame anyone but what I hope is that our politicians will be farsighted and pragmatic enough to solve the three dilemmas and not create new ones.