Joe Studwell: belief

Transcript context

…What has gone wrong in Thailand? The 1990s — it looked so good. Foreign investment fell off. They’re going to lose manufacturing to China, it seems. There’s a lot of stagnation. Politics hasn’t gone so well. They were a relatively wealthy country for their region. Why didn’t that go better? Well, it hasn’t gone so badly. Thailand’s always had a pretty strong currency, partly as a result of tourism being a great big part of the economy. The manufacturing has hardly been hollowed out, and the politics has always been a total mess. [laughs] I don’t think the politics has become any worse, and the position of the monarchy — it’s always been a disaster. But Thailand has always functioned fine despite all of that. So, to me, Thailand doesn’t look like a big mess relative to what I’ve seen in the past at all. I suspect that they will carry on with this very messy politics that they have until at some point the relationship between the monarchy and politics is confronted. But that’s an almost revolutionary thing to contemplate in terms of Thailand. I’m sure you’re familiar with South Korean birth rates. What do you think is actually going to happen there over time? The country just disappears? Or it becomes filled with immigrants, possibly from Africa? Or they somehow manage massive birth subsidies which work? Those all seem quite improbable to me, but I’m not sure what I’m left with.…

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