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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   41909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I have spent the past 5 months traveling between the US Midwest, California, Japan and Thailand. I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand.

I. Food and Services

Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.

Why is Thailand so trendy compared to Japan or the US? Basically, it is too expensive to take risks in rich countries. Thailand is a poor country but their economy feels incredibly healthy. Their money converts to pennies outside the country, but inside money trades hands so easily that anything feels possible. Food delivery and rideshares are so cheap because housing is so affordable that they can afford to live on such little money. Cab rides in rich countries are very expensive, because we have to pay for insurance, the pensions of drivers, and so on.

The quality of hotels has declined drastically in the US. I typically stay at mid-range hotels and rarely do I find that maid service is provided more often than once every three days. Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?

Airbnbs in Japan, fraught with regulation, are so bad. The apartments are old and cramped and dark and expensive. I am currently paying about $50 a night for an old build in a random part of a random city, and while the host is very kind, talkative, and helpful, it is also twice as expensive as the luxury airbnb I stayed at in Bangkok a month ago with a chic pool, gym, library, and dirt cheap food within walking distance. By the way, airbnbs and hotels in the midwest are incredibly expensive lately- why is it cheaper to stay in a room in a literal castle in Europe than a crappy hotel room that smells like weed in Ohio?

II. Airline Flight

I hate the cramped cheap seats on long flights. This time I flew from California to Japan and upgraded to a full-flat seat on Zipair, a low cost Japanese airline owned by JAL (Japan Airlines.) This 11 hour flight cost me $1515. I am not really going to complain, because it was great to have the extra room and I managed to sleep a bit. But the amenities on Zipair are shockingly meager. I asked for water early in the flight and she told me I had to order a bottle from the in flight service on my phone which they didn’t make available for another hour or so. There was no food provided, your only option was to order a few packaged snacks like Pringles from your phone.

A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself. They provided multiple delicious meals and snacks throughout the flight. It felt significantly less cheap than the Zipair experience.

By the way, I am concerned that the cost of international airline flight is far too cheap. The first time I traveled internationally was when I was in middle school around 2001. I believe my round trip flight between the US and London was about $1200 at that time. The inflation calculator I just checked said that’s the equivalent of $2190 today. I just checked google flights and the same round trip costs only around $491 today. The incredibly cheap barrier to entry of international flights seems like an obvious problem leading to more illegal immigration and erosion of local culture than I’ve ever seen anyone point out before.

III. Conclusion

You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.

————

I have to add a caveat. Whenever I am in Thailand I can never quite shake the feeling I’m about to get sick or get in some terrible accident. I don’t feel unsafe: people are very kind, and it’s not the same kind of fear that I feel in, say, the ghettoes of the US, which are truly scary. But buildings in Thailand don’t seem up to code, food safety is sometimes lacking (at least enough to fuel a constant anxiety in me) and my experience with the health care system (after passing out in a northern Thai hospital a few years ago) makes me know I must acknowledge the downsides to the “healthy economy” I admire in Thailand and be somewhat grateful for the safety standards and tradeoffs we make in rich countries. But I can only imagine that as the rest of the world catches up, the decline of the post WWII rich economies will continue to progress.

I'm a bit confused by this post; you open by stating that

I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand

but your evidence just appears to be that mid range hotels are better than low cost hotels, and national carriers are better than low cost carriers.

You do realise that Thailand also has low-cost airlines that nickel and dime you for everything and provide a very basic service? And high income countries all have airlines providing similar service to Thai airlines at similar prices?

It's the same with hotels. Your $20 a night hotel in Thailand is mid range but you can easily find much more basic hotels with similar service to the low end hotels you use in the US. The US is just a more expensive country, and prices reflect that.

Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?

Americans are so wildly successful that their time is worth far more than the entire $20 just to clean a room. This is not a sign of failure, it's quite the opposite.

This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.

This just means the data science guys messed up and over-specified the flight. The airline likely lost money on it, it's not sustainable to run an airplane at less than 70-80% utilization (paging /u/madmonzer to fact check me).

[ As an aside, there might be different accounting when the airline has to run a money-losing connection in order to capture the profitable long-haul international seats. Still, better to run it on a smaller plane rather than leaving an empty. ]

Hey, wait a minute, this is the second post you've made that attacks Japan and praises South Korea and Thailand! I thought it sounded familiar.

It's okay to dislike Japan, but I think you might have a bit of a narrow perspective here. Japan is like, twice as big as South Korea and seems to be doing pretty well for itself, lots of cultural output, okay wages, but an aging populace, an awful work culture, an awful face culture, and horrendous urbanization. South Korea... also has an aging populace, an awful work culture, an awful face culture, and horrendous urbanization, but it takes certain things to the extreme. Feminists have gone crazy over there and there is an absolutely wild gender war. The birth rate is 60% of what Japan's is, which is already pretty low. If you ask me, South Korea is doing a lot worse, regardless of how one might perceive their technology level and with-it-ness. Perhaps they are more open with you because they are more western, more international, and more feminist-inclined to the point where they view westerners as more feminist just because they're western. Japan is known for its racism and its insulated nature.

As for Thailand, I can't say much on it, never been there and I never hear any news from there. However, I have been talking to some Chinese people recently, and one of them went there and seems to think it's pretty dangerous and scary. Here are her words:

他们有枪击案，绑架要赎金，打你抓你去电信诈骗，或者将手脚砍掉卖艺之类的…..今年都有中国的小明星被骗去那里差点回不来。

还有一些是说当女生独自去更衣间或者卫生间的时候，里面其实有一个暗门，直接将你抓走。

但我们当时没有去芭提雅那些比较乱的地方，而且比较多人去就还好

但我们不小心住在了酒吧街，街边一排全是站着的女性和变性人

They have shootings, kidnappings for ransom, and scams where they hit you and take you to a place for telecommunication fraud, or cut off your limbs to make you a street performer... This year, even some minor Chinese celebrities were tricked into going there and almost couldn't come back.

There are also some stories about how when a girl goes to a changing room or a restroom by herself, there's actually a secret door inside and they just take you away.

But we didn't go to places like Pattaya that are more chaotic. Plus, since there were a lot of people there, it was okay.

But we accidentally stayed on a street with a lot of bars. The street was lined with women and transgender people standing along the side.

I think it's interesting that all around the world, upper-class women like to travel. I think China's youth is more liberal than many people think... Well, the ones I talk to, anyway.

Edit: Looks like the case she was talking about might be this one. Perhaps we can draw a comparison between Thailand and Mexico. Thailand is doing well for Southeast Asia, maybe the best, but still a not-so-nice neighboring country. Mexico, similarly, is one of the best Latin American countries. However, it has many faults, obviously.

The economics of air travel are not immediately obvious. It’s not just distance/duration. Route availability and the density of the endpoints are even more important because airplanes and their infrastructure are so expensive. I wouldn’t think this is a particular Thai advantage.

Though it is funny to see bitching about airline prices followed by a complaint that it’s too cheap. And you’re not even worried that it’s a bubble or something—no, you’re scared of visa jumpers? That’s less credible than the traditional complaints about tourists. I feel confident that the US-UK routes are not a significant contribution to either country’s illegal immigrants.

Your story makes me think of the stereotypical “gap year” amongst privileged college students. Only in that case, any insights about America’s bizarre economy are far more likely to grant an affinity for socialism. It’s enough to make me wonder how your policy prescription looks.

I think its more that about the Eternal September of international travel driven by price and accessibility. In the old times they were sending their best for work and tourism. Now, not so much.

/pol/ was making a lot of hay about Thailand and more recently Philippines allowing 'short term' visa free entry from India for example.

I do find it interesting how as international tourism gets more accessible to upwardly mobile developing nations their tourists tend to catch a lot of flak for visibility and doing undesired things. Chinese arguably got the most 20 years ago (though as somebody who travels a lot I think they've worked out most of the rough edges now), then Indians now since there's such a large mostly-affluent population. Even in my own experience I find that rich Africans (from Africa) tend to be some of the absolute worst in terms of obnoxiousness and interactions with service staff, but I assume that's downstream of the Nigerians I see being 1%ers in their own country and that being their typical cultural modus operandi around service staff.

I too remember the wave of Chinese mainlanders popping across to Hong Kong and the locals' reactions to young ladies wearing $10k+ outfits encouraging their toddlers to defecate out on the street.

Yeah like I'm not saying Africans are at some particular personal civility deficit but I feel like they're currently in the spot of just now being affluent enough and having enough of an upper class that you'll notice them. Give it another 20-30 years and it'll probably normalize.

Maybe if we didn’t keep increasing the minimum wage and other benefits to workers, we could have nice things. That’s the price we pay for equality. Although people will still complain.

America’s recent rise in blue collar wages is not driven by government fiat or by unions, the other usual culprit. It’s pure market economics- mostly the response to high inflation.

Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest.

What the heck is your definition of healthy????? Do you just think that being "trendy" means it's better in health and taste? Japanese food is amazing. You are probably the only person to visit Japan and say the food is shit. I mean it's not to everyone's personal tastes but how can you honestly call it bad?

South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.

Korean food is amazong too, but the korean food I know is cooled by grannys and old men in tiny restaraunts. I see nothing modern about that. And I also fail to see how it's any healthier than Japanese food.

In Japan, the food that many people eat every day is shit. It's very high in low quality carbs, grease, and salt. Most of the vegetables are fried, pickled, or otherwise covered in oil or salt. It really is as OP says, it's stuck in nutritional trends from decades ago, probably because the average age is quite high.

I'm not attacking Japanese food. It's delicious. And there are healthy meals like kaiseki, kaisendon, sushi, etc. but those are not things Japanese people eat regularly. The regular diet here is not great.

What the heck is your definition of healthy????? Do you just think that being "trendy" means it's better in health and taste?

It's always strange when I meet people like this. Theres a certain kind of person that fixates on a particular diet and reasons about how healthy food is by how closely it follows their chosen diet. It's hard for me to get into the head of people who are just completely immune to any actual examination of the outcomes of various diets and insists their diet is healthy. Someone downthread points out OPs supposedly healthier national diets have significantly worse outcomes than the supposedly unhealthy japanese diet and OP basically ignores it. I do know people like this IRL but they're all boomers probably basing their ideas off a debunked paper that was widely reported in the 70s or something. People have some utterly bizarre ideas about what food is healthy and I don't understand why theres so much intransience on this particular topic.

Same reason there’s a lot of intransigence on politics and religion: it’s a moral issue. It’s also closely linked to questions of willpower and akrasia for a lot of people, which is a particularly touchy subject. “The only reason you want to promote food X is because it aligns with your sinful and gluttonous lifestyle. I on the other hand am able to control my baser impulses, which is why I walk the path of true righteousness and eat food Y.”

I suspect OP is American and that this comment was specifically centered on the rarity and high cost of fresh fruits and vegetables, at least when compared to the US, Taiwan, Singapore, or any of the Southeast Asian countries.

I will go to my grave believing that US food quality is absolute trash tier to anyone who's ever eaten abroad. Asian cuisines in general do a much better job of incorporating vegetables into their dishes instead of relegating them into a bland, boiled mush to be tolerated rather than enjoyed. The only solution Americans seem to have found is to throw them raw into a bowl and coat them in syrup. The salad has thus become the central example of "healthy" food in the minds of Americans, because its competition is the grease soaked slop that comprises the bulk of the American diet.

There are other elements that go into a "healthy" meal, but if your definition is built on the common US conception of healthy = raw greens and fruits, that's not something you'll find in Japan. SE Asia will have more of that for climate/agricultural reasons and Koreans have a toxic culture of tripping over each other to be the first to chase after whatever could be the next trend (the constant boom-bust cycles of trendy specialty shops are a meme there; the movie Parasite had a reference to this with a character having lost money on a Taiwanese cake shop that likely went over a lot of heads abroad) so there are probably more "modern" and salad style shops there. Korean meals also tend to be served with an array of side dishes that often include raw vegetables.

I've eaten abroad, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Beijing, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, London, and quite a few other smaller cities in the respective countries listed. From home cooking to street vendors to Michelin-star restaurants, American food is great.

China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu, and it was also the only place where I felt food quality was noticeably worse, especially the meat. Other than that, the big difference is that everyone else makes sugar-free desserts. I think the very light use of sugar in desserts and baking is probably the single biggest culinary divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world.

It is also always strange when I see discussions like this, because cuisine is so global now. It feels like something straight out of a time capsule from 30 years ago, and even then the person expressing it was visiting Illinois or something. That one restaurant that made up half the restaurants in Beijing, we have them here in the U.S. as well, and have for years. You might have to get a table at the back of an Asian market, but it is the exact same food, prepared the same way. And conversely, the best meat I had the whole time I was in China was at a Texan BBQ joint that was positively delicious.

While the above is mostly about restaurants, I stayed in all these places (except Taiwan) long enough to do a fair deal of grocery shopping and home cooking as well. H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world, and their produce is fantastic.

Eh. I agree you can mostly get great foreign food in the handful of comparatively cosmopolitan coastal cities in the US (with exceptions: nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany), but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil. With "American cuisine" (burgers, fries, chicken wings), this probability goes up to something like 40%. The only exception seems to be the corner around New Orleans, which has a genuine homegrown cuisine that deserves the name. Away from the coasts, in my experience, it rapidly devolves to near-British conditions - I spent a few days in Chicago once, and was sort of astonished how highly-rated restaurants (I remember trying one each of Chinese, Japanese and Italian) consistently turned out to be dying mall food court tier.

China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu (...)

Where in China did you go? I haven't been to Beijing, but at least in the general area of Shanghai every larger town would at least have instances of the different major Chinese cuisines, which are fairly disjoint. There is a thing where every generic "premium mediocre" restaurant will offer a bad version of squirrel fish or whatever, but that's no different from how every such restaurant in a Western country will have a rump steak option priced at ~2x the median main.

nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany

Interesting - I live near a little Persian exclave. There’s a few Persian restaurants down the way. Guess they’re hard to find, though.

For bread, there’s a half-decent place I know of, but for anything good I’d recommend Wisconsin. It’s technically coastal.

but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil.

If this is happening to you the issue is likely something along the lines of too much fat or too much salt for your digestive system.

It's relatively common in America for Americans to have that problem with salt in Americanized Chinese food for instance.

I lived in Beijing for a year. It could just be that my Chinese friends loved Sichuan, but outside of the foreign quarter I would constantly get taken to different Sichuan restaurants that all had basically the exact same menu. And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.

Sichuanese has definitely taken off hard in the last decade or two, though having just been to Beijing I'd say there's a decent diversity available. Personally I just assume Hot Pot margins must be insane.

Ah. Yeah, Sichuanese food seems rather overrepresented (I'd intuitively chalk it up to it having become the default hotpot flavour, and hotpot being the default social activity - the same "hotpotty" spice mix is also exceedingly good at masking bad flavours, compared to most other Chinese flavouring templates).

And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.

Breakfast food is pretty standardised in every culture though. Go to the UK and complain about twenty different places all serving sausages and baked beans.

In the week I spent around Shanghai most recently, as far as I can remember I didn't touch anything Sichuan at all, without actively trying to - from what I can still recall, the things I had were either local to the areas I went (neither Shanghai's blanched seafoods, nor the fungal wastes of Anhui, nor the kind of rich pickle stuff in the middle of the two were at all similar to what you describe) or some variant or another of Northern (copious amounts of yang rou chuanr, a pretty good "Lanzhou hong shao" noodle bowl, the ongoing fad that is biangbiangmian).

Yeah I was just in Beijing. Definitely a trend towards Biang Biang/Shaanxi places lately.

American food is great.

It is if you look hard enough, it is, and you don't have to look too hard, but you have to admit that walking into a restaurant aimed at an American audience (so, including Asian and other ethnic cuisines) is a crapshoot in at least the "incorporating vegetables into their dishes" category. These days "bland, boiled mush" is rare, but "steamed, with butter and salt" might be the median and "your meat and starch comes with so few veggies they're practically just a garnish" is way more common than it should be.

H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world,

Have you been to Central Market? That upscale subsidiary is the H-E-B of H-E-Bs (except that ordinary H-E-B stores somehow accomplish high quality without high prices, while Central Market ... does not). When their grandmother last visited and wanted to spoil my kids, my son lobbied for (and got) a grocery shopping trip there, I guess on the theory that he had enough entertainment to last until Christmas but who knows when he'd next get let loose in an aisle with four or five hundred (not hyperbole) different kinds of gourmet cheese.

and their produce is fantastic.

You do still want to get there early and shop in person for the best selection. I usually order online for pickup, and that's still great for most fruits and veggies, but there are a few (fresh okra!) that are a crapshoot unless you pick your own.

H-E-B is also decent with charity and famous for disaster relief efforts. "Better than the government of Texas" isn't as high a bar as it should be in that case, admittedly, but it's still impressive that they clear it.

and even then the person expressing it was visiting Illinois or something.

I mean, sure, you can get some authentic, quality food in NYC or LA where there's enough of a market for them to import key ingredients directly, but the vast majority of America doesn't have these options. Illinois is far closer to a central example of the American dining experience.

it is the exact same food, prepared the same way.

I'll have to disagree here. I don't know the exact reasons (dilution of expertise, ingredient quality, market forces of a primarily American palate), but flavors and textures are noticeably worse in the US. I've spent a decent chunk of time in multiple American metro areas that claim to have top-tier food scenes (by American standards). Outside of NYC/LA, it is a rarity for me to encounter a restaurant that would surpass median standards in their country of origin. The quality distribution is so heavily left shifted.

American fruits and vegetables are really bad. I'd say that it's because they're selected for what they look like on a shelf and for how well they store in a warehouse or refrigerated truck. But that's the case in other countries too. And in my experience even locally grown "straight from the farm to the market" fruits and vegetables in America tend to taste flat and empty. So I don't know what really is the problem.

It's no wonder that Americans stereotypically dislike fruits and vegetables. The fruits and vegetables here tend to taste like mildly flavored water. I have a strong hunch that the lack of taste correlates with a lack of nutritional value.

Fruits and vegetables are cheap here in America too. We call it “shoplifting.”

Food anywhere else is surely more healthy than ours. But I find American food is more tasty and agreeable to my palette than a lot of other ethnic foods simply because I was raised on it. Chinese and Mexican food I have a very weak spot for. But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.

Who the hell steals vegetables?

Statistics are predictably elusive, but all I could find indicated that meat, cheese, and infant formula were the most popular stolen foods. Excluding alcohol, that is.

I also object to the idea that vulnerability to theft makes anything cheap, but I recognize that was tongue in cheek.

Statistics are predictably elusive, but all I could find indicated that meat, cheese, and infant formula were the most popular stolen foods. Excluding alcohol, that is.

Meat theft is a big enough deal in my (Canadian) corner of the world that some of the grocery stores were hiring extra security to watch over the meat section for a while there. I happened to see displays in the staff areas of one of these stores listing the most commonly stolen items and the other things mentioned here (and yes, laundry detergent too) were all on there. As for alcohol, you have to show ID through a secure window to even be let into the liquor stores.

By comparison they couldn't possibly care less about theft in the produce section.

Around here it seems to be laundry detergent for some reason. Don't ask me why, but every store has Tide locked up so that you have to get an employee to get it out for you.

What a coincidence. Detergent is locked up where I live also.

I went to Home Depot recently. I hadn't been in a while. Shocking how much was locked up. The installed metal gates across many shelves. For the most part not even that expensive of stuff. But I know that the organized shoplifting gangs target them in particular, do they're presumably responding sensibly.

If I were going to steal from Home Depot I wouldn't go for the power tools, I'd go for boxes of screws. That crap is expensive.

Crackheads being paid in drugs are, unsurprisingly, not the best planners. Plus power tools are probably easier to fence because they’re the responsibility of the individual workers, rather than purchased by the company on an account- it’s pretty easy to just take it out of the box and call it ‘gently used’.

Same reason as cigarettes in prison. It fulfills all the criteria for money; nonperishable store of value, fungible, everyone uses it, solves the coincidence of wants problem, easy to transport, etc.

Laundry detergent, razor blades, and baby formula are the big three of ghetto currency.

Who the hell steals vegetables?

You’d be surprised.

I also object to the idea that vulnerability to theft makes anything cheap, but I recognize that was tongue in cheek.

Thanks for noticing. Lol. A friend of mine impressed it upon me once: “you know if you shoplift you don’t pay taxes right?”

"you know if you shoplift you don’t pay taxes right?"

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the IRS expects you to declare the value of stolen goods (not returned within the calendar year) as income.

I hear that’s how they got Al Capone.

Even without shoplifting, fresh fruits and vegetables are generally more affordable and easily available in the US compared to Japan.

Syrup was an (in my opinion, mild) exaggeration in reference to the dressings I've seen people use for their salads.

I was partially referring to the ingredient quality in the US as well. I don't know enough about the food industry to have a definitive explanation for why (I suspect it has to do with optimization for mass production and shelf stability over flavor), but when I compare eating almost anything in the US to its equivalent in Italy, Japan, etc., all of the food feels somehow flattened or hollowed out. It's very difficult to describe, but I've spoken to many people from other countries across Europe and Asia who agree that there's something very "off" about the food here. I think this is most obvious with breads and meats. The US tries to compensate by setting sugar, fat, and salt settings to 11, which only makes the experience worse.

US produce is harvested underripe to give it maximum shelf life.

But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.

I believe that was intended to be a disparaging euphemism for salad dressings.

disparaging euphemism

Fun fact, the little-used word for this is a “dysphemism”

When you know people that put ketchup on burritos, this one doesn’t come far out of left field.

Definitely had me fooled.

Agreed, I almost didn't believe what I was reading. I've been to dozens of countries, and none of them hold a candle to Japan when it comes to food quality. I can't speak about outside of Tokyo, but even the random meals I had at random (what in any other country would be "hole in the wall") restaurants were phenomenal.

In postwar South Africa and Rhodesia, it was often noted by visitors that the (white) working class lived better lives than even the upper-middle class in Europe and North America. Even a mailman had a pool, a gardener/pool boy, a nanny, a maid. You would walk down a jacaranda-lined street in Salisbury, immaculately swept, the kind of place that would house doctors and bankers anywhere else, and the average resident would be like a high school teacher or the guy calling out departures at the railroad station.

Of course the foundation of that material affluence was cheap black labor. And it was that very labor that prevented - when the time came - white South Africans from migrating to the Western Cape (where they might have been a permanent supermajority). After all, in that scenario, they’d live just like other Europeans in European-majority countries, and to have a maid and a pool boy and a nanny in Denmark you need to be (well into, the threshold won’t cut it) the 99th percentile of income.

The Thais, of course, don’t have that specific racial hierarchy (although the Chinese, like everywhere in SEA, are still a market dominant minority), and so labor costs are mediated by actual supply and demand without artificial restriction. The best way to think of the Thai economy is as a highly unequal middle income country in which the top 5% are relatively affluent and everyone else is relatively poor. In a way, that makes it like Brazil but with a lower crime rate (for the usual reasons). Things are cheap in Thailand because labor costs are low. The rest of the story has been discussed elsewhere below.

Apparently one main reason for white affluence in Rhodesia was that even when blacks and whites were paid the same, social obligations to family members caused problems for blacks. If people who make money have to give it to their relatives, wealth becomes useless and it's impossible to save or invest for the future.

Same with indigenous Australians. Demand sharing from family and friends is speculated to have roots in hunter gatherer societies.

I'm of Anglo descent, my father was born in a pretty grim part of Northern UK just after WW2 and managed to get out of 'the poverty trap' via joining the army, getting a skilled trade and then heading overseas. But in his description the culture of poor Northern English households was pretty similar to the African and Indigenous mindset. He's one of 7 siblings, and whilst he was still domiciled anywhere near his mother he was expected to send about half of his post-tax wages back home to support the broader family.

Maybe less 'random cousin Igwe jumps out of a bush' than some of the African examples but a lot of this stuff is just downstream of being poor and having large families. It's always going to be difficult to be the first one trying to better yourself if the clan assumes that wins are socialized.

The missing part of all of these stories, IMO, is: where does the shared money go? If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice. In larger society we leave that to the government, or at least a local church, at significantly higher graft than my hypothetical, and someone trying to “make it on his own” is an obvious tax evader.

But I expect this isn’t the whole story, and the reality is an excess of men who don’t work or women who aren’t married or an unusual quantity of drink for the amount of money earned. That’s what’s really wrong: the family exerts authority to tax, but not authority to force good behavior. That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.

But I’d be interested in the specifics. The above is largely prejudice.

If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice.

It also depends on how much is communalized. Even if it just goes to the needy, any poor community is going to have enough needy that you could easily take away every penny that someone earns, give it to the needy, and still have needy. And the community isn't going to say "well, the needy already got 30% of his income, we'll let him keep the rest".

That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.

It's the same phenomenon.

Based on my dad's telling, it was a combination of drink, gambling, covering for injured/elderly men and women, covering pawn shop debts since frequently the money would run low just before the husbands returned from the sea. There was also an expectation of low-grade neighborhood socialism and enough men died or were injured on the boats that there was a pretty constant flow of widows, orphans and the like. Also my dad was there for essentially a very particular social moment between the Second World War (half the town was still ruins from the Blitz for his childhood) and the obsolescence of the Northern fishing communities for a plethora of reasons a few decades later. Which also increased the pressure on neighborhood charity networks since there were less boats and therefore less men going out on them and making great money for the time and place.

I haven't made a deep sociological inquiry of it, and my dad first left the fishing town at 14 to go to military school and then completely left the country at about 30 without spending all that much time actually living there.

Demand sharing is a terrible crab bucket that stops people from reaching escape velocity from an underprivileged life. I really sympathise for people that start out on hard mode. Many never had a chance.

It doesn't feel right to me that demand sharing is only a black/brown person thing. I've seen it growing up in white communities too.

Yeah I find my father's example interesting since paradoxically the fishermen were actually paid pretty well by general English working class standards.

But generally their lives would be spent half at sea in the middle of the Atlantic for weeks at a time, and then shore leave where they'd give over 85% of their pay packet to the wife/extended family and then drink the remainder. Made even worse by failing to do either usually marking you as a social outcast and meaning you weren't going to be invited back out on the ships for the next fishing run.

Yes, when young Africans talk about this they often call it the "Black Tax". It makes the kind of low-level capital accumulation necessary for growing a black middle class almost impossible, outside of people willing to move to the city or to a different country and cut ties with their family - a very difficult and painful thing to do in any culture, but particularly in African cultures. On the other hand, it's good for Malthusian survival.

It used to be the norm in Europe as well, back when subsistence farming was the default occupation.

Yeah my dad was born into a poor family in a fishing-dominated area of Northern England and prettymuch had to bail to Australia to get his family's hands out of his pockets.

There's also substantial movement inside the region so it's not purely a matter of Thai labor being cheaper. It's very likely supplemented with Cambodians, Indonesians etcetera so that even the Thai locals find the privileges surprisingly affordable.

So you miss cheap servants? I suggest relocating full time to South Africa or Brazil or something. Rich countries pay their service workers well enough for it to be out of reach of the upper middle class, except maybe as an occasional splurge.

Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded. The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.

You put it a bit more uncharitably, I don't think there's anything wrong with people being able to afford to live cheaply if they want. In America we prop this lifestyle up with welfare schemes- why is that more dignified?

Yes, actually that was a point I wanted to make and forgot about. The cost of labor is so high in rich countries that the quality of life for the middle class and the rich are degraded

This is my hope for an AI scenario: the downward pressure on labor cost should make services all around so much better. Of course, this really would only be good overall if the deflationary effects made up for it in total purchasing power.

God I don't even want to think about what AI-induced deflation would do to the financial system. Luckily the AIs will all be hyper-optimized to get consumers to spend money instead of saving it.

IMO the horror stories of deflation seem oversold for modest values of deflation (let's say low single digit percentages). I understand the theory, but there have been market sectors with drastic deflation in the last few decades (computers!) where you really could defer a purchase 12 months for a drastically better product, and yet they still sold like hotcakes and the market was considered "booming".

The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.

If you're talking about compute specifically then that is true in a sense but cheaper computers aren't really available and it's not really an option to buy them from a user perspective anyway because hardware requirements rise just in line with hardware improvements. I was fine with 2013s smartphones and I'm using them identically today, but those aren't available anymore and even if they were they'd probably not be usable anyway.

but cheaper computers aren't really available and

My cheap Chromebook (under $200 in 2024 dollars) is a much more capable machine than any of the machines in this Gateway 2000 catalog from 1995 that started at $1799 in 1995 dollars (75MHz Pentium, lol). It lacks a CD and 3.5" floppy drive, but supports WiFi and Bluetooth and has a comparably sized display. It's almost certainly faster emulating that Pentium than the original.

The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.

This can't be true, right? The original 8GB iPhone was $600 at the time. The 128GB Pixel 9a launched at $500.

And the equivalent to the pixel 9a in 2013 was the nexus 5 that cost 350$.

I can not get a phone that works similarly well today for 350$, regardless of what the system specs say, the software requirements for the same programs with the same functions are higher for no goddamn reason.

Oh yeah, certainly, sector-specific deflation is usually good, because it means that real productivity/quality gains are happening. It's generalized deflation which kills the economy, I believe, because it kills the availability of credit and the velocity of the money supply. Even if there's an increase in general productivity, the effects on the financial system would be extremely dire. But I'm not sold on AI causing deflation - if anything, if AI creates a strong deflationary pressure, then it makes sense for the government to print money to pay for debt/entitlements.

I don’t think the western model of debt for DoorDash is good; I think below-market housing should be more available.

At the same time, the native poor living better lives is good. They notice the improvement far more than the upper middle class notice getting to eat out more and better. Social equality is neither an idol nor a particularly bad thing.

The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.

This is partially due to density and economies of scale making operating costs lower. You still get this in richer places like Singapore and to a lesser extent in most of East Asia. There's a culture of having shops with 2-3 unique items, each with some minor variations, on the menu and high throughput.

The west has many places like this- fried chicken places, for example, often serve fried chicken and fries with only portion sizes differentiating the different option, maybe one is served as a sandwich.

The degree to which this is the case in East Asia is like, at least 5 times more than in the west. Any random food court in Thailand has probably 12 to 20 highly specialized food places that are all cheap and fresh, you're lucky if a random mall in the US has 8 food establishments in business, let alone cheap and fresh ones... Your average major mall in Thailand probably has 30-40 businesses just for food, not even counting the special booths that usually pop up for limited events that expand the count by another 20 or more. Truly blew my mind the first time I was in Thailand

Are we talking about outside of Bangkok?

Yeah, I went to Chiang Mai and Pattaya and it's the same way, we took a boat to a random island in the gulf and there were dozens of food vendors in the port, a beach on the coast we went to had endless food stalls. The density and variety of food options are staggering, you can't walk down a street without some woman cooking the best basil pork or whatever you've ever tried

Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Bangkok, these are all heavily touristed areas, which I would argue give a different picture of Thailand than you would get from a more local experience.

Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.)

On personal anecdote this feels kind of more of an indictment of the modern Western nutrition and food knowhow, whatever that consists of. I spent an year there, and basic Japanese university cafeteria chow + restaurant food had me lose 15kg, going from overweight to borderline normal, in a few months, without any special effort on my part. Like, a bowl of rice + some toppings would have me totally lose any sense of hunger for the rest of the day while keeping me energetic and alert (and doing more exercise than ever since), and I'd have to consciously try and eat more than that. Seems to work fine on the native population too.

I've posted about this before but I firmly believe that the answer to this is the lithium/chemical hunger hypothesis. I experienced the same thing when I was in Japan, but I was eating incredibly rich gourmet beef ramen for breakfast and washing it down with a sweet pastry. Still lost vast amounts of weight.

I don't have a strong position on this so random thoughts:

  • Japan makes you walk. I regularly travel between countries and when I look at my health app on my phone I can see exactly when I arrive and leave Japan because the steps taken in Japan are significantly higher than any other country I spend time in. The cities are set up such that you must walk far and wide. Train stations are large and mazelike. (This may not apply if you have a car in Japan- I have never driven in Asia.)
  • Japan is the most difficult country I've visited to eat healthy in. Fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive. (Yes there's cheap fruit/veggie stores but you have to seek them out.) It is the hardest country to find roasted meats without added fats in. Cuts of meat that are popular are very fatty. If you like seafood you will have a much easier time eating healthy (though you'll still be dodging breading and mayo.) I have struggled with my weight my whole life, the endless bowls of pasta and sandos and uber processed snacks everywhere are hard for me to resist.
  • Asian food in general tends to be less calorically dense than western foods, and spiciness has a mild laxative effect that reduces calories slightly as well. I think these two are slightly less applicable to Japanese food vs. Chinese or Thai cuisines, but the effect is still there if you're comparing rice to baguette or more calorically dense western foods.
  • I believe there's a social effect on people's sizes as well. I had a black friend in America who is overweight, lose quite a bit of weight, and then she said she felt like people could beat her up. She's since gained weight back. I don't really blame her. Being around bigger people does make me want to be a bigger person, while being around smaller people in Asia makes me feel like I don't need to eat as much. People in america in the 50s and 60s were much smaller as well, the fattening of america was a sort of arms race, and why I don't think ozempic is going to be as influential as people believe- some people want extra weight to throw around in their lives. In some places you don't need it.

The implied proposition that raw/fresh plant-based food = healthy seems suspect to me. Several human populations historically either had no such foods available to them at all, or only seasonally (note that the overwhelming majority of our edible plants are, in evolutionary terms, very recent creations); it would be strange, and does not seem apparent from real-world evidence, if their health suffered for it.

If you are not dead set on raw vegetables, I found it quite easy everywhere I went in Japan to find teishoku places that would give you half a dozen small plates of stewed or pickled mystery sansai with your rice and tiny portion of grilled fish.

For your other examples - Thailand/SEA are among the few regions that have a long-standing native traditions of eating copious amounts of raw or minimally-cooked vegetables, Korea is just extremely far up America's memetic colon (while their native food culture is all carbs, fermented foods and meat), and if you ask for raw vegetables in China people (locals and me both) will still look at you like you have a death wish.

while their native food culture is all carbs, fermented foods and meat

And pollock!

TBF it probably helped I was in a provincial university in the boondocks, a ways from the city center, so it was a hassle to go there on bicycle, narrowing down the food options. Like, the nearby options for anything with fries or bread or pasta were mostly famiresu chains that are sort of a weird uncanny valley imitation of some American diner. There was IIRC way more pasta and sandos in Tokyo. Going to the city center there was the best pasta I'd tasted to date but I wouldn't burn an hour+ of a day on the bicycle too often to get there :P. And I was on budget, which would bias me toward the school cafeteria or cheapo rice bowl places like Sukiya that didn't really give an urge to have the meal with extra everything. Going to visit as a grown up tourist with techie salary I engorge myself way more on the good stuff, so I guess moving there wouldn't have the same salutary effect anymore, unless I simultaneously went broke.

I mean, I eat Cajun(basically meat- usually cheap, fatty cuts- and rice slathered in fatty sauce) food with French and Mexican influences. But my portion sizes are normal, so I stay at a normal weight.

I’ve heard about Japanese portion sizes, I suspect this is what happens there as well.

I love Cajun food. I used to have a Cajun stepdad, he sucked but his cooking was the best. Thai people remind me so much of Cajuns.

Standard Japanese portion sizes are smaller than Western portions, typically, but it's very easy to add extra rice, extra noodles, extra fried chicken, extra broth, extra eggs, extra whatever you want, at every restaurant.........

A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself.

I'm not familiar with Thai Airways specifically, but a number of national state-owned airlines are run at a financial loss as a prestige effort. It's easy to have empty rows on new-ish planes when you don't care about making money but do care about the appearance of being a "modern country" with the airlines that entails.

I haven't heard that before but that makes sense. I've noticed poorer countries will often have nice, clean airports to give a good impression as well.

I think most of this can be explained by the fact that Thailand is a country who's economy is heavily dependent on tourism. When that's the case, they will optimize to make tourists happy over other concerns.

This may feel like a 'healthier' economy to you as a tourist, but I don't think it means the economy is healthier in any other meaningful sense.

I think most of this can be explained by the fact that Thailand is a country who's economy is heavily dependent on tourism. When that's the case, they will optimize to make tourists happy over other concerns.

Shouldn't this be the opposite? The place that's massively dependent on tourism with no real domestic economy should be rorting the fuck out of Rich Westerners whilst the place that actually has a diversifed economy should just have more of a fair market price for things?

No, because “no real domestic economy” means cheap labor supply means more competition for tourist dollars.

Florida would be a relevant comparison in this context. A huge pillar of its domestic economy is tourism.

Ripping off rich westerners by local standards can still be very cheap by rich westerner standards if you’re a poor country dependent on tourism.

I am a digital nomad, so I guess the line between whether I'm a tourist or not is sort of blurred, but I feel like my Thai friends born and raised in Thailand are happier and more content with their lives than my American friends born and raised in America, so I don't think it's totally the tourism effect. Thai people also seem to have a greater satisfaction with their hard work, have more to show for it- my partner is Thai and he can afford a car and a motorbike, an apartment in Bangkok, trips out of town several times a month, and so on, meanwhile my friends in the midwest well into their 30s are still living with family members or barely scraping by and have much more pessimistic outlooks on things

I keep reading your references to Bangkok, but Bangkok is not really representative of all Thailand. Surely this is something you are accounting for?

Self report life satisfaction is very similar between Thailand and the US and is slightly higher in the US.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder?tab=line&country=THA~USA

I wonder with life satisfaction if the USA might be weird in terms of age cohorts, where old people are happy and young people are unhappy. A young person in another country with a more even distribution might then find that their fellow young people seem more satisfied. Total speculation on my part though.

Fair, I can’t necessarily comment on the life satisfaction. I do believe that industrialization and modernization tend to crater general happiness levels so I’m not arguing on that front.

You were making an economic argument above though!

The world after modernization moves so much faster and is far more competitive than the world before it. Makes sense why people are so mentally drained, tired and stressed out. You have to grow up with a lot of grit and be used to difficult environments to live there and be truly happy as opposed to surviving and being content at best.

If the old people I spent my childhood and youth with (them born in the 1930s) are to be trusted, and given what I could observe of their habits and expectations, then the farmers who lived off of unmechanized agriculture, above all, hustled. They hustled every day, to make ends meet and to make sure that ends would continue to meet for another year. They hustled to make sure their fields yielded as much crop as possible, to make sure they got as much as possible out of their animals, and then they side-hustled to improve their social standing, to earn some money directly, to improve their working relationships with their neighbors and field-neighbors and craftsmen who provided them with tools and services, and to keep their houses from falling in on them. Theirs were lives of constant activity and an abyss of true abject poverty and physical deprivation and social sanction yawning left and right of the straight and narrow path. Even well into their 80s, these people remained as active as their bodies would permit, constantly hustling to save a few cents here or to make some improvement to their garden there or to socialize a little more.

They're practically a different species from the moderns who complain about working 40 hours a week, retreat into their little black boxes at every chance, spend extravagantly on a dazzling variety of luxuries, and who can rely on public welfare to catch them when they can't be assed to take care of their own affairs. Yes I know, old man yelling at clouds, "früher war alles besser". I'm a modern too, I know what I'm talking about.

People nowadays are mentallly drained, tired and stressed out? Maybe. Blame it on alienation, atomization, and in no small part on their brains being fried by a constant excess of sugar, screens and dopamine by any means. But it's not because they actually need to do more than peasants.

I also think working with your hands can be a lot more satisfying it's what we designed to do after all. Sure a lot of farming is backbreaking especially during harvest season. But crafting, sewing, woodworking, fishing? These are all things people do voluntarily in their free time.

The hobby version of these activities removes both the pressure and most of the worst parts of them.

People also farm in their free time. They call it gardening.

I agree with you, mind. Humans are bodies as well as minds. Just using one and not the other isn't just a waste; it's an impoverished form of existence.

This wildly underestimates the amount of labor and stress involved in subsistence agriculture.

Did you know that the a bunch of historical measurement units were traditionally defined in terms of ploughing speed? One furlong for an eight-ox team to plough until they needed a break. Use that time to set up for the next furrow. Repeat for an entire day and you have an acre. Repeat for an entire ploughing season and you have your effective limits on land.

Do this twice a year if you don’t want to starve. Spend the rest planting, weeding, foraging, harvesting, haymaking, shearing, milking, breeding, slaughtering, repairing, digging, building, etc., or you’ll still starve. Have your crops pillaged by a passing army and starve anyway.

And God forbid you’re a woman. You avoid some of those backbreaking tasks, but get your own set instead. Not to mention the joys of giving birth in the era before anesthetics or antibiotics.

Seriously. The past was much harsher than you’re imagining.

Premodern childbirth is less dangerous than is popularly imagined(although still much more dangerous than modern hospital births). Informed people might trot out the 1-2% per birth statistic but this is almost certainly an overestimate because it's calculated based off of recorded births, which were mostly of aristocrats, who started giving birth much younger than peasant girls.

…but had better access to nutrition, sanitation and medicine. I think data is all over the place. Even 1% per birth adds up over a life with 5-8 births!

More to the point, I don’t think a woman has to die in childbirth for it to make her life much more difficult. Assuming that the past was so much easier is hopelessly naive.

In the world before modernization you got up before the sun, worked your ass off until it set, and hoped nothing bad happened that meant you didn't survive anyway.

I thought that the hard working life of peasants was a bit overblown, that they would take long breaks, day drink, and get about half the year off. Based of vague half remembered scholarship, maybe Juliet Schor?

This is based on a never-published paper which was wrong. If you want a deep dive, see https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/

'Medieval peasants got half the year off' is a misconception based on the religious calendar of the medieval church, which allowed agricultural labor monday-saturday, less major feasts(impossible to estimate exactly how many but 36 is a normal median estimate from religious scholars- you could probably add a few more for feasts of local importance, and of course statistically 1/7 would happen on a Sunday anyways). This adds up to slightly more working days per year than the modern M-F minus a half dozen holidays workweek. Those days were, of course, much longer.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

As for winter, in climates where you can't do agriculture in the winter you have 'not freezing to death' work tasks to do instead like chopping wood.

And repairing your plough, your harrow, your cart and so on.

Tolstoy had the following to say about the peak of the peasant work year.

The day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of Levin’s most painful days. It was the very busiest working time, when all the peasantry show an extraordinary intensity of self-sacrifice in labor, such as is never shown in any other conditions of life, and would be highly esteemed if the men who showed these qualities themselves thought highly of them, and if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of this intense labor were not so simple.

To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep. And every year this is done all over Russia.

yeschad.jpg

Although I have no idea what they are doing at night that would so disrupt their sleep, light is expensive.

Edit - I guess threshing, shouldn't skim so much.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

If you mean people didn’t have modern concepts of leisure and recreation that’s true. The world they also had to concern themselves with was a lot smaller.

Sounds like most of what people complain about in the modern western world today.

Inaccurately.

And debt collectors would beg to differ.

Based.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Also, you did approximately nothing all winter.

Still had to take care of the animals. Keep the fires going. Make any necessary repairs. Do all the household tasks.

Yeah I've moved from Australia to Malaysia with admittedly a decent amount of accumulated savings and it's crazy how I can carve out essentially the same existence here for a third of what it'd cost in Australia to get anything barring tech items. Plus the upper-middle class cohort of high school/university friends I had in Australia is very decidedly not buying property or reproducing whilst my wife's about-equivalent cohort has a bunch of property and children at the same age.

I’m curious, how do you make a living over there?

I hit a pretty solid exit from a tech company a couple years ago so day to day expenses are well within passive income. Also some occasional remote consulting if opportunities pop up since my ex-field is still very much in the 'sell pickaxes to hopeful VCs' space.

Genuinely it doesn't take much to exist in Malaysia, though. I don't really track spending religiously but I'm living a very nice upper-middle class life for maybe 1.5k USD a month inclusive of a bunch of regional travel.

Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.

SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.

Clearly they're doing something quite a bit better than the nations you profess are clearly superior. It's fine to say that you prefer Thai food to Japanese food, I certainly do, but I don't really believe it's healthier. For instance, it might not be immediately obvious but thai cooking uses a lot for sugar.

You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.

Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional. That tells us very little about the productivity of society in general, just that it extracts money from young people and gives it to old people. It might even be that having a dysfunctional housing market makes the economy more productive because it forces young people to work more. If a house cost 300k rather than 1.5m then people with decent salaries might very well choose to work less.

You also have to realise that this situation is even worse in Thailand, with housing affordability and household debt a far higher than in the US.

SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.

For all of the comments about carbs being unhealthy for the last decade, I often think of how Japan, generally considered to have a healthy populace, must have a distinct lack of rice and noodles in the local cuisine.

/s if unclear.

ETA: Also a glut of cheap local produce.

the nations you profess are clearly superior

I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really, just trying to point out how things are counterintuitive to common assumptions among most people from rich countries and how things I've noticed have changed my perception

Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional[...]

Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...

I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really

Yes, you are.

Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...

And yet you fail to see the even greater dysfunction in the places you visit. You're just richer there man. Your analysis of the places you visit is just plain wrong, egregiously so.

What conclusions can we draw from your post? It's nice to be rich and the housing market is fucked.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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