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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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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