Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing “Thailand has never attained developed or wealthy status?” What are we talking about here? Well I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner, thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Economy at cross roads: World Bank calls for structural reform to avert two decades of low growth. Quoting directly: "It is accepted that a fertility rate of 2.1 is needed to maintain a country's population. Thailand, unlike many other countries is well below that figure. However, Thailand unlike most others has never attained a developed or wealthy status." 

Wow outsider, whoever you are that wrote this, I don't know what Thailand you are looking at but the Thailand I see, pretty wealthy, pretty developed. Does it look exactly like what you say a "developed country" should look like? Maybe not, but I kind of like that about Thailand. These also might be the same kind of people that come down to Kansas and tell us we are not developed enough or something like this. What works for Thailand works for Thailand but make no mistake, Thailand does not lack national wealth. Then people go on and on about "oh there is a big disparity between the wealthy and the lower classes in Thailand." Yeah there are some inequality issues. First of all, every time I ever hear that argument, or I ever hear that diagnosis of a symptom, immediately the next thing out of people's mouth is "we need to redistribute wealth," and it is like well that has always worked so well, so yeah let's go run off and do that! So yeah there are some inequality issues. 

That being said, the folks at the low end of the strata in terms of economic purchasing power, however you want to look at it in Thailand, are still orders of magnitude ahead of many folks that populate other countries very close in physical proximity to Thailand. So it is like what are we comparing here? Yeah okay, a western outsider, whatever, or any outsider can look on Thailand and say "oh you have got this structural problem with inequality, or you have these issues" and yeah it is not unfair to bring those up but it is unfair to look at them without looking at the broader context of the overall economy here. And at the end of the day I would say Thailand is a developed country. Is it still developing? In certain parts it is, but the country itself, if you look at it in its totality, is most assuredly a developed nation. And I don't think there is any doubt, I was downtown last night walking around the area near Khao San road down near the Palace and anybody that comes and goes to downtown Bangkok and looks at some of the national monuments and just that whole area, if you don't think that this country is wealthy, I don't know what to tell you. You are obviously almost willfully blind to the facts in front of your face.