RMC Third World Index

As you travel around the world how do you tell if you are in a Third World country or not?

It’s a ticklish question and a challenging one. But here at the Road to the Middle Class we have devised the RMC Third World Index so you can tell immediately where you are.

It is simple really. As you drive along, check the side of the road. Are there any tracks winding into the fields or the bush, tracks that look like they are used by foot traffic or by bicycles?
If there are, then you are in the Third World, because the tracks mean that the country still has subsistence agriculture where people walk to and from the fields, and may live in a village inaccessible to four-wheeled traffic.

You can see these tracks in China and India. And you can see them in the Kingdom of Cambodia, where Lady Marjorie and I just visited.

But you do not see them in Thailand. There are no traditional agricultural villages left in Thailand; the agriculture is machine-powered. Even in the tribal villages up in the north of Thailand in the national parks the villagers drive to their rice fields on their Honda 100cc motorcycles.

So as you drive by Thai farms on Thailand’s excellent highways, the farms look like they could almost be in the United States. Farm yards are stocked with tractors and with trucks. Just like you’d expect to see in the good old USA.

Clamber over Angkor Wat, While You Still Can

SIEM REAP, CAMBODIA —
You haven’t lived until you have seen the gigantic rush hours at Siem Reap, the closest town to the monster palace and temple complex at Angkor Wat.

In 2005 they booked 1.5 million visitors to Angkor Wat, and this year they are predicting 2 million.

In consequence the sleepy village of Siem Reap has got itself an airport with a spanking new international terminal, and a permanent construction zone in which over 80 tourist hotels have been built in the last few years.

When the tourists are heading out of their hotels for the temple complex at 8:30 am, you can visualize the torrent of buses and Toyota mini-vans.

And when the tourists get to the ruins... Prepare to be shocked.

We westerners, trained to worship the environment before we even get out of diapers, expect to be firmly roped off from fragile ruins.

In our US National Parks we are used to the slow and relentless project to confine us to the road, or the trail, or the bus. Because if we stepped off the trail we would irreversibly damage the fragile ecology—of the alpine meadow, or the arid desert, or the cultural heritage of the adobe village—and that would never do.

But not at Angkor Wat. At least not yet.

They do have ropes up to stop you from fingering the amazing 150 foot long bas-relief of the monkey god Hanuman’s battle with the demon king.

But you can clamber over pretty well everything else, at least for now.

You’d better get on an airplane and get out here real soon. Because the euro-snots will pretty soon decide that ordinary people need to be kept off the sacred precincts—where only accredited researchers ought to tread.

Back From The Thai Jungle

CHIANG MAI, THAILAND —
Out on the marches between Thailand and Myanmar the terrain is pretty rough. They call it the “tribal areas.” And a lot of the inhabitants are refugees from Myanmar, as you might expect.

We visited a couple of villages, two of the few true agricultural villages left in Thailand. They are located in a National Park at the end of jeep trails.

But the Thai government does not just leave these villages in splendid isolation. Oh no. It is, you might say, very interested in village life in the tribal areas.

In fact it is interesting to observe how the Thai government extends its power into these tribal areas.

In the first place, the Thai government operates a government school, compulsory for all children, run by a single teacher who lives in the village (and likely ends up marrying a local village girl). In the village we visited there’s a one-room school house and it features a huge display of the King of Thailand and his queen. There’s a display of the Thai alphabet and the English alphabet (English teacher comes once a week on Friday).

Shocking to an American is the straight-on Thai nationalism of the school. Around eight in the morning each day there’s a flag-raising in the school yard, singing of the national anthem, and rudimentary military drill.

Inside the school building there is posted a big ten commandments in which the children are directed to be respectful to their parents and their teacher, to study hard, and to listen in class.

You can see that whatever the parents may want, the Thai government is determined to turn the children in the tribal areas into loyal Thai citizens.

Like everything else about the Thai government, it seems effective and efficient.

At The Royal Flora Expo

CHIANG MAI, THAILAND — The Royal Flora Expo opened here November 1 in Thailand’s second city, up in the north west of the nation near the border with Myanmar.

It’s an exposition of flowers plain and exotic on exhibition grounds perhaps a quarter of a mile on a side, nestled up against the mountains.

Central to the Expo is the Royal Pavilion, featuring the King of Thailand’s “initiatives and activities focusing on the agricultural projects. In addition there’s a Thai Tropical Garden, a Corporate Garden, the Expo Center, and an International Outdoor Garden with exhibits from about 25 nations from Iran to China.

Your correspondent could not stay long at the Royal Flora Expo, due to scheduling constraints but did manage to visit the Orchid Pavilion and the Tea Pavilion.

The Orchid Pavilion featured a dazzling array of orchids ordinary and exotic.

The Tea Pavilion had videos of diverse cultural practices with respect to tea, including the Japanese Tea Ceremony, European ladies enjoying afternoon tea, and Middle Eastern men who apparently enjoy tea in an “atmosphere of conversion,” which seems culturally appropriate. After conversion (or maybe the fractured English meant to say conversation) the visitor gets a chance to enjoy a cup of Oolong.

The Royal Flora Expo is set to run through January 31, 2007. If you are in Thailand and plan to visit Chiang Mai, be sure to block out some time to enjoy this splendid treat.

First Impressions of Thailand

ON THE ROAD IN THAILAND — It’s the roads, stupid. You drive for mile after mile, for hour after hour on first class roads all across southern Thailand. And there are four lane, six lane arterials through most of the towns you drive through.

And another thing. There don’t seem to be any traditional villages. Everyone is living in the towns, or in western-style isolated farm complexes.

It’s a surprise. You know that Thailand has recovered from the Asian Contagion of 1997-98. But the appearance of solid prosperity, the burgeoning businesses, the ubiquitous Toyota HiLux trucks and 4x4s, it means something.

And another thing. In India and China there is a class of transportation below what we see in the United States. Leaving aside the occasional ox-cart, which you don’t see in southern Thailand, there is also no sign of the motorcycle-based tricycle cargo vehicle. It’s pickup trucks everywhere, parked in front of businesses big and small. Maybe the truck is a old Nissan. But just as likely it is a shiny new Toyots HiLux 3.0D, with fancy roofrack and roo bars (OK so they don’t have kangaroos in Thailand, but you get what I mean.)

Here is something else. Outside your average southern Thailand city is a row of plant nurseries, looking just like what you would see in the United States.

Here is my take. You are getting pretty close to the top of the league when your city is supporting a bunch of businesses in the nursery lark.

By the way, anybody around here recently walked along the Bridge over the River Kwai (pronounced Kwer) whistling “Colonel Bogey?”

I thought not.

Milton Friedman Dead at 94

Back in the 1960s and 1970s there were three high-profile economists in the United States: John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, and Milton Friedman. For many years Samuelson and Friedman alternated writing a column at the back of Newsweek. Yes, those were the days when Time and Newsweek had pretensions of offering serious intellectual opinion.

Each of the three economists occupied an important niche. Galbraith offered liberals comforting liberal “conventional wisdom” while couched as though it was a courageous explosion of conventional ideas. Samuelson offered a compromise, writing a standard textbook which took a middle road between classical economics and lefty elitism. But Friedman was the real thing. As Holcomb B. Noble writes in the New York Times:

Milton Friedman [was] the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward less government and greater reliance on individual responsibility[.]

...
“Among economic scholars, Milton Friedman had no peer,” Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said yesterday. “The direct and indirect influences of his thinking on contemporary monetary economics would be difficult to overstate.”

Actually, Milton Friedman held a conventional view of monetary policy, the quantity theory of money. In the left-liberal era influenced by Keynes, this was perhaps a necessary return to basics. Keynesians were altogether too eager to manipulate monetary policy for political ends. Since Milton Friedman, scholars have tried to develop a more nuanced quantity theory, one that recognizes the confidence that people place in money as well as understand the fundamental importance of the quantity of money in circulation.

But it was Friedman’s example and inspiration as a fearless champion of freedom that made him the outstanding political intellectual of his generation. This is the opposite of Alan Greenspan’s view:

“From a longer-term point of view, it’s his academic achievements which will have lasting import. But I would not dismiss the profound impact he has already had on the American public’s view.”

On the contrary, it will be as a public intellectual and a controversialists that Friedman will be remembered.

And the proof of that is the central mission of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, founded in 1996 to promote school choice. After a century and a half of government monopoly education there is probably no more important work of public persuason than to move the United States and the world away from the disaster of public education.

It is the final measure of Milton Friedman, American hero, that he devoted the last years of his life to this noble cause.

Language Does Matter

Language, we are taught, is an innate human ability. We have, according to Noam Chomsky, an internal syntax that enables us to acquire language. Therefore, says MIT psychologist Steven Pinker, we should regard all language as equally valid. In other words the vernacular lanugage of the streets is just as human as the language of the academy.

In the current City Journal psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple begs to differ. No doubt there is an inherent ability for language, but just like any other innate human ability, the language ability depends on the way in which it is drawn out and developed.

Dalrymple spent many years working at an inner-city hospital and prison in England. In his experience, the lack of communications ability in the underclass people that he encountered was palpable.

I was struck not by the verbal felicity and invention of my patients and those around them but by their inability to express themselves with anything like facility: and this after 11 years of compulsory education, or (more accurately) attendance at school.

These people just could not articulate abstract thoughts, or even feelings beyond the most basic and crude.

And the reason is not too difficult to find. Underclass people are born to people that lack language skills, and so spend their childhood in an inarticulate environment. Then they go to failed schools where they fail to improve their language skills.

This, Dalrymple points out, adds up to a staqgering disability. Even at the basic level, where underclass people need to communicate with middle-class welfare-state bureaucrats in social services and criminal justice, their lack of language skills means that the bureaucrats do not find out, or do not bother to find out, what their needs are.

Beyond that, of course, they are cut off from the entire world of employment and culture where abstract reasoning and articulate speech is essential to a competently lived life.

And Dalrymple knows whereof he speaks. His father obtained a decent education and was an articulate man. But his uncle, due to lack of funds, did not get an education. This brilliant man was condemned to live his life unable to get the thought in his mind out into the world.

My uncle... remained trapped in the language of the slums. He was a highly intelligent man and what is more a very good one... But he was deeply inarticulate. His thoughts were too complex for the words and the syntax available to him. All through my childhood and beyond, I saw him struggle, like a man wrestling with an invisible boa constrictor, to express his far from foolish thoughts&mdashthoughts of a complexity that my father expressed effortlessly.

It’s cheap for the liberal multicultis to peddle their relativistic notions. They may not value the importance of proficiency in speech and written expression. But their whole livelihood is built upon this proficiency.

And, it might be added, their dominance of the public square depends, to a significant extent, upon keeping a significant minority of the population inarticulate and dependent.

Speech and language may indeed be innate human abilities. But like any innate ability, it is merely latent until you develop it and train it. Ask Tiger Woods.