088 - Value, Cost, and Price

Even just a couple of days into my stay in Thailand I've gained a refreshing close-up view of what value, cost, and price really are.

The cost of food is often 5+ times cheaper, even including delivery plus tip.

The cost of using the public train system, which seems superior to similar systems I've encountered in the US, Netherlands, and London, is once more 5+ times cheaper than the privatized train systems in Europe.

The cost of rent is easily 2-3 times cheaper than similar options in parts of Europe, 4 times cheaper than Seattle, and roughly 8 times cheaper than SF, NYC, and Boston based on my last look at those markets. The cost difference of buying a condo appears to be even greater than this, around 10x, and they do tend to build mega-structures like the 4,000 condo facility I found.

So, this begs a few questions. Are materials, food, gas, and electricity cheaper? No.

Rather, the cost difference stems from a system that hasn't spent decades inflating at a much greater pace than value is added. Significant value has been added and continues to be, but it has kept pace and evolved. In everything around me, I observe more efficient methods being applied than are typical in the US and Europe.

People in the "West" tend to immediately expect gentrification and grinding of those in poverty into the mud, and yet here I've found a modern Metropolis of 8 million plus exceeding those places in so many ways. The US expectations are true of how the US operates, not universal truths.

Cultures are each specialized to adapt in different ways, and the advantages I see here have been underestimated. This is also a major opportunity for collective intelligence systems, as there is much that the US and Europe could stand to learn from Thailand and countries like it.

The UK and Netherlands both have their own severe housing crises, which they saw coming for a long time and did little to prevent. Here mega-structures of housing are abundant. Prices in both NL and the UK also exploded for public transit costs after their mistake of privatizing it.

When value, cost, and price are well-aligned across these sorts of metrics, you get something that looks more like Bangkok. When the price is allowed to explode then costs snowball and value often suffers due to uneven distribution, rather than even improvement, resulting in cases like the UK and the US, as well as aspects of NL.

The future with regard to AI is much the same, including how dramatically it can vary based on policy. If anything, the degree of that variation will be measured in orders of magnitude rather than single-digit multiples.

Value offered must align with cost and price, and the places where it does will thrive in the long term. Citizens benefit directly from this balance, and the consolidation of funds and power is mitigated.