089 - Lessons From Southeast Asia

The world is full of astounding data, waiting to be discovered and have insights extracted. This is quite literally the case with countries, as they offer us "natural" observations about how complex systems can evolve and adapt in different ways. The more complex the system, the greater the potential difference.

The advantages demonstrated in one country will usually also be transferable to another, but that process of willful adaptation based on observed advantages is still a new and alien concept to many countries. Rather than a constant flow of short-term, near-sighted, and narrowly examined point adaptations, as countries typically follow today, a different kind of process is required.

The "West" has watched as Southeast Asia (SEA) and China have risen out of poverty and come to thrive in our new digital and massively connected and globalized world over recent decades. What they've neglected to see is their own slide into much the same dystopian poverty that SEA and China have risen out of.

The tables are already reversed, but blindness to this fact has been maintained, thanks in part to poverty and severe debt looking quite different in the US, UK, and parts of Europe today than it might have appeared in SEA and China three decades previous. The irony of this is that "Western" countries now desperately need to integrate viable methods and policies from countries 7-12 time zones away.

The US and Europe delivered many innovations in decades past, but in terms of housing, logistics, medical treatment, food, public transportation, and a variety of other domains many of these countries are drowning in their own inability.

In Bangkok, I've found reasonable homes that people can actually afford, in areas that have visibly benefited from city planning and an adaptive layer of added economic value such as street food vendors and pop-up shops. A modern transit system as good as any other I've seen, if not better, gives them to means to travel affordably, and people use that system well.

Logistics time and costs, as well as food costs, far surpass anything I've seen elsewhere, to such a point that a robotic swarm would have trouble competing. Amazon on its best day cannot yet approach this. The US in particular offers a good example of a decades-long failure to resolve logistics issues, with systemic critical shortages of the long-haul truckers it presently relies on to stay afloat.

The parks also show signs of greater environmental and human health awareness than I've observed in "Western" countries, including the most "progressive" areas of those countries. In Seattle, SF, and NYC, parks are places where drug addicts go to shoot up, smoke, and trip. In Bangkok, parks appear to be places where people dedicate time to their physical and mental health, which also contribute to the environment. It is very acutely telling that I've seen precisely zero cigarette butts in parks here.

SEA also holds at least one more counterintuitive advantage that may become clearer in 2024.

(...To be continued...)