I’m writing up academic papers with special reference to the theme “The De-Thaksinisation of Thailand” and would be pleased to co-work and/or receive suggestions.
I deliberately put in “epistemological” in my statement re “measurable reality” in order to indicate a difference between common sense practical naivity, which might serve everyday research activities well, and more fundamental questions on the possibility of human knowledge, which would lead us to a somewhat more cautious and skeptical view on things. I thought your version of quasi-religious or “spiritual” belief in “science” in social investigation was laid to rest some time ago.
I was at a ‘people’s platform for democracy’ meeting the other day. Some comments were made about the excessive amount of funds from the health budget that are assigned to public servants. A medical doctor present, who works in the system, said this was fiddling the accounts. Because most of the health schemes are poorly funded, when civil servants use the health system they attract premium charges and levies on all manner of things – this allows the health system to then fund other activities.
Just a thought – I would have looked at the figues and taken them at face value.
Michael
nganadeeleg states that “Political parties that can read (or manipulate) mass opinion are likely to be be more successful than those that cannot.”
I propose that since that is the case, the importance of that opinion vs. fact is even MORE critical, as a divergence between the two has serious consequences, like war. The way the American public was duped (with their own collusion, to be sure) into the current disaster, or the way the Thai public is duped points to MORE work relating opinion to fact, not less.
As for Srithanonchai’s concern that “measureable reality” is “bizarrely unrealistic”, would he “construct a reality” where he is confident in stepping in front a a speeding train?
“Measureable reality” is based on constructing theory that maximizes explanatory power while minimizing axiomatic inputs. It is not a philosophical debate, it is scientific method. If you don’t accept that, then we end up arguing spiritual truth and that FAR more difficult than any science.
The last I checked, anthropology is a social science. As a science, one assumes it would follow scientific method, and in scientific method, extrapolating individual anectodes to larger populations is a big no-no. Bystander states the case for this quite well in response #7.
Further, anthropology includes the understanding human cultural development and social customs. Economics, or the allocation of scarce resources, cannot possibly be divorced from such considerations. If one is not using scientific method or considering economic factors in their study of human communities, one has no business calling his work anthropology.
What I see here is reportage – which is all well and good, but let’s not masquerade this in a pretense of science or research. Thailand is chock full of such surface pretensions which fall apart with any serious examination – and thus serious examination is systematically missing, as Mr. Fernquest points out. The Sasin business plan competitions are an excellent example. The Thai contestants in the competition, by and large, are not entrepreneurs or innovators – they take ideas developed by others and create business plans out of them in order to compete in the contest. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, but while Thai teams regulary win the competition, I am unaware of any of these business plans actually becoming funded businesses. This is because once the contest is won, the students go on to their consulting or banking careers, the plan lies on the shelf and no one ever follows up with the actual entrepreneurs or innovators who came up with the ideas in the plan. Yet another example of surface appeal with little substance.
I would make the same comment regarding the SET’s efforts – I see mostly gloss. For example, their investor relations training program is filled with low-level coporate staff who want to learn what to put in brochures and what a website should contain, rather than understand how to segment investors and match the appropriate investors to corporate strategy.
Lack of substantive debate is a major issue in Thailand, and it irks me to see more of it, especially in a forum which could be so much more.
that seems a little excessive. surely, the sky is the limit when people pay for this kind of things..same as wedding or ordination. but really, what’s the average and median. and how do that amounts look when normalized to their income or their net worth? are the total involved in paying the debt of the deceased and such, etc.
the danger of collecting anecdotes casually is that people tend to remember the extremes and the unusuals… and can easily lead to wrong impression, and wrong presumption in your later inquiry.. espeically if the sample size is small.
My sense is that the economic practices in Thailand and Cambodia are extremely different, even when the institutions look nominally similar, though I gladly admit my ethnographic experience in Thailand is extremely limited. In Cambodia, and based on my own fieldwork almost exclusively focused on funerals, the upshot of funeral finance is almost entirely dependent on a very few factors:
1. The wealth of the family
2. The social cohesion of the village
3. The relationship of the family to the monastic leadership
4. The manner of death.
The truly wealthy must spend a lot of money on funeral events. And although they recoup some of this from donations, it still ends up being a very large expense: the fees at the temple or for the mobile cremation station (called a Meru in Cambodia) are much higher, must be more elaborate, etc. More drink and food must be given, and better food. But given their wealth, even these much higher expenses represent very little compared to the proportional expenditure of the ‘respectable poor’ who must also attempt to at least hold a ceremony with drinks, food, etc. These can sink a family if they do not recoup a lot of the expense in donations.
This is where the social cohesion of the village enters the equation: in post-war Cambodia, this is a spotty issue which can in no way be geeneralized. In some of the villages I spent time in, there were highly motivated ritual specialist acaar (ajaan) or village leaders who reconstructed village-wide (or nearly so) mutual aid societies specifically surrounding the issue of funerals, so that no single funeral could sink a family. The fees were generally quite reasonable and collected personally on a monthly basis, such that there was always room for exceptions in dire circumstances. I was also told that in these communities, these strategies did not reduce the amount that was recouped in donations, which is an interested point. In villages with less cohesion and without such institutions, again, a funeral can sink a family, or can bring it reknown and new positions of prestige and access to wealth. It can be a gamble.
The relationship with the local clergy is important, but more so in the cities, where cremations are not supposed to be held in the street, but only at temples. Different temples charge different fees, depending on prestige, etc., so that different temples have wildly differing costs, and very different congregations. A good relationship with the abbot or the head funerary acaar will lower the price.
The manner of death can also change the price of course: in both directions, depending. If the family feels the need to celebrate the death in public fashion, the cost will be higher, and very few donations will be received (but those that are will often be more substantial and from closer relatives). This is not a hard and fast rule, and is being reshaped in the era of AIDS, and especially in middle and upper-class families whose new life expectancy results in more sudden deaths from stroke, heart failure, etc. If on the other hand, the death was somehow shameful to the family, or the family chooses not to celebrate the death publicly for whatever reason, the cremation can be relatively cheap. At one temple I spent a great deal of time at, the bodies of mob-murdered motorcycle suspects were burned every afternoon with no fee, since the families simply refused to claim the bodies. Similarly, since this was the only temple which would (at the time) cremate the bodies of AIDS sufferers, all these dead would be cremated here. Soem foreign NGOs helped subsidize these cremations through direct donations to the temple committee.
Of course, in the countryside, there are many families too poor to even consider any of this. A friend of mine simply cremated his father in a field and then brought as many of the bones and ashes as he could to the temple and buried them in the ground.
“I fail to see how a report of one family’s funeral expenses and how these were paid for provides any insight on the sustainability of rural debt.”
I’ve noticed the same problem with reports in the news. One or two cases are cited at length when what is actually needed are hard to come by stats or more extensive examples from participant ethnography.
Sub-optimal side deals where the bank’s real estate broker or loan officer gets a cut/commission. I have anecdotal evidence of the former. The whole “auction” process on repossessed real estate that still seems to be going on was far from transparent.
“Len Share” probably accounts for a lot of savings, that is not taxed. These neighborhood funeral pools are really small sums, at least in our neighborhood. I think the emotional solidarity from people coming to your loved one’s funeral and paying their respects is a lot more important. A funeral with only one person following the coffin would be very depressing. The legalised gambling that takes place during the Ngan Sop lightens the gloom a bit.
Two more items. Motorcycle dealership penetration into villages, usurious loans, sudden “forced” repossession and resale yields hefty profits for some. Certain consumer credit companies also gave loans recently with unclear terms where the borrower could opt to defer and defer until the loan became effectively several times larger than it was. Credit alone does not do the trick.
Business plans as a focus for project based learning have become popular and are well-adapted to an environment in which small business and individual initiative has potential. Sasin Business School has business plan competitions. I designed a second year Business English curriculum around a business plan. (survey, spreadsheets, sales presentations, critical questioning, posters/advertising, brochures, model products, spokespeople, limitless opportunities for language production)
The Stock Exchange of Thailand is actively involved in designing and implementing the curriculum for teaching economics basics in elementary schools. They wrote the textbooks too.
“The traitor is slated to be banished to live foever in the jungle…Civil servants …are not supposed to allow themselves to become henchmen for rogue politicians…”
Is this soldier language?
It’s very dramatic.
BTW they are selling black wristbands at 7-Eleven.
That mean “I love Naresuan” according to the cashier.
I also saw pink wristbands (???)
It’s too bad they are watering down what was originally a nice way to show one’s love of HMK.
In the context of this discussion on mass opinion, the following article might be interesting. Ilya Somin. 2004. “When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatenss Democracy.” Policy Analysis No. 525, September 22, 2004. This text should be downloadable from the web site of the Cato Institute.
As an aside, to an epistemological constructivist, the idea of the existence of “measurable reality” is bizarrely unrealistic. There is nothing but constructions of reality (whether achieved deductively/analytically or inductively/qualitatively). And it is only these constructions that compete with each other. Scholarly constructions are only insofar different from other sorts of constructions as they are produced by controlled procedures.
“They are not all running around getting themselves into debt on mobile phones and motorbikes!” Of course not. With a motorbike and mobile phone, why would anyone need to run around?
But thanks for that reference to my letter to the Economist, alluding to a sentence that was actually edited prior to printing, much to my chagrin. The printed version reads: “While buying motorcycles and mobile phones shored up [Thaksin’s] political base, and certainly helped “pump up domestic demand”, it did nothing to tackle the rising debt in the countryside.”
The original letter ended with “…it has also led to an increase in rural household debt, the consequences of which are not at all understood.” – a more sensible and fact-based comment that was also more tightly linked to the following paragraph.
Well-functioning debt markets can be a wonderful part of rural (or indeed any) development – but this requires effective credit scoring by lenders and productive debt management by borrowers, both of which are integral parts of any working microcredit program. I continue to look in vain for any substantial examination of either credit-scoring or productivity of TRT’s rural debt schemes; in fact at a government-hosted conference where both Mr Thaksin and Mohammed Yunus spoke, and every TRT program had lavish booths on display, not one of the bubbly presenters at any of the booths could produce any such information.
Similarly, I fail to see how a report of one family’s funeral expenses and how these were paid for provides any insight on the sustainability of rural debt. Are you claiming that there is a widespread system of group support that mitigates NPL creation, of the time created by Grameen over years of trial and error? If so, you need to show a bit more than a single observation.
Whilst I don’t want to buy into a debate about academic/social research, I am interested in the following statement by hpboothe:
“How is individual or even mass opinion on practical policy issues useful in isolation from what relation those opinions have on measurable reality? Consider that in 2002 a good proportion of the US believed that Saddam Hussein was associated with the 9/11 attacks to see just where ill-informed public opinon can lead.”
Because of the ‘one man, one vote’ system, I think it is important to know what peoples opinions are (especially mass opinion), irrespective of whether those opinions bear any relationship to measurable reality.
Political parties that can read (or manipulate) mass opinion are likely to be be more successful than those that cannot.
fall, don’t forget to add “murder unborn fetuses”, “allow khmer voodoo shaman to take over the emerald buddha”, and “open up the gates to hell” in that litany of Thaksin evils 🙂
Mr Pig Latin: Thank you for your insightful analysis of my motivations, you’ve saved me countless hours on the psychiatrists couch. You will notice, however, that my note to the Economist was exactly along the lines of my critiques of Mr. Walker – that sweeping pronouncements made on the basis of faulty analysis or without a shred of evidence whatsoever are of marginal utility apart from making noise.
The financial problems in the 30-B health care plan, the structural problems in the rural development schemes, the rising consumption & debt in the countryside; none of these are opinions – all can be demonstrated conclusively. My prediction of a future debt crisis and of Thaksin coming back to “save” the country from problems he initiated are speculative of course – but I am unaware of how to research the future.
The reason I have “not provided more of what you claim to be missing” is because I am also unaware of how to provide what I am missing.
“How do you start a tutorial?” you ask. I would hope a tutorial would begin with a fact base. If I had such a fact base (e.g. statistics on village lending NPLs), I would certainly post them somewhere. However, I am not contending that these programs are or are not successful; I am contending that those who do should back up their claims with credible data, but apparently that’s asking for too much.
Again, I refer you to Mr. Walker’s post regarding the BMJ article that did analyze the 30-B health care scheme. It has to date generated one comment, a thanks for the post. No discussion, no conversation. I find it sad that actual research gets such a reception while so much attention goes to unsubstantiated, unverifiable speculation.
Yes, that’s right. The key point of my post is that there are forms of what might be called “social saving” that are overlooked in discussion about rural household finances. Looking back over my notes I see that in the case I referred to the family recovered, from various sources, about 75,000 baht. So they had pay 10,000 baht themself.
As for what the money is spent on. I have not collected any detailed data on this. I suspect the main item is food and drink. Other expenses include transport of the body to the home from hospital, payment to the local “undertaker” for various ritual services, the coffin, the cremation “platform” (prasart), payments to monks and other ritual specialists, purchase of flowers, and sometimes payment for entertainment. And there may well be others.
Mr Walker: You may call me whatever you wish, and let me assure you that my head of steam is present regardless of your particular academic standards. Not having been to the conference, I certainly cannot assess the dimness of the mob present, but I’m sure it’s gratifying to you to find an appreciative audience, just as Paris Hilton must be happy to have fans, dim or otherwise. But none of that addresses the issues that I am raising, which is why the dialogue concerning rural and political development in Thailand seems entirely populated by ideological diatribe rather than rigorous analysis.
I certainly do NOT want to comment on “local political culture” as I’ve not done any objective research into the issue and so therefore anything I have to say would inevitably be colored by personal experience. The inability to identify and account for observer bias is a major part of why so much of social science is scoffed at by analytical afficionados like myself. How is individual or even mass opinion on practical policy issues useful in isolation from what relation those opinions have on measurable reality? Consider that in 2002 a good proportion of the US believed that Saddam Hussein was associated with the 9/11 attacks to see just where ill-informed public opinon can lead.
If you are “selecting” your dataset, you are not conducting “research”. Research begins with a hypothesis and a sound methodology to test that hypothesis, and then proceeeds with data gathering . One does not “select” or “package” data to suit ones pre-determined outcome. That is propaganda, and please excuse me if your “confidence” that your quotes are “commonly held perspectives” is unconvincing. Whence does your confidence arise? What questions are you asking? How do you control for your being a foreigner asking these questions? What you have given is a laundry list of various comments that espouse a certain political viewpoint, and I don’t see how responding with another laundry list of opposing comments serves any purpose other than to show that there are differing opinions out there – of which I doubt there is a question.
I am certainly NOT interested in engaging with the argument that that the campaign for rural empowerment waged by NGOs and activist academics has contributed some ideological legitimacy to Thailand’s coup, because, as I mentioned before, I know nothing about it and anything I have to say would be as useless as the opinions you’ve posted. I do NOT think this is a topic worthy of debate – rather I think it is a topic worthy of research. Setting up social science research methodology is NOT easy, as Srithanonchai mentions, but that is not an excuse for dispensing with analysis completely and replacing it with a shouting match. Good social science research is few and far between, mostly because so many people think it’s nothing more than random interviews and pontificating, which is easy to do. Just note the number of comments on topics with no factual basis vs. the number of responses to the BMJ article about the 30-B health plan. The minute you start looking at facts, that’s the end of the conversation – to the detriment of actual development of any sort in Thailand.
Quite strange that all newspaper acceptably translate Traitor = Thaksin. Well, most probably, it is him being refer to. But so does Prem = charismatic figure. Unspoken agreement to save from defamation lawsuit?
Alway the three holies,.. nation, religion, and monarchy. Now it gone from “corrupt” politician to philosophical “evil”. According to Saprang’s, I guess if “rogue politican” allow to return to power. “Rogue politician” would own/destroy Thailand, become a pope and abolish Buddhism, and establish a new dynasty to rules, all-in-one. That would put even Qin Shi Huang to shame.
Chatthip Nartsupha. 1991. The ‘community culture’ school of thought. In Thai Constructions of Knowledge, eds. Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton, pp. 118-141. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. (reprinted 1995)
Chatthip Nartsupha. 1999. The Thai Village Economy in the Past. Translated by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. 131 pp.
Kitahara, Atsushi. 1996. The Thai Rural Community Reconsidered. Historical Community Formation and Contemporary Development Movements. Bangkok: The Political Economy Centre, Faculty of Economics, Chulalongkorn University. 190 pp.
Kemp, Jeremy. 1993. On the Interpretation of Thai Villages. In The Village in Perspective. Community and Locality in Rural Thailand, ed. Philip Hirsch, pp. 81-96. Chiang Mai: Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University.
Kemp, Jeremy: Seductive Mirage. The Search For the Village Community in Southeast Asia. Dordrecht: Foris Publ., 1988
Although the funeral might have cost 85,000, you also have to ask how much money was made from donations from those paying their final respects.
Whether the deceased is a Thai or Chinese, it’s always customary to make a donation. After the funeral rites of a deceased relative of mine were over, the family sat down and did the accounting and we ended up making more than we spent on the bills. And we weren’t being cheap with the alms-giving! I understand this is the case for most funerals.
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The “De-Thaksinization” of Thailand
I’m writing up academic papers with special reference to the theme “The De-Thaksinisation of Thailand” and would be pleased to co-work and/or receive suggestions.
Sufficiency economy, insufficient money
I deliberately put in “epistemological” in my statement re “measurable reality” in order to indicate a difference between common sense practical naivity, which might serve everyday research activities well, and more fundamental questions on the possibility of human knowledge, which would lead us to a somewhat more cautious and skeptical view on things. I thought your version of quasi-religious or “spiritual” belief in “science” in social investigation was laid to rest some time ago.
Evaluating the 30 baht health care program
I was at a ‘people’s platform for democracy’ meeting the other day. Some comments were made about the excessive amount of funds from the health budget that are assigned to public servants. A medical doctor present, who works in the system, said this was fiddling the accounts. Because most of the health schemes are poorly funded, when civil servants use the health system they attract premium charges and levies on all manner of things – this allows the health system to then fund other activities.
Just a thought – I would have looked at the figues and taken them at face value.
Michael
Sufficiency economy, insufficient money
nganadeeleg states that “Political parties that can read (or manipulate) mass opinion are likely to be be more successful than those that cannot.”
I propose that since that is the case, the importance of that opinion vs. fact is even MORE critical, as a divergence between the two has serious consequences, like war. The way the American public was duped (with their own collusion, to be sure) into the current disaster, or the way the Thai public is duped points to MORE work relating opinion to fact, not less.
As for Srithanonchai’s concern that “measureable reality” is “bizarrely unrealistic”, would he “construct a reality” where he is confident in stepping in front a a speeding train?
“Measureable reality” is based on constructing theory that maximizes explanatory power while minimizing axiomatic inputs. It is not a philosophical debate, it is scientific method. If you don’t accept that, then we end up arguing spiritual truth and that FAR more difficult than any science.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
From the archives: funding funerals
The last I checked, anthropology is a social science. As a science, one assumes it would follow scientific method, and in scientific method, extrapolating individual anectodes to larger populations is a big no-no. Bystander states the case for this quite well in response #7.
Further, anthropology includes the understanding human cultural development and social customs. Economics, or the allocation of scarce resources, cannot possibly be divorced from such considerations. If one is not using scientific method or considering economic factors in their study of human communities, one has no business calling his work anthropology.
What I see here is reportage – which is all well and good, but let’s not masquerade this in a pretense of science or research. Thailand is chock full of such surface pretensions which fall apart with any serious examination – and thus serious examination is systematically missing, as Mr. Fernquest points out. The Sasin business plan competitions are an excellent example. The Thai contestants in the competition, by and large, are not entrepreneurs or innovators – they take ideas developed by others and create business plans out of them in order to compete in the contest. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, but while Thai teams regulary win the competition, I am unaware of any of these business plans actually becoming funded businesses. This is because once the contest is won, the students go on to their consulting or banking careers, the plan lies on the shelf and no one ever follows up with the actual entrepreneurs or innovators who came up with the ideas in the plan. Yet another example of surface appeal with little substance.
I would make the same comment regarding the SET’s efforts – I see mostly gloss. For example, their investor relations training program is filled with low-level coporate staff who want to learn what to put in brochures and what a website should contain, rather than understand how to segment investors and match the appropriate investors to corporate strategy.
Lack of substantive debate is a major issue in Thailand, and it irks me to see more of it, especially in a forum which could be so much more.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
From the archives: funding funerals
Andrew is an anthropologist, not an economist. He’s not neccesarily interested in quantitative robustness and statistically significant populations
From the archives: funding funerals
that seems a little excessive. surely, the sky is the limit when people pay for this kind of things..same as wedding or ordination. but really, what’s the average and median. and how do that amounts look when normalized to their income or their net worth? are the total involved in paying the debt of the deceased and such, etc.
the danger of collecting anecdotes casually is that people tend to remember the extremes and the unusuals… and can easily lead to wrong impression, and wrong presumption in your later inquiry.. espeically if the sample size is small.
From the archives: funding funerals
My sense is that the economic practices in Thailand and Cambodia are extremely different, even when the institutions look nominally similar, though I gladly admit my ethnographic experience in Thailand is extremely limited. In Cambodia, and based on my own fieldwork almost exclusively focused on funerals, the upshot of funeral finance is almost entirely dependent on a very few factors:
1. The wealth of the family
2. The social cohesion of the village
3. The relationship of the family to the monastic leadership
4. The manner of death.
The truly wealthy must spend a lot of money on funeral events. And although they recoup some of this from donations, it still ends up being a very large expense: the fees at the temple or for the mobile cremation station (called a Meru in Cambodia) are much higher, must be more elaborate, etc. More drink and food must be given, and better food. But given their wealth, even these much higher expenses represent very little compared to the proportional expenditure of the ‘respectable poor’ who must also attempt to at least hold a ceremony with drinks, food, etc. These can sink a family if they do not recoup a lot of the expense in donations.
This is where the social cohesion of the village enters the equation: in post-war Cambodia, this is a spotty issue which can in no way be geeneralized. In some of the villages I spent time in, there were highly motivated ritual specialist acaar (ajaan) or village leaders who reconstructed village-wide (or nearly so) mutual aid societies specifically surrounding the issue of funerals, so that no single funeral could sink a family. The fees were generally quite reasonable and collected personally on a monthly basis, such that there was always room for exceptions in dire circumstances. I was also told that in these communities, these strategies did not reduce the amount that was recouped in donations, which is an interested point. In villages with less cohesion and without such institutions, again, a funeral can sink a family, or can bring it reknown and new positions of prestige and access to wealth. It can be a gamble.
The relationship with the local clergy is important, but more so in the cities, where cremations are not supposed to be held in the street, but only at temples. Different temples charge different fees, depending on prestige, etc., so that different temples have wildly differing costs, and very different congregations. A good relationship with the abbot or the head funerary acaar will lower the price.
The manner of death can also change the price of course: in both directions, depending. If the family feels the need to celebrate the death in public fashion, the cost will be higher, and very few donations will be received (but those that are will often be more substantial and from closer relatives). This is not a hard and fast rule, and is being reshaped in the era of AIDS, and especially in middle and upper-class families whose new life expectancy results in more sudden deaths from stroke, heart failure, etc. If on the other hand, the death was somehow shameful to the family, or the family chooses not to celebrate the death publicly for whatever reason, the cremation can be relatively cheap. At one temple I spent a great deal of time at, the bodies of mob-murdered motorcycle suspects were burned every afternoon with no fee, since the families simply refused to claim the bodies. Similarly, since this was the only temple which would (at the time) cremate the bodies of AIDS sufferers, all these dead would be cremated here. Soem foreign NGOs helped subsidize these cremations through direct donations to the temple committee.
Of course, in the countryside, there are many families too poor to even consider any of this. A friend of mine simply cremated his father in a field and then brought as many of the bones and ashes as he could to the temple and buried them in the ground.
Apologies for length.
From the archives: funding funerals
“I fail to see how a report of one family’s funeral expenses and how these were paid for provides any insight on the sustainability of rural debt.”
I’ve noticed the same problem with reports in the news. One or two cases are cited at length when what is actually needed are hard to come by stats or more extensive examples from participant ethnography.
Sub-optimal side deals where the bank’s real estate broker or loan officer gets a cut/commission. I have anecdotal evidence of the former. The whole “auction” process on repossessed real estate that still seems to be going on was far from transparent.
“Len Share” probably accounts for a lot of savings, that is not taxed. These neighborhood funeral pools are really small sums, at least in our neighborhood. I think the emotional solidarity from people coming to your loved one’s funeral and paying their respects is a lot more important. A funeral with only one person following the coffin would be very depressing. The legalised gambling that takes place during the Ngan Sop lightens the gloom a bit.
Two more items. Motorcycle dealership penetration into villages, usurious loans, sudden “forced” repossession and resale yields hefty profits for some. Certain consumer credit companies also gave loans recently with unclear terms where the borrower could opt to defer and defer until the loan became effectively several times larger than it was. Credit alone does not do the trick.
Business plans as a focus for project based learning have become popular and are well-adapted to an environment in which small business and individual initiative has potential. Sasin Business School has business plan competitions. I designed a second year Business English curriculum around a business plan. (survey, spreadsheets, sales presentations, critical questioning, posters/advertising, brochures, model products, spokespeople, limitless opportunities for language production)
The Stock Exchange of Thailand is actively involved in designing and implementing the curriculum for teaching economics basics in elementary schools. They wrote the textbooks too.
Saprang on the three pillars
“The traitor is slated to be banished to live foever in the jungle…Civil servants …are not supposed to allow themselves to become henchmen for rogue politicians…”
Is this soldier language?
It’s very dramatic.
BTW they are selling black wristbands at 7-Eleven.
That mean “I love Naresuan” according to the cashier.
I also saw pink wristbands (???)
It’s too bad they are watering down what was originally a nice way to show one’s love of HMK.
Sufficiency economy, insufficient money
In the context of this discussion on mass opinion, the following article might be interesting. Ilya Somin. 2004. “When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatenss Democracy.” Policy Analysis No. 525, September 22, 2004. This text should be downloadable from the web site of the Cato Institute.
As an aside, to an epistemological constructivist, the idea of the existence of “measurable reality” is bizarrely unrealistic. There is nothing but constructions of reality (whether achieved deductively/analytically or inductively/qualitatively). And it is only these constructions that compete with each other. Scholarly constructions are only insofar different from other sorts of constructions as they are produced by controlled procedures.
From the archives: funding funerals
“They are not all running around getting themselves into debt on mobile phones and motorbikes!” Of course not. With a motorbike and mobile phone, why would anyone need to run around?
But thanks for that reference to my letter to the Economist, alluding to a sentence that was actually edited prior to printing, much to my chagrin. The printed version reads: “While buying motorcycles and mobile phones shored up [Thaksin’s] political base, and certainly helped “pump up domestic demand”, it did nothing to tackle the rising debt in the countryside.”
The original letter ended with “…it has also led to an increase in rural household debt, the consequences of which are not at all understood.” – a more sensible and fact-based comment that was also more tightly linked to the following paragraph.
Well-functioning debt markets can be a wonderful part of rural (or indeed any) development – but this requires effective credit scoring by lenders and productive debt management by borrowers, both of which are integral parts of any working microcredit program. I continue to look in vain for any substantial examination of either credit-scoring or productivity of TRT’s rural debt schemes; in fact at a government-hosted conference where both Mr Thaksin and Mohammed Yunus spoke, and every TRT program had lavish booths on display, not one of the bubbly presenters at any of the booths could produce any such information.
Similarly, I fail to see how a report of one family’s funeral expenses and how these were paid for provides any insight on the sustainability of rural debt. Are you claiming that there is a widespread system of group support that mitigates NPL creation, of the time created by Grameen over years of trial and error? If so, you need to show a bit more than a single observation.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
Sufficiency economy, insufficient money
Whilst I don’t want to buy into a debate about academic/social research, I am interested in the following statement by hpboothe:
“How is individual or even mass opinion on practical policy issues useful in isolation from what relation those opinions have on measurable reality? Consider that in 2002 a good proportion of the US believed that Saddam Hussein was associated with the 9/11 attacks to see just where ill-informed public opinon can lead.”
Because of the ‘one man, one vote’ system, I think it is important to know what peoples opinions are (especially mass opinion), irrespective of whether those opinions bear any relationship to measurable reality.
Political parties that can read (or manipulate) mass opinion are likely to be be more successful than those that cannot.
Saprang on the three pillars
fall, don’t forget to add “murder unborn fetuses”, “allow khmer voodoo shaman to take over the emerald buddha”, and “open up the gates to hell” in that litany of Thaksin evils 🙂
Sufficiency economy, insufficient money
Mr Pig Latin: Thank you for your insightful analysis of my motivations, you’ve saved me countless hours on the psychiatrists couch. You will notice, however, that my note to the Economist was exactly along the lines of my critiques of Mr. Walker – that sweeping pronouncements made on the basis of faulty analysis or without a shred of evidence whatsoever are of marginal utility apart from making noise.
The financial problems in the 30-B health care plan, the structural problems in the rural development schemes, the rising consumption & debt in the countryside; none of these are opinions – all can be demonstrated conclusively. My prediction of a future debt crisis and of Thaksin coming back to “save” the country from problems he initiated are speculative of course – but I am unaware of how to research the future.
The reason I have “not provided more of what you claim to be missing” is because I am also unaware of how to provide what I am missing.
“How do you start a tutorial?” you ask. I would hope a tutorial would begin with a fact base. If I had such a fact base (e.g. statistics on village lending NPLs), I would certainly post them somewhere. However, I am not contending that these programs are or are not successful; I am contending that those who do should back up their claims with credible data, but apparently that’s asking for too much.
Again, I refer you to Mr. Walker’s post regarding the BMJ article that did analyze the 30-B health care scheme. It has to date generated one comment, a thanks for the post. No discussion, no conversation. I find it sad that actual research gets such a reception while so much attention goes to unsubstantiated, unverifiable speculation.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
From the archives: funding funerals
Yes, that’s right. The key point of my post is that there are forms of what might be called “social saving” that are overlooked in discussion about rural household finances. Looking back over my notes I see that in the case I referred to the family recovered, from various sources, about 75,000 baht. So they had pay 10,000 baht themself.
As for what the money is spent on. I have not collected any detailed data on this. I suspect the main item is food and drink. Other expenses include transport of the body to the home from hospital, payment to the local “undertaker” for various ritual services, the coffin, the cremation “platform” (prasart), payments to monks and other ritual specialists, purchase of flowers, and sometimes payment for entertainment. And there may well be others.
Sufficiency economy, insufficient money
Mr Walker: You may call me whatever you wish, and let me assure you that my head of steam is present regardless of your particular academic standards. Not having been to the conference, I certainly cannot assess the dimness of the mob present, but I’m sure it’s gratifying to you to find an appreciative audience, just as Paris Hilton must be happy to have fans, dim or otherwise. But none of that addresses the issues that I am raising, which is why the dialogue concerning rural and political development in Thailand seems entirely populated by ideological diatribe rather than rigorous analysis.
I certainly do NOT want to comment on “local political culture” as I’ve not done any objective research into the issue and so therefore anything I have to say would inevitably be colored by personal experience. The inability to identify and account for observer bias is a major part of why so much of social science is scoffed at by analytical afficionados like myself. How is individual or even mass opinion on practical policy issues useful in isolation from what relation those opinions have on measurable reality? Consider that in 2002 a good proportion of the US believed that Saddam Hussein was associated with the 9/11 attacks to see just where ill-informed public opinon can lead.
If you are “selecting” your dataset, you are not conducting “research”. Research begins with a hypothesis and a sound methodology to test that hypothesis, and then proceeeds with data gathering . One does not “select” or “package” data to suit ones pre-determined outcome. That is propaganda, and please excuse me if your “confidence” that your quotes are “commonly held perspectives” is unconvincing. Whence does your confidence arise? What questions are you asking? How do you control for your being a foreigner asking these questions? What you have given is a laundry list of various comments that espouse a certain political viewpoint, and I don’t see how responding with another laundry list of opposing comments serves any purpose other than to show that there are differing opinions out there – of which I doubt there is a question.
I am certainly NOT interested in engaging with the argument that that the campaign for rural empowerment waged by NGOs and activist academics has contributed some ideological legitimacy to Thailand’s coup, because, as I mentioned before, I know nothing about it and anything I have to say would be as useless as the opinions you’ve posted. I do NOT think this is a topic worthy of debate – rather I think it is a topic worthy of research. Setting up social science research methodology is NOT easy, as Srithanonchai mentions, but that is not an excuse for dispensing with analysis completely and replacing it with a shouting match. Good social science research is few and far between, mostly because so many people think it’s nothing more than random interviews and pontificating, which is easy to do. Just note the number of comments on topics with no factual basis vs. the number of responses to the BMJ article about the 30-B health plan. The minute you start looking at facts, that’s the end of the conversation – to the detriment of actual development of any sort in Thailand.
Best regards,
HP Boothe
Saprang on the three pillars
Quite strange that all newspaper acceptably translate Traitor = Thaksin. Well, most probably, it is him being refer to. But so does Prem = charismatic figure. Unspoken agreement to save from defamation lawsuit?
Alway the three holies,.. nation, religion, and monarchy. Now it gone from “corrupt” politician to philosophical “evil”. According to Saprang’s, I guess if “rogue politican” allow to return to power. “Rogue politician” would own/destroy Thailand, become a pope and abolish Buddhism, and establish a new dynasty to rules, all-in-one. That would put even Qin Shi Huang to shame.
The cross-border Shan
On Chatthip and others also see
Chatthip Nartsupha. 1991. The ‘community culture’ school of thought. In Thai Constructions of Knowledge, eds. Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton, pp. 118-141. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. (reprinted 1995)
Chatthip Nartsupha. 1999. The Thai Village Economy in the Past. Translated by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books. 131 pp.
Kitahara, Atsushi. 1996. The Thai Rural Community Reconsidered. Historical Community Formation and Contemporary Development Movements. Bangkok: The Political Economy Centre, Faculty of Economics, Chulalongkorn University. 190 pp.
Kemp, Jeremy. 1993. On the Interpretation of Thai Villages. In The Village in Perspective. Community and Locality in Rural Thailand, ed. Philip Hirsch, pp. 81-96. Chiang Mai: Social Research Institute, Chiang Mai University.
Kemp, Jeremy: Seductive Mirage. The Search For the Village Community in Southeast Asia. Dordrecht: Foris Publ., 1988
From the archives: funding funerals
Although the funeral might have cost 85,000, you also have to ask how much money was made from donations from those paying their final respects.
Whether the deceased is a Thai or Chinese, it’s always customary to make a donation. After the funeral rites of a deceased relative of mine were over, the family sat down and did the accounting and we ended up making more than we spent on the bills. And we weren’t being cheap with the alms-giving! I understand this is the case for most funerals.