On balance, this is a good analysis of the problems confronting Thailand. There is one other obstacle to the country's development that is overlooked or ignored - IQ. According to official reports published in Thailand, the average IQ of Thais in Bangkok is 94, and for the rest of the country it is 89.
There is only so much education and training people with an IQ in the 80s can absorb. I don't know the root cause of these IQ figures, but I suspect diet plays a major role, especially the fact that Thai rice often has dangerously high levels of arsenic. The country cannot progress much further until the problem of low IQ is solved.
Not 100% sure how effective overall the measurement of IQ is; it's just way too variable and hard to study across millions of people.
Having said that, nations like Thailand & Bangladesh do consistently present as low in such IQ tests with, as you said, a verified factor being a high risk of pollutants including heavy metals in groundwater. This can be ameliorated by government policy (in Bangladesh's case, the Arsenic Risk Reduction Project).
However, with so much political uncertainty and corruption in Thailand, even existing regulations are flouted when it comes to water quality, sadly.
On balance, this is a good analysis of the problems confronting Thailand. There is one other obstacle to the country's development that is overlooked or ignored - IQ. According to official reports published in Thailand, the average IQ of Thais in Bangkok is 94, and for the rest of the country it is 89.
There is only so much education and training people with an IQ in the 80s can absorb. I don't know the root cause of these IQ figures, but I suspect diet plays a major role, especially the fact that Thai rice often has dangerously high levels of arsenic. The country cannot progress much further until the problem of low IQ is solved.
Not 100% sure how effective overall the measurement of IQ is; it's just way too variable and hard to study across millions of people.
Having said that, nations like Thailand & Bangladesh do consistently present as low in such IQ tests with, as you said, a verified factor being a high risk of pollutants including heavy metals in groundwater. This can be ameliorated by government policy (in Bangladesh's case, the Arsenic Risk Reduction Project).
However, with so much political uncertainty and corruption in Thailand, even existing regulations are flouted when it comes to water quality, sadly.