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did not respond positively internationally to the ideas that were put forward, but
I regard it as a very, very fine publication. There’re a lot of case studies that
showed lots of ways in which sufficiency economy is helping people. But, there
are many people outside Thailand in particular, of course, who regarded that as
being a capitulation to the forces of sufficiency economy, when they should
have been standing up against that. I don’t agree.
Now, in 2006, as again, most of you know, Thailand chaired the Group of
77, which I confess now, I haven’t heard about prior to this. It was actually
the group that was of 77 countries that were the non-ally countries that
eventually became much bigger than 77. I think it’s 130 some countries now.
But, Thailand used that opportunity to promote sufficiency economy and I think
that was appropriate because that helped shape the sustainable development
goals, perhaps, or not… not because they’ve been approved in 2015, but it
helped shape the ideas about how we can achieve sustainability through ways
that introduce new ways of thinking. So, from what I can see with those
sufficiency economy when there is economic growth constrained and now I’m…
it’s very tricky, because economic growth can be defined by gross domestic
product as it often is. It was very problematic because increasing numbers of
people say and yet gross domestic product is still the measure by which growth
is being taken in many places, to my knowledge, all countries.
They measure gross domestic product. There are all kinds of problems
with that, just thinking about GDP as the measurement of growth. When GDP is
constrained, you have scapegoating, people identifying people, others, who are
unlike them as being responsible for their problems. And then that creates
less democracy as there is reaction against minority groups as there’s
encouragement to cut back, to even cheat on elections and so on. So, you
have a series of positive feedback loops that make things worse and worse.
But with sufficiency economy philosophy, even with no economic growth, you
can have more democracy because people can say there are ways that we can
deal with the problems we face that do not include trying to identify who the
problem people are.
So, I’m saying now that from my perspective, we are at the fork in the
road. We weren’t in the 1930s. There were big problems of unemployment,
so on. But, now, there is a fork in the road where we have reached what some
call the limits to growth and this is recognized increasingly in the public press
and in various documents produced by the United Nations and others, the 0QFOJOH LFZOPUF BEESFTT
International Committee on Climate Control and IPCC, and so on. So I’m just
going to give a very quick little Canadian case study just to show you what I
think is an example, very recent example of how economic growth is on the
one hand, the basis for the welfare state. And what happened when it’s cut
