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introduced the highest minimum wages, just for example, in Canada are now in
Alberta. It’s just all very recently.
So it’s been struggling with the problem of what to do with all its
resource wealth. It’s very unfair that Alberta has in Canada’s most of the oil,
and in the world it’s very unfair that Canada has a lot of oil compared to other
countries that should use it. But, even that unfairness, we have the problem of
we have to cut back. Environmentalists are saying, all kinds of environments are
along the pipeline, particularly where the oil stops in Vancouver. And the
consequence is that, probably, the government is going to change in Alberta.
Most people think that and that’s what the polling said. And we will have less
of the welfare state there because they are running out of resources,
opportunity to sell the resources. So, how does sufficiency economy deal with
this problem of how we can reduce dependence on economic growth defined
as GDP? I would say it does so by helping us think about the public interest.
That’s a term that planners love to use and it’s been for decades. The terms
that professional planners talk about the public interest, in the early welfare
state in 1950s, 60s, and so on, and various parts of the world. The idea was
that experts knew what it was. Architects or engineers would tell you what the
public interest was. Then in the 1960s and 70s, you got this idea that nobody
knows what it is because there are different publics and they have different
interests and we shouldn’t have one at all. Now we have a totally different
idea, I think, of what public interest is and that is something that is constantly
evolving, and by people coming together to talk about democratically what it
consists of, and how to reach it. It is not something that experts have. It’s not
something that isn’t there because there are different publics. There is a public
interest which is to deal with ecological constraints among others and to deal
with social problems. We just don’t know completely what it is, and we don’t
know how to get there.
So, this is the way that I think sufficiency economy philosophy can help
us create more sustainable democracy and more sustainability and ecological
sense. And I’m going to refer here to a phrase that the person who is reviled
in some circles Garrett Hardin who is a biologist, American biologist writing in
1968, who identified in a mistitled article. I won’t get into that here. But he
called for mutual coercion mutually agreed upon as the only solution to dealing
with ecological problems. You can’t just make people do things. You have to
have people agree together about how to cut back, and that is what sufficiency
economy philosophy does. It talks about moderation. It talks about immunity or 0QFOJOH LFZOPUF BEESFTT
self immunity or prudence or various problems of translation of course, but that
is a different way of thinking about the world. And to my knowledge, any place
else in the world is talking about. So, I think Thailand has an answer. It’s not
