Southern Thailand, Singapore, and inequality

Three interesting pieces this morning:

First, Joshua Kurlantzick reviews the ongoing violence that 'has made southern Thailand the deadliest war zone in East Asia', while remaining 'almost invisible on the global stage'.

Despite some new government initiatives, the violence has recently spiked. Explanations for this vary, the most depressing being that young men in the south, now innured to violence and facing the consequences of national economic slow-down, 'have become wedded to the insurgency as a way of life':

'As each generation of young men in the south has been drawn into the insurgency, and as some teachers, local clerics, and other powerful southerners treat the insurgents with great respect, generation after generation of southerners see the battle as the best option not just for their politics, but for their own social well-being. And that is a hard cycle to break.'

I hope he is not right, and there is still a chance for the politics of opportunity to count for something in southern Thailand.

Second, a fascinating opinion piece by Adrian W. J. Kuah focuses on the contrast currently emerging in Singapore between 'the imperative of the national narrative and the ethos of a networked city':

'Whereas the national narrative emphasises the continuity and coherence of place, the clearly-bounded territory that is the locus of collective identity and values, the ethos of a global, networked city privileges and celebrates the transient flows of people and capital, with the city being an open arena of ambition and competition.'

These competing impulses are proving difficult to reconcile -- which is one of the reasons for the current 'unhappiness with the state of immigration policies', as Kuah delicately puts it.

Amid these competing ideas of spaces and flows, there's a renewed need, it seems to me, for Doreen Massey's concept of place, which articulates 'a global sense of the local, a global sense of place' (1994, Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp 154-6).

Thirdly, Scott Winship reminds us that inequality is a complex topic to handle. A lot of what we intuitively suspect about it is hard to ground in evidence, and its effects vary depending on development levels. Focusing on the United States, Winship writes:

'There are plenty of reasons to worry about inequality of opportunity — socioeconomic gaps in college-going are on the rise, and test-score gaps between rich and poor kids have similarly increased, to name just two examples. But the evidence that these problems would diminish if we could limit the top 1 percent’s incomes to those seen in other countries is nonexistent... Studies on whether inequality hurts economic growth typically focus on developing countries...

'Similarly, the influential research of economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argues that inequality leads to less democracy and reinforces itself through politics, but it too is based on developing countries. There has been hardly any research that rigorously tests whether economic inequality in the United States is associated with worse political or policy outcomes for the nonrich.'

Like many others, I'm concerned about inequality in Southeast Asia, and convinced that smarter policy is a big part of the answer. But designing and implementing smarter policy that will create synergies at both national and regional levels is no small challenge.