It seems that humankind has sought to improve life since the beginning of time ... but progress has been slow. Progress has accelerated in the last few hundred years, but results have been mixed with some progress faster and better than others.

I remember doing work in Thailand in the early 1980s. Part of the work concerned an assessment of the investment potential of Thailand and the enabling environment of law and culture and institutions that would make Thailand a good place to invest. Of course the analysis of law and the banking sector and the regulatory environment and everything else made one draw the conclusion that Thailand was not going to be a good place to invest. Not to mention that very few people spoke English and the language and even the alphabet was incomprehensible. But before I concluded my work, I asked another simple question. Why was it that money was being invested in Thailand? And of course it turned out that a lot of money could be made in Thailand if it was invested in profitable enterprise. Money flow was not constrained by things that I had been studying. It was all about economic value adding and earning profit. Brothels, tourism were profitable. End of analysis.

I was in Thailand again in the early 1990s ... in fact 1992. I was struck by the amount of new construction and leisure facilities like golf courses that stretched for miles in every direction around Bangkok. As I traveled around I noted how few of the houses were occupied and how much of the construction was not totally completed and ready for use. Clearly there was something of a mismatch between what had been financed and built ... and what needed to be sold ... and probably be financed. The banks were not yet reporting problems ... but clearly they were heading towards a crisis. And of course it eventually came. In 1997, the Asian financial crisis hit as the banks realized that they had over-lent to developers and it would take time for the market to absorb the inventory.