Often these comments are fairly condescending, thinking life must be horrible. While it's sometimes inconvenient, it's often not as bad as people on the outside think, and in some ways better than the west.
If you have time, have a look at Hans Roslings data overview on TED.com. It's good to see a statistical over view for what can be seen in countries like Thailand if you go looking for it.
I find the point about the conception of "us" the western world and "them" the third world interesting.
In fact, most people don't use the term "third world" correctly. The term was created in the cold war era by the Americans who referred to the "first world" as the allied forces countries, the "second world" as those countries aligned with the soviet union, and the "third world" as everybody else. So when I hear somebody refer to Thailand or any other country as "third world", I immediately doubt that their opinion will be informed.
Also when we refer to development as an issue, we at least need to consider development in two broad categories, social and economic development.
As we saw in the video, many countries in the world are fast approaching equal levels of life expectancy and child mortality in the west. Life expectancy in Thailand and many other south east Asian countries is about 70, only 8-10 years behind OECD countries. And they're catching up.
Of course health measures are not the only indicators. There are other indicators, such as the Press Freedom Index, where in particular Thailand does not do too well. But in fact that rating is a result of the banning of material considered offensive to the Monarchy or to Buddhism. Otherwise the press is quite free here. So it shows the importance of contextualizing the data and the ideas we have about countries.
Economically, income levels are lower, but not on the scale we first conceived of the idea of "us" and "them".
Here we see a graph from Hans Roslings very easy to use software Gapminder. We can see in the post world war 2 period that Australia, the US and the UK are sitting comfortably with long lives and on average $10,000 or so dollars per year.
Even after adjusting for cheaper local goods (which economists call "Purchasing Power Parity" or PPP), The average Thai was only living about 42 years and earning about $800 per year.
According to the data, Thais were earning less than 10% of what westerners were and living about only half the amount of time.
So let's look at these countries today.
The western countries have gotten somewhat healthier and richer according to the stats. Now we are living about 80 years on average (up 14%) and make on average $40,000 per year (a 300% gain). Not bad.
But Thailand has done even better.
Life expectancy is up from 42 to 70, a 67% gain, and only 12.5% below that of the west. And much of this can be accounted for by high levels of AIDs in the country.
An average Thais income is about $8000 a year, adjusted for purchasing power. This is a 900% gain. And most importantly, it is only about 20% of the where the western countries are now, and is at the same level the west was post world war 2.
And, with an average 5% GDP growth per year, if social stability can be maintained, Thailand could reach western levels within a generation.
So what does this mean anyway?
It means that the concept of the "western" and the "developing" worlds is becoming obsolete and incorrect. More and more countries are getting richer and healthier and the similarities between countries are becoming greater than the differences.
Within the next few decades, most countries will see greater inequalities in their own country than outside it.
Perhaps countries one day might stop looking down on other countries, and look instead for ideas and inspiration from them.
