Blog post 3- Thailand
A few days ago we were boating through mangrove forests around Phuket, Thailand. We passed a small fishing village and our driver offered to dock the boat so that we could see the village. We were given a tour by one of the elders. This was an amazing and eye-opening experience.
By and large the people we met looked happy. Children were playing, some men were resting and others were making fish nets, an older woman was smiling as she greeted us. The 150 person village survived off the crab and fish from the water and rubber trees in the rain forest. We were told that all profits were shared between the community members. The elder who gave us a tour was proud to show us the Mosque which doubled as a community center.
This experience reminded me of my visits to an Israeli Kibbutz. A Kibbutz is a community in Israel where the means of production is owned by the entire community and all the profits are shared equally regardless of what each person does. Not only that, but both a Kibbutz and the village we visited gather around the house of worship. In one case a Synagogue and in the other a Mosque.
As an economics student, I am fascinated by how different communities answer the basic question of economics: how to allocate resources with the constraint of scarcity. In our large and interconnected community at home, individuals specialize to do one task and they keep all the profits from that job. The village, on the other hand, specializes as a whole (in fishing and rubber tapping) and shares the profits as a community. I essence, they operated like an individual in our community would operate.
The village has been around for over 100 years. I believe that the reason their socialist model works is because they are small community, connected by identity and creed, and, most importantly, not rich enough that people get greedy. The downfall of most of Israel’s Kibbutzim was their own success. Once their farm or factory became profitable enough that people realized they could become individually rich the concept of the janitor earning as much as the CEO began to seem unfair.