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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in Vietnam for the last five years. Ask the average Vietnamese how much they think their economy is booming.

Then go visit Bangkok and marvel at how far behind Vietnam is.

I think our economy is not growing as fast as we would like, but it is doing OK. Just ten years ago, most people who had a chance to emigrate would do so, but in recent years I've noticed that many people who studied in Western countries have come back to start their businesses at home.

That's woefully poor analysis. Thailand did not fight wars from the 50's to the near 80's. That's a bit like asking the former Yugo states why their economy looks nothing like Turkey's.

Vietnam suffered mass near starvation after the war thanks to misguided communist economic policies. Go travel around the country like I have and tell me how much the average working class Vietnamese feels the current economic "boom".

Or maybe the US and pals placed Vietnam under an embargo from 75-94, and war only really ended in 79 after China got booted out? 94-16 isn't really that long. Check back in 20 years. I'll bet my bottom dollar their standards of living will improve faster than their neighbours'.

You are trying too hard and thanks to your recent comparison with the capital of a country that has been / is currently governed by military dictatorship, I really can no longer take you seriously.

It probably helped that a sizable portion of the food crops were sprayed with Agent Orange by US forces, rendering them worse than useless.

You have a really weird way of phrasing things. "Things really sucked after the war. They don't suck like that now, decades later. The average Vietnamese doesn't like how things are now".

It's hardly surprising that the communist government went crazy-anti-capitalism after having half the country turned to mush by the Americans, but things are getting better. After the war, the communists didn't even allow privately-owned shops, and the economy was awful. They started reversing that and the economy started recovering.

But just because somewhere else is doing better doesn't mean that a place hasn't improved significantly in recent years. That's a boom.

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