Since the 90s, Malaysia has consistently made about 25% the GDP/capita of the United States, in USD terms ... I know this only because I bothered to look when deciding to move back to Kuala Lumpur while I was still in college. Very little has changed here, due to blatant corruption and racial politics ... a fallout from the implicit Bolshevism of UMNO and Mahathir's early-career strategic plannning.
But the next two decades seem more interesting. While the 90s were lived through with a sort of vision on 2020, the problem with it, as with many plans of this sort, is that they told everyone ... so all the thieves got excited and headed off the masses. But now you've got a political environment where the dominance of one set of thieves has been proven defunct, and the playing field is starting to level. 1MDB presented Malaysia with its own Watergate, and the narrative continues to galvanise cultural interests, however ironically.
Between 2009 and 2022 the minimum wage tripled from 500 to 1,500 MYR/month. By 2042, it's going to be somewhere in the range of 3,000 to 5,000. Wages on average will have doubled ... the 50,000/month jobs will be paying at least 100,000/month, if not more due to quicker growth at the top of privilege ... and the Ringgit should have stabilised around 2.8 to 3.5 USD, much closer to its locus prior to the Asian Financial Crisis (the moral consequences are related, on a secular scale).
But why now, and not before? We're going to see lots of inflation as things gradually catch up with the real estate market, which has been inflated against purchasing power since the Fed dropped QE on us after the latest mortgage crash. The Malaysian economy will also finally been forced to look beyond a dependence on oil, due to forces beyond its control, and that, finally, changes things significantly, on a scale similar to the change in political climate.
This seems like an interesting area of research for the future. When I moved back to Malaysia in 2005, I figured that if I lived here long enough, I'd figure out enough of it to be a good bridge between Malaysians and non-Malaysian interests. I guess along the way, I did learn a thing or two.
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