September 20 - Kids! Youth! Celebrate!

Posted on September 20, 2019

Thailand, in Southeast Asia, celebrates Youth Day today.



And Germany, in Europe, celebrates Universal Children's Day.



Celebrating children and teens and young adults is - of course - celebrating the future, celebrating a nation's most precious resource.

With new generations come fresh ideas, unique contributions, and renewed hope. Of course we celebrate them!

Thailand and Germany are very different. I was considering doing a head-to-head comparison of the two nations, which usually takes quite a bit of research...and then I stumbled into these two websites:

My Life Elsewhere offers a Country Size Comparison that actually shows one nation superimposed on another! This showed me that Thailand and Germany are close to the same size, although in square kilometers, Thailand is a bit larger. (Germany has a larger population and its density is about 100 more people per square kilometer than Thailand.)

CountryEconomy.com offers a comparison of the economies of any two nations. When I chose Germany vs. Thailand, I was not at all surprised to learn that Germans are, on average, far richer than Thais. 

In order to compare nations with different sizes of populations, you want to look at the "per capita" data - that is a measure of the total earnings per year of an entire country divided by the number of people in that country. Obviously, in any nation, some people are going to have more money than others (and remember, population includes even babies and young kids, most of whom have NO money) - but if a nation's money was divvied up completely evenly, with every single person getting the same amount, THAT's what "per capita" means. 



Also, any comparison has to use equivalent currencies. For example, Germans use euros, and Thais use bahts, and 1 euro is equal to almost 34 bahts, as I write this, so comparing how many euros per capita to how many bahts per capita would be confusing. Because of this, the CountryEconomy charts use the equivalent number of U.S. dollars for both euros and bahts.

That's how we get to see a fair comparison; in this case, Thai people earn the equivalent of about $7 thousand a year, per person, and Germans earn the equivalent of about $48 thousand a year, per person! What a huge difference!

Scroll down to see all the other kinds of info given in this compare-two-nations website. Pretty great resource, right??


So, no effort on my part to research a comparison - instead, I will show you Thai and German kids:


Above, Thai kids; below, German kids.
It's fun to pose for photos!
Above, a Thai baby; below, a young German child.
Obviously, where people live doesn't always tell
us the color of their skin and texture of their hair.
 

In Thailand (above) and Germany (below), kids
love to play established games and sports...

...AND kids everywhere love to play just in water and
sand and mud and trees and in their imaginary worlds!
Above and below, two of the many variations
of traditional German costumes.

Above and below, two of the many variations of
traditional Thai costumes.


No comments:

Post a Comment