| Abstract: |
This article investigates whether religious motivation can be effectively manipulated to bring about social and economic change in Thailand. Thai peasants, like anybody else in this world, are fascinated by some material comforts. But to many of them it is simply not a realistic possibility. For them, merit making, religious spending, is a much sounder and much more profitable investment than ordinary economic saving. It means investment in a next life in which their merit will be paid off by a more desirable social position, where they will be free from the toil and the poverty of the present existence. While merit does not contribute to economic saving and investment of the poor and the less well-to-do, it does so in the case of the economically more powerful, whose savings and investments are most important anyway. The question that is more crucial is, whether they will invest in opportunities that will enhance per capita production, and that has very little to do with Buddhism or merit. On the whole it would seem that the economy of merit making provides Thai society with a model that stresses the usefulness of saving, investing and achievement, merit therefore becoming, if anything, a value that is potentially conducive to economic growth.
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