Your appetite just changed

The complaint that Vietnam's official inflation figures are a fiction mistakes a change in appetite for a change in prices. I think the official figure is roughly honest. What has inflated is not the currency but the shopper.

Consider what this country has done in forty years. Vietnam went from genuine poverty to a place I would rank among the wealthiest in Southeast Asia, and that ascent rearranged everything: the jobs, the housing, the ordinary texture of a Tuesday. A person whose parents haggled over greens at the wet market now orders a tasting menu and pays for the air conditioning, the imported wine, the waiter's pressed shirt. Of course that person feels squeezed. The squeeze is real; its source is not monetary policy. The plastic stool by the market gate still costs almost nothing. It simply no longer costs nothing to be the kind of person you have decided to become.

This is the answer I owe to the Vietnamese who live here and announce that they want to be paid in dollars because the dong is, in their word, fucked. Receiving US dollars in Vietnam as salary is illegal, which ought to end the conversation, but set the law aside; the position fails on its own terms. Every fiat currency is a managed thing, a promise administered by a committee, and the dollar is no less administered than the dong; it is only administered from farther away. Hoarding greenbacks in Saigon undermines the very currency your salary, your rent, and your neighbors all live in.

What the dollar craving really expresses is a fetish for the West, the old reflex that anything stamped in America or Europe must be sturdy, refined, and safe. I will grant the reflex its history; there were decades when it held. Those decades are ending. I grew up watching things in Europe depreciate rather than appreciate: the assets, the institutions, the quiet confidence that tomorrow would outbid today. Instead, try believing in your own country, and in the people running it long enough for them to be worth it.