In review and in prospect
The Philippines clearly has a chicken-and-egg problem where determining the root causes of its chronic collective wretchedness involves a toss-up between its image and its profound cultural dysfunction. Is the country’s image as a black hole where investment funds disappear forever the root cause of its lack of come-on to rich folk looking for a place to park their excess cash? Or is its people’s renowned inability to productively capitalise on the abundance of resources and opportunity within their own islands the real heart of the matter?
Harping about not having enough “foreign direct investment” in order to progress sends a simple message:
Filipinos are hopeless at creating capital indigenously.
In a pre-globalised world, people simply invented and produced what they needed locally. Being hooked on foreign capital is what frames the “debate” around what the development strategy of the Philippines “should be” today — a debate underpinned almost solely by a blanket acceptance that Filipinos are simply too lazy or too brain-dead to think their way out of the rathole they currently find themselves in. The basics of living within one’s means now simply fly over the heads of our lot who are slowly starving as the intravenous feed of foreign capital (in the form of both FDI and OFW remittances) either slows to a trickle or is engulfed by our galloping mall-hungry population. The principles are easy to grasp even for the current crop of name-brand solons who now infest the Philippines’ legislature:
(1) Self-sufficiency — being able to produce domestically what is consumed locally in order to;
(2) Reduce unhealthy and un-secure dependency on global trade and reliance on unnecessary shipping of goods.
(3) Simplification of the concept of economic value tying it squarely back to production and tangible assets all sustainably created through;
(4) Domestic capital creation — an ability to rely on one’s own inherent cleverness to create physical, intellectual, cultural, and (ultimately) financial capital indigenously.
Tough luck for us though. If we evaluate the Pinoy condition along the above four points, we get bad news spelled out for our lot. Our economic value as a people is tied squarely to the amount of capital and commercial activity that the industrialised world is able to generate (like rats and roaches who live off by-products of human activity). If we start seeing a withdrawal of this activity by the rich world, we will be left to increasingly rely on our own cleverness to replace this with something to keep our economy buoyant. A reliance on a cleverness that historically was never evident in us is a scary prospect. Personally I’d put my money on roaches and rats.
Last week's blog posts
January 26, 2024 by Oman
"In any case, charter change or amendment IS an idea whose time has come and the senate seems vainly fighting against it for no other reason other than fear that the prestige of their billionaire’s club might be diluted. Hence the theatrics of the likes of Sen. Joel Villanueva..."