Everywhere you look — physically or conceptually — in the Philippines and you find systems and solutions that cannot scale. The most famous of these is the jeepney. The jeepney “system” (if you can even call it a system) is a public transport solution that requires more labour input with every unit of capacity expansion. This is why as the populations of the Philippines’ cities ballooned to their enormous sizes today, so too did their jeepney infestations.
The same can be said about the country’s economy. It is a predominantly labour-added value and consumption-driven one. It needs disproportionately more warm bodies to churn out every additional unit of the low-value commodities the Philippines is renowned for. It also needs more people to keep spending to prop up the consumption pyramid scheme.
Worse, aside from being labour-intensive, the Philippine economy is also extractive. It relies on stuff being dug out of the earth and pulled out of women’s wombs for much of its exports. Because these economic models are such strong traditions, the Philippines’ crooked politicians know nothing beyond extracting their wealth in similar fashion to fund their worth — pretending to be “concerned about the poor” (the greatest political resource of all) while colluding with one another to channel the fruits of labour export, mining, and mall development into their secret bank accounts.
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Why can’t Filipinos’ spot this pattern and act on the insight in said patterns? Perhaps it is because they are inherently incapable of wrapping their pointed heads around the bigger scheme of things. Systemic thinking necessarily requires broad cognitive vision — perhaps a mental skill that decades of habitual small-mindedness had irrevocably atrophied in the Philippines. One, after all, needs a strong grasp of large scale systems in order to take a long view on cause-and-effect relationships.
Engineering is, at its core, the systematic study and modelling of cause-and-effect. In this definition lies the answer to why Filipinos fail to innovate at every corner of their collective history. Much of what hampers Philippine progress begs engineering solutions — turning input into greater output at scale. Because Filipinos aren’t engineers they are, perhaps, doomed to forever fail at what is, essentially, the ultimate source of per capita wealth growth.
benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.
I have a friend couple whose family lives in Prague for 4 years (5 years in Dubai previously) but still decided to go back to the Philippines with the 2 sons but left his accountant wife there. Their sons are receiving Very High Honors in a private PH currently. I wonder what’s the motivation but clearly he is losing the promising potential and education of his sons (The dad said his sons will not go back). Who gives up living in Prague?!
The Banaue Rice Terraces are an engineering marvel that rivals the pyramids.
On that, Nick Joaquin had this to say…
If engineering, or science for that matter, were really the basis for decision-making, would things be as dysfunctional as they are now? A lot of science gets ignored when it doesn’t serve capitalist interest. Is large-scale planning to secure your own economy even possible with this machinery? Cause and effect is not just on the surface. What kind of people do we empower (politics) in this kind of economy?