Maboloc on ZTE and the Youth

ZTE and the youth and what is wrong with Philippines
By Ryan B. MabolocLinkoping,
SE03.01.08

Manila-based Asian Development Bank reports that in 2006, 14% of the Philippines’ 87 million people or 12.18 million live on $1 a day while 30% or 26.1 million are below the poverty line. This is despite a 20% increase in tax collection between 2002 and 2006, a GDP growth rate between 4.4% to 5.4%, export growth of 16%, and overseas remittances of $12 billion. The country is burdened by $57B in debts and an unemployment rate of 11%. In 2007, GDP has registered a rate of 7.3%, fastest in three decades. But the statistics above perplexes me. Is economic growth bad for Filipinos?Living in a poor country where hunger is the face of many people’s state of affairs, I have seen the terrible reality of human life which truly makes one doubt whether poverty can vanish from the earth. Inequality is a hard fact of life. About 25 years ago, fish was abundant in my beloved barrio, so they put a fishing port in the 90s. More than a decade has since gone by, and all the fishes have disappeared. They said the port will make the lives of people better, but after all, Fr. Pete Lamata was right for opposing the fish port. I have not understood him then. Right now I do. A hell lot of people in my barrio are still poor.

In the past few years, a great amount of wealth has been created by the Philippine economy through exports, extensive tax collection, and overseas remittances but such has not translated to the well-being of many poor Filipinos. What is wrong is not the way we practice liberal democracy, but the way we understand equality. In view of the evidence of human deprivation in our highly economized world, the sociologist Des Gasper says that the concept of equality should advance the idea that people are not just the means but more importantly, the principal ends of development. But the way we do it in country, our OFWs are our number one export product and clearly, we use them as means and its toll in families, not to mention the lonely nights of being away from your “one true love” is beyond any measurement. Development is about people. The 1990 Human Development Report begins with the statement, “people are the real wealth of a nation”. How many of the hundreds of politicians we have read this report?

Let me do some development analysis. First and foremost, money doesn’t solve our problems. The traditional concept of well-being in welfare economics evaluates social arrangements in terms of aggregate income and wealth through indices such as the Gross National Product, the Gross Domestic Product, and per capita income. For instance, the efforts to address the demand for social equality in many of poor countries are anchored on economic growth. Lowness of income of a country’s poor sector obviously indicates social inequality. Furthermore, it also suggests that families who live below a certain line experience hardships in maintaining a decent way of life or what mainstream economics calls a standard of living. Aggregation in terms of national income is seen to have a cascading effect envisioned to improve living standards. Basically put, it means that the poor are expected to take advantage from the gains due to economic growth, their welfare dependent on the amount of wealth the economy creates.

In measuring national development in terms of real numbers from a country’s economic activity policy makers assume that economic growth in terms of GNP and GDP will have a positive effect on the well-being of the poor. Des Gasper outlines this in what follows: economic production = income = consumption = personal utility = well-being (Gasper 2000, 283). Well-being is the end result of income coming from higher inputs to production in a country’s economic activity. The process of production employs people which in turn enable them to gain something from it. Income is translated to the consumption of commodities in which the process of production employs people which in turn enable them to gain something from it. Income is translated to the consumption of commodities which satisfies personal utility. The satisfaction of this advantage is construed as well-being in economic terms.

In their effort to arrest the problem of poverty, in many of third world countries, governments indicate a certain cut off point called the poverty line based on income earned per household to identify the poor. Those who live below this line are considered poor. This type of measurement shows that poverty is simply the lack of income or the lack of means to pursue a certain standard of living. Low income is seen as the lack of means, (i.e., income) to achieve well-being. Government programs concentrate on reducing the number of people who fall below the poverty line. But for Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, this is stupid because there can never be a policy to supplement the income of people who fall below the poverty line because the only information it provides is the recognition that some people are poor. In addition, Sen says that the aggregation exercise done through simple head counting pays no attention to the fact that people could be a little below the line, or a lot, and also the distribution of income among the poor may or may not be itself very unequal. Such type of measurement does not provide an adequate basis for the reasons why people are deprived of their well-being, or whether the kind of deprivation they suffer is so grave or unimaginable, say for instance the case of homeless orphans or families (i.e., in Manila, the Philippine capital, one does not only see street children but also street families). Thus, Sen says that the real extent of deprivation may be underestimated if we concentrate only on the size of incomes.

Philosophically, it can be argued here that poverty is a result of the lack of real or substantive freedoms, not income per se. Deprivation, destitution, and oppression suggest that the inability of a people to live meaningful life is due to their inability to actualize their freedoms or capabilities towards being or doing. People lack empowerment. From a political point of view, development as freedom highlights the fact that governments can do more in terms of enriching the lives of its people by focusing on their positive freedoms to lead a life that is worth living. In the Philippines, we do the reverse. We emphasize on the negative rights of people, i.e. I do not agree that the youth must go to the streets to protest. They must read their books inside the classroom. Why send them to a war that we (i.e. politicians, professionals, businessmen, etc.) have created for ourselves? They must do battle with great minds, i.e. Stephen Hawking, Jean Paul Sartre, and not the small minds in this ZTE thing.

Isaiah Berlin distinguished positive from negative freedom and Amartya Sen used this to explain the meaning of human development. The idea of negative freedom corresponds to what is sometimes called non-interference rights. These rights can be summed up as freedom from coercion. Positive freedom, on the other hand, refers to real opportunities that can be given to people. The difference between positive or substantial freedom from negative freedom can be shown, for instance, in the case of a person who is without much income or resource, and lives a life of deprivation and misery. His or her negative freedom may not have been violated at any given time, for instance, he or she has never been attacked violently. Yet, his or her negative freedom is also worth nothing to him or her. This is because he or she has never fully attained his human potential in terms of a life that is well-lived which positive freedom, i.e. capabilities, may have provided which negative freedom by itself does not.Nobody ever dreams of living a miserable life. But I fear that we are exposing the youth to a war that they shouldn’t take part of.