ruptures in ideology

The country’s downward spiral accelerates. When a country is ruled by a president who can’t separate the reel from the real, deposed, and replaced by an equally inept and greedy creature, ruling for nine years through bribes, anomalies and scandals, can the country recover like a Phoenix rising from the ashes?

I don’t think it will be a swift recovery, if at all. GMA’s shameless disregard of laws, be it moral or legal, really makes the society vulnerable. If the president, the supposed leader of the country, is so garapal, unpopular and viewed with contempt, then, the citizens will have no incentive to follow laws. Kung sya nga ginagawa un, kami pa. And this has very wide structural implications.

Which makes me question whether this democracy – Western style – is really the kind of government or ideology or whathaveyou for us. Hey look, our neighbors have already overtaken us in terms of economic development. Malaysia has Mahatir, Thailand the king, Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. Does it mean that the more free and democratic a society is, the less its economic developments. Don’t think so. I guess what makes us politically stunted (aside from the obvious economically stunted) is the prevalence of elite democracy and the Filipinos’ lack of faith to EDSA. We deposed ERAP to have another bigot occupying his place and at a longer time with the possibility of extending it further (prime minister-in-waiting?). From the looks of it, 2010 elections will just be another election. In national level, there may be some hope that change will be effected, but in the local level, patronage still prevails. And with an SC subservient to GMA’s whims (given that she has more appointees to the bench), well parliamentary government is just a nay and aye away.

Just letting my thoughts wander. Say, if Trillanes and his idealistic officers have succeeded in their drastic means to seize governmental powers, will it usher in a new era? Is it time to explore another form of government, one that can produce a mahatir or lee kuan yew?

Keeping rust off my memory

There is no better way to say it than borrowing from Gary Granada’s Balon: Ang ating karununga'y nakatali Sa hangin at buhanging ilusyon. Or Nassim Taleb’s argument that we are all after all ignorant and there’s a limit to what we can know. Black swans – or the occurrence of highly improbable but with high impact events – litter our collective histories. Whatever you want to call it – be it fat tails for statisticians, unknown unknowns for military strategists or outliers to econometricians – these are things often taken out into equations to simplify the process. But, in a way, taking the most important part of the story to make it “tellable” ex post facto. Yes, I agree with Taleb that our brains are wired to search for fitted stories after an event has happened, as if we can predict the story beforehand.

A friend once emailed me this story. A young Harvard MBA graduate, brimming with ideas (or so he thought) once approach a fisherman on his proposal to make him happy. He said he is interested in making the life of the fisherman more profitable by maximizing his catch. He said he will arrange a loan so that the fisherman can buy a bigger boat so to catch more fish; arrange selling distribution for his catch and invest in latest technology in fishing. Then, he and the fisherman can expand it, hire more people and establish a plant that will process their catch to canned fish. The fisherman asks why? He said that if this proves to be successful, they can devote less time – he to his fishing and more time to his family. Oh, the fisherman said, “You went to Harvard, just to be at my current position?”

Which brings me to the overstatement of having degree programs. Filipino psychology tells me that Filipinos are awed by labels and titles associated with the person. Thus, people in the education industry are so fixated to have a PhD attached to their names as if this will transform them from being a simpleton to super genius. Or we hear from poor people that they are resolved to move heaven and earth – and possibly even hell – just to ensure that their children end up as propesyonal.

But does this amount to an indictment of formal education. Not at all. Good education is a solid foundation for our happiness, but it does not mean that it can provide us knowledge to advance the human race or morality that will strengthen the moral fiber of the society (we have so many crooked officials with advanced degrees). Sometimes, education (or lack thereof) is contingent on the field one has chosen. For one, I believe that my chosen field, economics, need a lot of revision for its failure to anticipate economic crisis after economic crisis. There are fields of specialization that is simply to simplistic that it needs tinkering. You just cannot predict human behavior both in the micro and aggregate level. Economics must be a social science and should not pretend that it can rank among the physical sciences of the world. Hey, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations does not have a single equation on it. An author argued that were he to publish his book today, it may end up being labeled as a sociological work. Economics has become enamored with equations, maths and numbers that it even attempts to generate models after models that find little or no practical and real application at all!!!

There are also many institutions here that are bereft of knowledge transfer but just function as diploma mills. But this is another story.

Of course, I only raise questions to stimulate discussions on this, but it does not mean that I know the answer to this question. Does that make me a reactionary pig? Or does this make me more of a deep thinker. As Gary Granada puts it (I begin with Gary so I will end it with Gary as well), feeling mas magaling ka habang hindi ka naiintidihan.