Friday, July 20, 2012

My vacation in a critical view.

    I normally live in the United States, but this summer I went on an adventure. I am currently residing just outside Metro Manila with some of my family in the Philippines. I've only spent a few weeks out of my whole life here, but I feel like belong. Filipinos are just as much my people as Americans. There is a language barrier, but I get by, and majority speak English anyway.
Life is calmer here, even in the big cities. Yes, people have places to go, but here the flow isn't ruined by a few assholes. It just feel like a kind of place where I can walk into a restaurant, not purchase a thing, steal wifi for hours, walk out the door and get a "salamat" (thank you) from the door guard.
     The economics major in me has just a few problems though. Social inequality is a big one. A lot of people live out of temporary structures on the the side of the road. The problem is there's no help from the government, and that really puts pressure on finding money from other sources. There's hundreds of street peddlers, and sketchy looking  food/retail stalls along the way. You can say they put themselves in that situation, but they really didn't. There is a public school system, but there's not enough teachers or classrooms. It's easy to be forgotten in those situations. Education is such an unimportant thing when you don't know when you'll get to eat next. Since the labor is uneducated, they don't get paid much, and the cycle continues for generations. Outside of that, the private/higher level public schools are executed very well. That is why there is a less prevalent middle class.
     The other thing is just general infrastructure. The population is about twice as dense with half the amount of roads as any metropolitan area in the US . And a lot of the roads are placed poorly with no legitimate draining system. Also stop signs are a suggestion and the whole system relies on designated u-turn areas. Traffic enforcement is almost nonexistent.
     The point is, the Philippines is in an economic boom. In fact, they are on the fast track to having one of the largest GDP's in the world. Now is the time to work on the things everywhere, not just the urban ares. Improved roads will increase business efficiency and attract more tourists.  Reforming the education system is also important, a lot of intelligence has gone unnoticed because they never had the opportunity. If education reform doesn't start soon, they'll hit a production/efficiency ceiling, they're gaining capital (human, financial and resource) yet the actual quality of the human capital is lagging (intellectual capital). They can continue to add more human capital to expand, but eventually it will slow because they'll run out of resources to add more people, so the only way to expand past that is to improve the efficiency of the labor.One  way is to just raise wages, because workers will feel pressured to perform better. That creates some problems, though. It's easiest to just start hiring from a smarter pool of applicants, which would be the effect of education reform.

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