Most of them ain’t all that shit hot at driving Mercedeseses either, for that matter
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OK, look at what happened in the good ol country. So they “advanced” from working in the mud, after the big land owners owned everything and wanted someone to buy the overworked land for housing developments, and common folk moved to work for the government in nice offices or to work for multinational companies in nice office complexes doing “customer service” - it all started as offshore bets, remember? More money laundry…
People who cannot work in nice offices have nowhere to work as the automated great plots of land do not require that much muscle, factories are gone and the few still there do not need a lot of people and prefer women. They cannot become independent business owners, do not have the education nor funds. They just survive in temporary jobs and alcohol or float towards the gigantic parallel economy of criminal activity which promises power and riches.
Then we started developing a mentality that agriculture was bad, it is for poor people -read color of the skin-, it is not worth it, maybe only coffee, as we can buy everyting we want cheaply with the money we have from money laundering, and working in offices.
Problem is the country does not produce anything for its substenance, only export. That is one problem, which has exploded in our faces regularly.
The idea within the export oriented economy deal is you sell expensive commodities like pineapples and coffee. However, aside from soy, pineapples, coffee and other stuff for export… no food is left produced in the country. One of my teachers had warmed us about thsimodel because then what happens is that you do not have a safety net. People all over the world can do without coffee in the morning, nor are pineapples vital to your existence. In case of war or price gouging, what the heck are we going to eat if we cannot buy? Moreover, the stuff we need like vaccines, tvs, X ray machines, anything more conmplex than blue jeans and underwear -and even that is moving abroad- is produced outside which means we have to buy stuff with foreign currency. And these are small potatoes. Bridges, power generators, planes, and most importantly, oil to move it all, everything comes from outside.
70% of the GDP goes to pay foreign loans and the rest is left to pay government officials salaries and social programs to prevent a revolution. hence, nothing is left for the future.
In the past, the railroads were paid partially by lands and mostly by loans of which the loan shark interests are still being paid. This is a drag that prevents accumulation of capital. That plus lack of education means we cannot invest in local R&D to get out of the hole.
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Things are somewhat different where you’re from, I think, because the violence there is overt rather than implicit. Farmers in Central America are endlessly harrassed by the State and others. If you look like you’re making money, there will be someone from the gubmint asking for bribes, or bad things will happen to you.
Filipinos have a lot more leeway because the State is weak, and there aren’t too many armed groups “fighting for the rights of the people”. In other words, if you want to set up a profitable farm, you can do so with minimal interference or taxation.
I’m not denying that there are very real problems ranged against you if you’re at the bottom of the heap. But you really only have two choices in that position: resign yourself to a life of servitude (either growing rice or working in a call centre), or sort yourself out.
I won’t argue that bootstrapping a viable business is easy. But all the ingredients are there. “The poor”, mostly, have two major assets: land and labour (ie., themselves and their family and friends). Out of those two things you can create riches if you put your mind to it. If you want to find out how to raise ducks or grow fruit … well, an hour on the Internet costs P10.
Some do it. Most just can’t be bothered. As someone remarked back there, poverty and failure is accepted in Filipino culture, whereas in Chinese culture, being unable to support yourself brings enormous shame both on yourself and your family.
I’m not advocating an export-oriented economy based on agriculture (or any other raw materials). That’s a recipe for disaster. Farmers are complicit in this: they’re lured by promises of quick profits if they grow pineapples or whatever, and quickly realise that the only people actually making the profits are the middlemen. And yet they keep doing it. Why? Why not say to yourself: ah well, that didn’t work. Let’s do something else.
If a farmer genuinely understands his land, he will make a profit. Not necessarily in US$, but he will profit. Grow a few trees and learn how to work with wood, and you can build yourself a beautiful house. Plant a dense hedge of Pithecellobium around your land and you’re less likely to have burglars sneaking in; keep a pig and feed it with the pods. Grow 1000m2 of vegetables and keep 50 chickens, and you will not go hungry. With shelter and food, you can ponder on how best to use the rest of your land. The investment in cash is small, if you have plenty of time on your hands.
Note that Taiwan’s export boom was based on technology, not commodities.
I think every country has this problem. Why humans have a tendency to delegate the food supply to those people least competent to manage it is a complete mystery to me.
Now, that’s just getting insulting and showing ignorance, even if you are in fact Filipino and think you know what you speak of, but it doesn’t sound like it or you’d know that some people don’t have the option of planting trees on property they don’t own, even if they have space enough in the area they can use. And you really don’t know the Philippines if you think rice grows everywhere.
And you REALLY don’t know the Philippines if you think everyone knows an OFW. Family is a means of support, but not everyone has it. I’ve been to villages where people eat a sweet potatoes a day when times are bad, and share what they have when they can.
That is a small number of people and not the main problem.
I said being poor isn’t a shame in the same way as in Taiwan. Poverty and failure is not accepted and no one appreciates the family failure.
@finley sir, I will not speak to you of the Philippines again because I don’t speak to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. If you cannot communicate on here without being insulting, I will add you to my ignore list. Probably doesn’t mean much to you, but there it is. You’re not wrong in everything you say, but you have a lot to learn and you figure out a better way of saying it, without insults.
It was just a random example of a low-cost, low-input project. I realise many people don’t technically own their land. But on the other hand, many do. Or at least have de facto security. So they could plant trees.
Rice likewise was just an example. Some people are losing money on rice. There are other people losing money on watermelons. I don’t see how this is relevant. The fact remains that they’re losing money.
My point was merely this: if you’re not making any money doing whatever-you’re-doing, then you either need to learn how to do it better, or you need to do something different. Because whatever didn’t work today sure as hell isn’t going to work tomorrow either.
How is this in any way “insulting” or “ignorant”? The hard logic of life applies to farmers the same as it applies to anyone else. 1+1=2 whether you’re rich or poor. The rain it raineth on the just and also on the unjust fella. Nobody gets a free pass.
I’m not talking about the poorest of the poor. I’m well aware that there are people who are homeless, landless, and jobless. I’m referring specifically to people who control sizable areas of land and yet do nothing productive with it.
Then what do you see as the problem? You already explicitly stated that security of tenure absolutely is a problem, in that it prevents people planting long-term crops. You can’t have it both ways.
I think you’re splitting hairs here. The Catholic Church are endlessly promoting that “blessed are the poor” nonsense. If it were not accepted to a certain degree, it wouldn’t happen on such a vast scale. People would move heaven and earth to not be poor. In fact I know people who have done precisely that. And they did it because they refused to accept poverty.
Then give me an alternative viewpoint instead of just accusing me of ignorance. Spell out what it is that I’m missing here.
I’m stating my observations. If you find those observations uncomfortable, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong.
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I do not know in Filipinas, but in Latin America, the Catholic Church became divided when there was the Liberation Theology -basically, Marxisms and Catholicism, for a revolutionary take on social conflict. Most of the followers were excomunicated but there was still that little detail where the idea of separation between State and Church was born, as the extreme right did no longer had the CC in their pocket.
The elites aligned themselves with the newer and more powerful economically evangelical radicals, who preach teh Prosperity Gospel - give us your money, you´ll have your wishes come true. It preyed perfectly on the magical beliefs of the uneducated population and has helped the elites stay in power. That is why we have the embasies in Jerusalem, you know, doing our part to bring the End of Days, the Second Return of Christ when he will destroy all infidels who use condoms and vaccinate.
Sigh.
The blessed are the poor comes with being rich is bad. I can think of many times my family was wronged, especially legally, and they just turned the other cheek like good Christians. I can think of many more examples when the rich folk did not. At that time I thought we´re idjits. then I realized that those were the rules of the game, the game was rigged.
I always wondered why the men in the family drank so much money away, did not save for the future. Now it is my Mom, the “rich aunt” in the family who supports them in their old age. What happens when she is gone? We do not have the culture of acumulating wealth because of the nail that sticks out and all that jazz. There is also the social stigma around being frugal. There is a burden of cultural ideas that tell you the goal in life is not to work, but live off others and have a lot of money, like rich people do. Because our models, the rich people, are not hardworking folk that earned their wealth through creativity, entrepreneurship, acumen, but rather had it handed to them or stole it from someone else. And to make matters worse, they do nothing to keep it. They are not wise business people, they are the minister who rigs all export deals to buy from him and eliminates -literally- competition by trick or bullet.
I was looking at the amount of money say Maburro and ilk have, billions of dollars in Swiss and Vatican banks. recently there was this Burmese or soem other SEA country minister, also had stolen billions. So I conclude it is not our countries are poor. If we were poor, no one would be making billions of US dollars out of them.
So, as I have said it before, what is the incentive to have something people can take away from you any time they want?
No. What I said and how you paraphrased and added to it was completely different.
Because you use words like idiot. While it’s note strictly relevant, some people who are or have been in that situation are dear to me. You’re argument is ignorant because you lace it with insults and make statements that show you don’t fully understand the situation since people face.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person or generally ignorant. You’re getting close to good points, but get a little more understanding and to choose your words better. Put more thought and less emotion into your argument. And that’s the last I’ll say about it.
Perhaps you have another word for someone who repeatedly shoots himself in the foot and brings others down with him? I can think of far worse than ‘idiot’.
Oh, get over yourself. I know what it’s like to be hungry. As in always hungry. As in not knowing whether I can afford to eat tomorrow. I’ve looked in the mirror and contemplated my ribs poking through my skin. So don’t give me that “you just don’t understand” rubbish. I understand very well indeed. When one is in that position, there’s only one person who cares enough to get you out of it, and that’s yourself. It’s no good railing against the universe at large, because the universe doesn’t care.
I gave you a coherent and logical explanation of my position. All you’ve been able to come back with are slights on my personal integrity. So I suspect my descriptions are a little too close to the mark, am I right? If I were wrong, then why feel insulted?
So I might as well double down here: if you (in the abstract, not you personally) are squatting on a piece of land, such that nobody else can use it, and you’re not prepared to care for it yourself, you’re a bad person. You don’t deserve sympathy. In a small but definite way, you’re making the world a worse place for yourself and everyone around you, by failing to live up to your potential and perform your duties for the planet that sustains you.
In fact I think you’ve neatly answered the question: “why did Taiwan prosper, and the Philippines did not?”
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k, bye. I tried to be nice. I’m not @yyy and going to spoon feed an opposing argument to you that you can’t agree with. We’re off topic anyway.
I don’t think I slighted anyone’s integrity, though. Sorry if I said anything that came off that way.
Hmm…sounds like you’re asking for the exact opposite.
How so?
Go back and read your exchange with @finley again (dispassionately) and hopefully you’ll see what I mean.
Well, I congratulate you for reading all of it because I didn’t. Maybe I was eliciting an emotional response, but that shouldn’t lead to the things he said. I attempted honest human-to-human communication. He uses broad insults and his arguments carry neither water nor milk, and he doesn’t care for what I said, so I can’t be asked. There’s a lot of people on the Internet. I can’t talk to them all. When arguments turn toward politics, policy, or theory, I bow out. These days people get to entrenched in malinformed opinions. If I want to know about the effectiveness of land policy in a country, I’ll go to JSTOR.
That’s too many “I” statements. It’s easy to go toxic online. I’ve been thinking about blocking my own access to all but professional forums.
Neither did I – I just dropped in when I got the notification that you were name dropping me. I’m not sure if I should be flattered or offended or both, but if Finsky is driving you up the wall, at least we have something in common. 
I think it is by Finley’s logics, not emotion in the argument. Isn’t it?
I don’t read much emotion in finley’s arguments.
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I read Finley’s comments as ‘people who choose to grow rice when they could grow something more profitable are idiots’. I can see how others could read it as ‘Filipinos are idiots’, but I doubt that was his intention.
Other than that it all read like a congenial exchange of views to me.
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90% of the time, when I advance the argument that “if doing X makes you poor, and you have the option of doing Y which will make you less-poor, it’s pretty stupid to keep doing X” people accuse me of being down on poor people.
“It’s not their fault!” is the refrain. True. Some of isn’t their fault. Maybe a lot of it isn’t their fault. But “fault” is about what happened last year. Control is about what happens next year, and poor people have a surprising amount of control - often over other people’s lives as well as their own. And the emotional bit comes in when I see people hurting others because they’re unwilling to stop hurting themselves. I don’t like it.
But yeah, I wasn’t saying all Filipinos are idiots. I’ve met several people there who started off poorer than you can imagine but pulled themselves up by honest hard work - which is why I’m asserting that it can be done. All this really arose from the “how did Taiwan and the Philippines diverge?” question, when they had a lot a similarities 60, 70 years ago.
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Sorry if it was the latter. I was thinking of your careful explanations in the Uber thread, which also went unheard. I don’t have your patience. I was kind of hoping someone would clean this off topic mess up as well. Not sure who is in charge here.
It’s an arguably minor point, but I find the use of terms like “idiot” to be an emotional and not logical. Maybe some don’t.
Compared with how many conversations go here, maybe it is. But since the topic here is about workers in Taiwan, I’m sure he trusts his intelligence enough to take the conversation to a forum or subreddit where more Filipinos gather instead of posting from the safety of forum of mostly Taiwanese and expats. I’ll recommend a few. I’d like to see how those conversations go.
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I know how that goes. You should be killed. Go back to America. I hope you’re declared persona non grata. etc. If I had 10 pesos for every death threat I’ve had from Filipinos, I’d have enough for, erm, a Big Mac.
I think this is all incredibly relevant. Why are degree-qualified Filipinos coming here to get carpal tunnel syndrome? Why are these people not setting up tech-based industries in the Philippines?
The conversation about farming arose from the interesting question: how did Taiwan end up like this and the Philippines end up like that?
When I asked you what I was missing, I wasn’t just goading you. I am genuinely fascinated by the possibility that Filipinos are being held back by some elephant in the room that I can’t see. If you know precisely why the average Filipino farmer is his own worst enemy, let’s hear it. Because if there’s something real (as opposed to something they believe) that’s holding them back, then perhaps it can be fixed, yes?
The Japanese invested massively in infrastructure in Taiwan; the Americans, not so much in the Philippines… Taiwan’s true peer here is Korea.
Guy
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