Your brother’s keeper

Whoever wins our election today has overwhelming problems to face on day one. Assuming the winner is sincere in running this country well and not to the ground, the first order of business is how to get us to think and act as one nation.

We are badly polarized and for similar reasons that America is also rather polarized these days. At the base of it is economics… The rich have become richer and the gap between rich and poor is now wider than ever.

A large segment of our population is feeling increasingly deprived and frustrated. The economic impact of the pandemic made everything worse. They are ripe for the picking of populist politicians entertaining anti-democratic thoughts.

Indeed, there are observations made about a raging democratic recession around the world that populist politicians are stoking. Trump, for example, cultivated people Hillary Clinton described as “despicables” on his way to the White House.

The South China Morning Post cites a Pew poll of 38 countries conducted in early 2017 that found about 47 percent of those surveyed deemed to be less committed to democracy.

“The tendency – as measured by their willingness to support representative democracy or the alternatives of military or one-man rule or rule by experts – is more pronounced in Asia.”

SCMP reports that in the Philippines, 67 percent said they were willing to consider alternatives to representative democracy.

Political scientist Richard Heydarian notes that countries such as the Philippines have been making clear economic progress at the national level, but have not distributed its fruits equitably.

In the resulting “emerging market populism”, populist leaders promise quick solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as access to healthcare or education, or the quashing of corruption and crime.

“In the Philippines and I believe in some parts of Asia, such populists will appeal to the rising aspirational middle classes,” Heydarian said.

This disgruntled constituency, according to Heydarian, includes people who went to second-tier universities, have stable jobs, and drive SUVs – but still feel their social mobility has been hampered by a lack of access and connections that the elite possess. “They have achieved some measure of success, but are not there yet.”

I picked up a few government statistics from a PIDS paper by Dr. Jose Ramon Albert that describes the environment we are in.

First of all, Dr Albert said “we should ultimately get bothered that around three out of every 20 Filipinos (16.6 percent) are from families with incomes below P 10,727 a month (if the family is a family of five), and that one in 20 (5.2 percent) even are part of families with incomes 30 percent less than this threshold (around P 7,528 a month).

“As of 2018, the estimated poverty rate in the Philippines, based on the 2018 FIES, is 16.8 percent (equivalent to an estimated 17.7 million Filipinos in poverty out of a total of 105.8 million Filipinos in 2018).”

Beyond poverty is income distribution.

The non-poor, Dr. Albert points out, is a very big portion of society, with a lot of inherent heterogeneity.

“Filipinos in a family of five would be in the middle class if their monthly family income falls between P 23,000 and P 140,000 in 2018 (or around P 25,000 and P 150,000, respectively in 2020 prices).

Expenditure patterns tell us that “the low-income class spends about three-fifths (56.9 percent) of its total expenditures on food, while total food spending for the middle- and high-income classes are about two-fifths (42.8 percent) and a-fifth (22.9 percent) of total expenditures, respectively…”

It is so socially volatile that many have little protection against shocks, such as job losses and food insecurity. Life for the vast majority of Filipinos can be very challenging.

According to SWS, the estimated number of jobless Pinoys is 11 million in December 2021 and 11.9 million in September 2021. Then there is the large army of underemployed, many of them unable to qualify for available jobs due to inadequate skills.

That’s the other big problem. Leni Robredo said there is a need to declare a state of crisis in education largely because of the substandard quality of education being provided in public schools. International assessments have placed us at the very bottom of a long list of countries in math, science, and reading.

Education already gets a lion’s share of the national budget, but apparently that’s not enough. The UN recommends allocating six percent of the country’s GDP to education. We are only allocating three percent of GDP now.

We can go on with many more big concerns, but it is clear that the government and the private sector must work together.

Big business may complain and say they are already paying taxes. True, but we are in an all-hands-on-deck situation here now with the potential of a social volcano eruption at Alert level 2 or 3.

It is time the conglomerates get serious with their corporate social responsibility programs and bring it beyond PR values. Their business survival depends on social stability. There are many urgent needs.

There is hunger. The national Social Weather Survey of Dec. 12 to 16, 2021, found that 11.8 percent of Filipino families or an estimated three million, experienced involuntary hunger – being hungry and not having anything to eat – at least once in the past three months.

There is housing. It is a perennial problem and the private sector should start to help. With property conglomerates making money hand over fist and creating new billionaires regularly, this is something they should help solve.

There are many other examples and we can discuss them in future columns. Suffice it to say that we are all our brother’s keepers. We are all responsible in making sure no Pinoy goes hungry, has a roof over his head, and every Pinoy kid gets the education he or she needs to break out of poverty.

Or risk our democracy being hijacked by populist politicians who will take advantage of our people’s willingness to give up some freedoms for the promise of a better life.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco