The French have the right to be lazy.

Thanks to Lafargue, the French have the right to be lazy. But now Macron wants to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. “The French budget risks floundering on pensions that are siphoning off nearly 14% of the nation’s GDP each year – roughly twice the drain than in the United States and behind only Italy and Greece in Europe.” [David A. Andelman, CNN, 11th Jan 2023]

There is no free lunch, even in the wealthy nations of the West.

What more for a developing country like the Philippines? Our impulse is to point to a culprit other than ourselves.

Enter the 3Cs of a “hardy mindset” – challenge, commitment, and control. We must embrace our challenges and commit to overcoming them, recognizing that we have no control over others but ourselves. The onus to change is on us.

Consider: We have over 400 economic zones yet set a 10% investment growth target – even when our neighbors generate export revenues from 2.5 to almost six times ours.

Before PEZA, we had EPZA, created in 1972. That was half a century ago. Nueva Ecija held the distinction of Rice Granary of the Philippines by the 1920s, over a century ago. And we are the second-largest coconut-producing country.

Yet, we aren’t a powerhouse in manufacturing and agribusiness.

It’s called mismanagement.

In other words, the poverty we’ve faced for the longest time is our own. “Catering to the bottom of the pyramid” is shortsighted. Politicians come and go, but if we are to be proud of our institutions, our economic managers and think tanks must step up to the challenge.

Short-sightedness nourishes the crab mentality and the sense of entitlement and emboldens political patronage and impunity.

Our economic managers must recognize the North Star, the “context.” The context is for the Philippines to be a first-world economy and nation.

Juan de la Cruz must thrive. He has the same aspirations — as we do in the Philippine elite and chattering classes — to be self-actualized and prosperous.

The war on poverty — as in the 4Ps — is shortsighted. As it stands, we need to continue with the 4Ps for twenty-five more years.

Fourteen years ago, when the blog started, it pointed out that Vietnam had already cornered more FDIs than the Philippines. Then, in 2020, or eleven years later, Vietnam’s GDP topped ours. But that is a broken record; the Asian Tigers did the same thing to us.

Please recall the elements of cognitive development. Beyond binary thinking, there is multiplicity and relativism – or the imperative of context. And the ability to navigate those elements is a function of experience – which our neighbors gained by leapfrogging industrialization.

Singapore has recognized the public sector’s lack of understanding of knowledge management initiatives. For example, our economic managers speak to “enablers” but not “drivers” of “economic undertakings.” [“Understanding the drivers, enablers, and performance of knowledge management in public organizations,” L. G. Pee and Atreyi Kankanhalli; Conference Paper, Dec 2008, Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore.] “TRAIN Law continues to support economy's growth.”

That lack of understanding of knowledge management initiatives in the public sector will yield short-sightedness or “analysis” and the absence of “analytics,” which is forward-, lateral, and creative thinking.

On the other hand, in the private sector, the revenue streams are the drivers of the enterprise. In fairness, the profit motive makes the defining “drivers” instinctive to business managers, which is not the case with “economic managers.”

Should we reinvent Philippine education to bridge the academic world and the “real world”?

“Poor teacher training,” Editorial, Manila Standard, 10th Feb 2023.

In education, we have a money problem and mindset problem beyond poor teacher training. And that is why we can’t lose sight of the accelerated journeys – from poverty to prosperity – that our neighbors pursued. In other words, to gain experience and confidence in managing change, we must seek “quick wins.”

We can walk and chew gum simultaneously. It is not binary thinking. Sadly, people struggle to move beyond logical yet linear and incremental thinking. And that is because, as neuroscience explains, the well-developed chamber of the brain is the binary, not the “lateral chamber.”

Yet, the imperative to prioritize never ceases within the context of an ecosystem. And why the blog keeps speaking about the photosynthesis phenomenon.

Our challenge? No development experience. We struggle to move to multiplicity and relativism. Because we don’t forward-think, we aren’t at home defining a desired outcome or context. And absent the latter, we can’t generate multiple scenarios to pick and choose the way forward confidently.

See above; it’s called mismanagement.

We value hierarchy and paternalism by being “easy” on incompetence, irresponsibility, and inefficiency. Granted that rank has its privileges, including incompetence, we turn around and bestow paternalism on those subordinate to us. And that twin value would explain why we turned from the region’s “basket case” to a perennial laggard.

Why aren’t we a powerhouse in manufacturing and agribusiness? How can a nation be underdeveloped after over seventy-five years?

We won’t be ahead of the curve in energy development, manufacturing, and agriculture until we overcome short-sightedness. And the crab mentality is a classic. Over the last 14 years, the blog has spoken to a pretty simple GPS model – because it facilitates forward-, lateral, and creative thinking.

Vietnam had and still has an infrastructure problem. Their education system is not world-class. And there is corruption too and inefficiency. But we still think we have to address each of our share of these challenges before we can overcome being the regional laggard.

In fairness, they are “enablers.” And we must fix them. Still, we must aggressively seek the “drivers” and exploit them.

And that’s what Vietnam did; it followed the journey of the Asian Tigers – leapfrogging industrialization by begging for foreign money and technology.

Are we “teachable”?

Unsurprisingly, as we already did, we would fall into learned helplessness.

What is “learned helplessness”?

“It is a mental state in which an organism forced to bear aversive stimuli, or stimuli that are painful or otherwise unpleasant becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are “escapable,” presumably because it has learned that it cannot control the situation.” [Encyclopedia Britannica]

And there is also “cognitive bias.”

“A cognitive bias is a subconscious error in thinking that leads you to misinterpret information from the world around you and affects the rationality and accuracy of decisions and judgments. Biases are unconscious and automatic processes designed to make decision-making quicker and more efficient. Cognitive biases come from several things, such as heuristics (mental shortcuts), social pressures, and emotions.

“Although these biases are unconscious, there are small steps we can take to train our minds to adopt a new pattern of thinking and mitigate the effects of these biases.” [https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-bias.html]

That is why the blog has introduced the imperative to pull neuroscience into our nation-building challenge.

Juan de la Cruz is beyond survival. Juan de la Cruz must thrive.

Our economic managers, legislators, and think tanks must recognize the North Star, not perpetuate short-sightedness. Short-sightedness nourishes the crab mentality and the sense of entitlement and emboldens political patronage and impunity.

Gising bayan!