Wednesday, September 24, 2008
CaffeineSparks' perspective on the Overpopulation Issue
In response to Resty O's Condominiumized series. All data culled from official documents published by the NSO, NSCB, PopCom and UPPI.
On "overpopulation."
The number of people inhabiting a finite space with finite resources only matters when the finite space and resources are not managed well. The Earth can only be called "overpopulated" when it can no longer sustain the population. Even regenerating resources, such as agriculture, can fail due to mismanagement or natural calamities. Given that the Philippines' annual population growth rate of 2.06 (average 2000-2007) remains constant, it is projected our population will rise to over 140 million. This is not a problem if along with the population growth we experience a sustainable growth in the economy that would support this number of people. But the economy has been very sluggish in comparison to our neighbors. If we look at the agriculture sector alone, which employs 36 percent half of the working-age population, the future looks grim.
Nowhere does it say in HB 5043, that the Philippines is "overpopulated."
"Our population growth rate of 2.04% is extremely high. The CIA gives a much lower estimate of 1.728% (World Factbook Country Listing of 2008, available on the internet)."
And of course we will believe the estimates of the CIA over Filipino demographers and statisticians who are working here.
"We should aim for a Zero Population Growth Rate."
The bill does not suggest a target population growth rate. Our lobby's budget advocacy aims to eliminate "unmet need," i.e. the number of mothers who say they want to space children or stop having children but are unable to because they do not have access to family planning methods and commodities and/or do not have resources to acquire them.
There is a 15.7 percent "unmet need" among married/in union women of reproductive age (15-64) in the Philippines.
On the number of children
The Philippines' total fertility rate, i.e. the average number of children per couple is 3.5. Desired fertility rate on average is 2.5. What difference can one more child make? According to studies a lot. The table below is taken from "Poverty, Vulnerability and Family Size: Evidence from the Philippines" by Aniceto C. Orbeta, Jr. ADB Institute Discussion Paper No. 29, June 2005.
This table shows that the more children there are in the family, the higher the higher the incidence of poverty.
You can read the rest of Orbeta's analysis here.
While the bill suggests having 2 children, this suggestion is in no way coercive. If a couple think they can support 10 kids, they will not be penalized for their choices.
FACT: 20.1 percent of currently married/in union women of reproductive age are already having 2 kids anyway. 17.9 of them have 3 (NDHS 2003).
On Poverty
This country is poor (by poor I mean 1 in 4 Filipinos is going hungry involuntarily). A growing population is not the cause of poverty. Poverty is caused by many, many things. I believe my search for these factors are well-documented in this blog over the years. However a growing population makes those who are already poor suffer more. It also perpetuates the cycle of poverty from once generation to the next. Once you are born into a family with scant resources, what are the chances of you making out of poverty yourself?
Picture a family of 10, the young couple with 8 kids living on the father's minimum wage. P300++/ day divided by 10 = P30 per person? In this instance, how can the mother not make her children work as well? That is why you see them begging on the streets instead of studying in schools. Should the mother work as soon after giving birth to her youngest, who will take care of the brood? If she does not work, then she has no money of her own and is completely at the mercy of her husband. What if their marriage is less than ideal?
On Development
I am re-posting my response from part of my latest entry at Filipino Voices.
What is the impact of the reduced population growth of other countries on economic development?
Reduced population growth coupled with an outstanding development policy environment produced the “East Asian miracle” something that has eluded the Philippines, even while it is geographically in the region. Lower dependency ratios, a large working-age population and a growing economy resulted in rapid economic development.
South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand are among the first group of less-developed countries (LDCs) to achieve low total fertility rate (TFR) in the world. From the 1960s onward, these countries abandoned the idea that a large population was a source of strength. This assumption was replaced by the idea that population growth was an impediment to development goals.
Between 1975 and 2000, Thailand’s per capita income grew to eight times, Indonesia 6.5 times and South Korea 10 times. The Philippines could only manage 2.6 times but it had the highest population growth rate among the three at 2.36 percent a year on the average.
The East Asian miracle can be attributed to these countries taking advantage of their ‘demographic dividend’ or the rise in the rate of economic growth due to a rising share of working age people in a population. The demographic dividend was made possible by reduced fertility.
The East Asian demographic transition of the past fifty years is the fastest demographic transition to date. Modern transitions are faster because countries gain the benefit of knowledge, experience, or technology developed by others.
The Philippines has a large working-age population, but why does this not translate into economic growth?
While the Philippines has a large working-age population, the dependency ratio is equally high. Moreover, not all who belong to the working-age group are gainfully employed.
For every 10 working adult, there are 7.2 dependents. There are 51 million Filipinos of working age (15-64 years old). Of these 4.1 million are unemployed and 10 million are underemployed.
“Demographic dividend” (or the rise in the rate of economic growth due to a rising share of working age people in a population) does not occur automatically. It is achieved through the right combination of national policies. Without the right policy environment, it is possible that the Philippines will miss the opportunity to secure growth.
The demographic dividend is delivered through three main mechanisms - labor supply, savings and human capital.
As long as the labor market can absorb the labor supply, per capita production increases. Sluggish economic growth unable to absorb new labor will lead to a large unemployed/underemployed working-age population.
A large working population encourages the growth of savings, improving the overall prospects for investment and growth in the country. However an economy unable to generate wages that exceeds subsistence levels is not likely to generate savings.
A working population able to save will invest in education and health - essential investments in human capital. The long-term gain is a society that is more productive, promoting higher wages and a better standard of living.
The three mechanisms of demographic dividend – labor supply, savings and human capital – are all highly dependent on the national policy environment.
On the role of the Church
"The Catholic Church is not concerned with the plight of the poor in the country."
Mary Racelis to Bishop Bacani, Ateneo Development Society Forum, 2 Fridays ago: "If the church is so supportive of natural family planning father, why are there no services teaching them in parishes?"
Bishop Bacani: (stoic face.)
On the safety of pills, condoms etc.
This is the WHO report quoted by CBCP when they say pills are carcinogenic. In bold caps the report reads "ORAL CONTRACEPTIVES INCREASE RISK OF SOME CANCERS AND
DECREASE RISK OF OTHERS."
I don't know if Resty has ever bought condoms. They usually say they are only 96% or so effective. The instruction leaflet also informs the user of how the condom might be damaged etc.
On Thailand. In 1991, HIV/AIDS infection among the adult population peaked at 143,000. The aggressive promotion of condom use initiated by the government was a direct response to the epidemic focusing on the country’s prostitution industry. At one point condom use among sex workers was at 96 percent. At present there are an estimated 580,000 adults who are infected with HIV/AIDS.
Strong government support decreased the prevalence of HIV/AIDS significantly among adults, reducing the rate from 30 percent in 1994 to 12 percent in 2003.
On Semantics
The motive of couples of practice natural family planning as well as modern methods is one and the same. Prevent pregnancy.
At this point I'm getting more and more annoyed with what Resty, an old blog buddy, has posted on his blog.
I will finish this post once I have cooled down some.
But on the point of age-appropriate sex education for young adults from Grade 5 and up, this is what I have to say.
I went to the committee hearing discussing the proposed Anti-Child Pornography bill. Horror of horrors, child porno, filmed here and starring Filipino children, are openly sold in places where anyone can buy DVDs.
Pro-life solon Rep Zialcita, in a sneering and condescending voice asked "Sa tingin n'yo makakatulong ba ang sex ed ng Rh bill na yan?"
Rep. Custodio-Antonino responded by saying they are actually considering lowering the age for much younger kids. To teach them not about the intricacies of kama sutra but to teach them what sex is. To teach them about their sensitive body parts and about what is inappropriate interaction with adults.
We are dealing here with realities other people live through. Let's pull our heads out of our asses and open our eyes. Please.
To be continued....
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Vox populi, Vox Dei
The Catholic Bishop’s Conference of the Philippines has been vocal in opposing the passing of the RH Bill. The Church hierarchy has called for denial of communion and even the excommunication of members of Congress who have authored or are supportive of the proposed legislation. They have also called on the electorate to punish these legislators at the polls come 2010.
As Filipinos and as a social institution, the Church hierarchy is entitled to voice its position in matters which they deem involve morality. However the issue on reproductive health is one that is not merely moral, defined as the authoritative delineation of what is right and wrong, but also touches on what is socially just for those subsumed by such authority.
The Philippines is a republic. Its people have elected members of Congress to whom they have entrusted representation, or voice, in government. The Philippine Constitution is the highest manifestation of Filipinos’ collective voice. One of the reasons why the constitution deems the separation between Church and State “inviolable” is to remain true to the republican social contract which places sovereignty on the will of the People. Filipinos exercise their sovereign right to self-determination by electing representatives in government who are tasked to make manifest their constituents’ collective voices. As a Republic, the Philippines’ legislators, unlike the Catholic hierarchy, must also be answerable to those not of the Catholic faith.
In 2004, Filipino Muslims issued a fatwah (official ruling) which expressed support of family planning. The ruling endorses the use of “all methods of contraception” given that they are safe, legal and in accordance with the teachings and principles of their religion. This is a direct response to higher maternal and infant mortality rates in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao as compared to other regions. A genuine democracy aggregates the interests and values of the minority along with the majority.
Plurality of Catholic Voices: Unity in Diversity
The Philippines, and five others, are the only remaining Catholic countries of 42 which do not have a clear policy on population management and reproductive health.
The plurality with which the Catholic faithful practices the minutiae of religion is reflected in the varying stances of practitioners world-wide. A region with which we share cultural and historical similarities, Latin America, has long called for the need to put reproductive health issues into a developing-country context.
Immediately after its release in 1968, Latin American bishops expressed support for Pope Paul VI’s De Humanae Vitae, with some caveats that placed the Catholic faith in the context of developing countries. The Second Latin American Bishop’s Conference held that same year admitted that “population growth in Latin America exacerbated economic, social and ethical problems, such as low nuptiality, single parent families, out-of-wedlock births, and housing shortages.” By the late 1960s the Latin American Catholic Church affirmed that population growth caused unjust suffering for many families.
There is clearly no single voice speaking for all Catholics on matters of reproductive health and population management.
Disinformation in the Media Regarding ‘Abortion’
In accordance with the Constitution, RH Bill 5043 clearly upholds the sanctity of family life by continuing to deem abortion illegal.
There is no evidence to support the claims of the CBCP that Representative Lagman’s RH bill “opens a door for abortion to be recognized as a population control method.” In fact, Western Europe, where abortion is legal, experiences the lowest rate of abortion in the world with a rate of 11 per 1,000.
Whether we admit it or not, abortion is a fact in the Philippines. Based on data gathered in the late 1990s, some 473,000 abortions occurred in 2000. 1/3 of women who experience an unintended pregnancy end it in abortion. Unintended pregnancy is therefore the root cause of abortion. Preventing unplanned or unintended pregnancies by providing women access to comprehensive family planning and reproductive health services, including access to complete and accurate information, would enable women and couples to make informed decisions and, consequently, help prevent abortions and save women’s lives.
It is true that in Philippine context the Church hierarchy perhaps holds a monopoly of authority on things ‘moral’ and not-of-this-world. They are shepherds who must tend to the spiritual needs and well-being of their flock. However their flock is also made of flesh-and-bone and must subsist on material things – clothes, food, shelter, all of which are finite. It is in the dominion of the laity – to ensure that the people’s physical well-being is able to sustain spiritual well-being.
While there may be no interest groups who loudly campaign for a comprehensive national reproductive health program, some important facts indicate that Filipino families need such policies. According to the NSO's Family Planning Surveys, 15.7 percent of married women who do not want any more children or who want to wait before having their next birth currently have no access to any method of family planning.
36 out of 100 married women are already using modern family planning method. Pills are the most popular form of contraception, followed by female sterilisation or ligation. More than half of those who use contraceptives are married women aged 35 to 39 years old.
Reproductive rights are also human rights. Reproductive rights do not merely address issues on abortion. Reproductive rights address issues of maternal mortality, discrimination and a host of other gendered health issues. It is the struggle of women and men to decide on when and whether they want to have children and to have access to family planning services to achieve greater control over decisions which affect their own bodies.
There is a strong need for national legislation addressing the need for a pragmatic reproductive health policy. Legislators must answer to their mandate by enacting legislation which will lead to sustainable population and reproductive programs. Legislators are also mandated to speak on behalf of those who cannot.
A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?
This 1987 Atlantic Monthly article was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in the United States and has remained the subject of controversy and attention in the Philippines. This is the text as originally published in the magazine.
Copyright 1987 Atlantic Monthly Company
The Atlantic Monthly: November, 1987
A DAMAGED CULTURE
A New Philippines?
IN THE UNITED STATES THE COMING OF THE AQUINO government seemed to make the Philippines into a success story. The evil Marcos was out, the saintly Cory was in, the worldwide march of democracy went on. All that was left was to argue about why we stuck with our tawdry pet dictator for so long, and to support Corazon Aquino as she danced around coup attempts and worked her way out of the problems the Marcoses had caused.
This view of the New Philippines is comforting. But after six weeks in the country I don't think it's very realistic. Americans would like to believe that the only colony we ever had--a country that modeled its institutions on ours and still cares deeply about its relations with the United States--is progressing under our wing. It's not, for reasons that go far beyond what the Marcoses did or stole. The countries that surround the Philippines have become the world's most famous showcases for the impact of culture on economic development. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore--all are short on natural resources, but all (as their officials never stop telling you) have clawed their way up through hard study and hard work. Unfortunately for its people, the Philippines illustrates the contrary: that culture can make a naturally rich country poor. There may be more miserable places to live in East Asia-- Vietnam, Cambodia--but there are few others where the culture itself, rather than a communist political system, is the main barrier to development. The culture in question is Filipino, but it has been heavily shaped by nearly a hundred years of the "Fil-Am relationship.' The result is apparently the only non-communist society in East Asia in which the average living standard is going down.
Now a few disclaimers. Some things obviously have gotten better since Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fled the country at the end of February last year (though most Filipinos seem to think that the threats to the Aquino government --of which the worst was the bloody August coup attempt --imperil such progress as the country has made). Not so much money is being sucked out at the top. More people are free to say what they like about the government, without being thrown in jail. Not so many peasants are having their chickens stolen by underpaid soldiers foraging for food, although the soldiers, whose pay has been increased, are still woefully short on equipment and supplies.
The economy has stopped shrinking, as it had been doing in the late Marcos years, and some rich Filipinos have brought capital back home. I was not in the Philippines during the Marcos era and can't compare the atmosphere firsthand, but everyone says that the bloodless dethroning of Marcos gave Filipinos new dignity and pride. Early this year, on the first anniversary of the "EDSA revolution' (named for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, where many of the crucial events took place), television stations ran round-the-clock replays of all the most emotional moments: the nuns' attempts to protect the ballot boxes, the defection of Marcos's two main military supporters, Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel Ramos, the abortive swearing-in of Marcos, his sudden disappearance in an American helicopter. It was inspirational and moving and heroic, and as late as this summer, just before the attempted coup, some of the same atmosphere remained. Filipinos are famous for their love of religious icons. A visitor would have to be blind not to see the religious element in Corazon Aquino's public role. Stores sell small Cory dolls with bright yellow dresses and round-rimmed glasses. They're not exactly icons, but I've seen them displayed in homes and cars as if they were. Even when beginning to grumble about her government, many Filipinos speak of Cory's goodness, patience, and piety in tones that suggest they think of her as a secular, widowed Blessed Virgin, and as the only person with even the potential to hold the country together.
Democracy has returned to the Philippines, in a big way. As if to make up for all the years when they could not vote, Filipinos have been analyzing the results of one election and preparing for another almost nonstop since early last year. Election disputes have returned too. For three months after the legislative elections last May, long recounts dragged on to determine whether Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos's former Defense Minister, whose switch to Aquino helped topple Marcos, would get one of the twenty-four seats in the Senate. Senators are elected nation-wide, in what often resembles a popularity contest. Among the new senators is a Charles Bronson--style action-movie star; Enrile is about as well known as the actor, and though he has made many enemies, most foreigners I spoke with found it hard to believe that in an honest vote count he would have lost to everyone on Aquino's list of nominees, which included a number of newcomers and nobodies. Finally, in August, he squeaked in as number twenty-four.
Democracy has unleashed a Philippine press so varied and licentious as to make even Americans feel nervous-- or rather, to recall standing in grocery check-out lines looking at Midnight and Star. Newspapers are always starting up and closing, but at any given time Manila has at least twenty dailies, most of them in English. Each paper features its stable of hardworking star columnists, any of whom is capable of turning out 2,000 to 3,000 words of political commentary and inside gossip--the equivalent of a whole American op-ed page--in a single day. Philippine politics has a small-town feel, because so many of the principals have known one another all their lives. This adds to the velocity and intensity of gossip--especially the rumors of impending coups, which have cropped up every week or ten days since Aquino took power, and which preoccupy political Manila the way scandals preoccupy Washington.
One final disclaimer: it can seem bullying or graceless for an American to criticize the Philippines. Seen from Manila, the United States is strong and rich. Seen from anywhere, the Philippines is troubled and poor. Why pick on people who need help? The Filipino ethic of delicadeza, their equivalent of saving face, encourages people to raise unpleasant topics indirectly, or, better still, not to raise them at all. Out of respect for delicadeza, or from a vague sense of guilt that the former colony is still floundering, or because of genuine fondness for the Filipino people, the United States tolerates polite fictions about the Philippines that it would ruthlessly puncture if they concerned France or even Mexico. I don't pretend that my view of the Philippines is authoritative, but I've never before been in a country where my initial impressions were so totally at odds with the standard, comforting, let's-all-pull-together view. It seems to me that the prospects for the Philippines are about as dismal as those for, say, South Korea are bright. In each case the basic explanation seems to be culture: in the one case a culture that brings out the productive best in the Koreans (or the Japanese, or now even the Thais), and in the other a culture that pulls many Filipinos toward their most self-destructive, self-defeating worst.
The Post-Kleptocratic Economy
CONSIDER FIRST THE OVERALL ECONOMIC: PICTURE. Officials in both South Korea and the Philippines have pointed out to me that in the mid-1960s, when the idealistic (as he then seemed) Ferdinand Marcos began his first term as President, the two countries were economically even with each other, with similar per capita incomes of a few hundred dollars a year. The officials used this fact to make very different points. The Koreans said it dramatized how utterly poor they used to be ("We were like the Philippines!' said one somber Korean bureaucrat), while to the Filipinos it was a reminder of a golden, hopeful age. It demonstrated, they said, that the economy had been basically robust until the Marcoses launched their kleptocracy. Since the 1960s, of course, the Philippines has moved in the opposite direction from many other East Asian countries. South Korea's per capita annual income is now about $ 2,500--which gives the country a low-wage advantage over Japan or the United States. That same income makes Korea look like a land of plenty relative to the Philippines, where the per capita income is about $ 600. The average income in the Manila area is much higher than that for the country as a whole; in many farming regions the per capita income is about $ 100. The government reports that about two thirds of the people in the country live below the proverty line, as opposed to half in the pre-Marcos era. There are technical arguments about where to draw the poverty line, but it is obvious that most Filipinos lack decent houses, can't afford education, in some areas are short of food, and in general are very, very poor. The official unemployment rate is 12 percent, but if all the cigarette vendors, surplus bar girls, and other underemployed people are taken into account, something like half the human talent in the country must be unused.
Some Filipino economists contend that the country is about to turn the corner, is ready to make a new start economically as it has done politically. Is the world price of sugar stagnant? Plantation owners can flood seaside sugarcane fields and raise shrimp, which bring high prices and for which Japan has an insatiable demand. Are American, Japanese, and European companies shifting their production sites worldwide? Why not build more of the plants in the Philippines, which believes it has a well-educated work force and relatively low wages. Just before the first anniversary of the EDSA revolution I spoke with Jaime Ongpin, an intense, precise businessman in his late forties, who had become the new Finance Minister. For the immediate future, he said, the trends looked good. The government was breaking up some of the cartels run by Marcos's "cronies' and exposing them to competition. Construction and small-business activity were picking up. The price of copra (the country's leading export) was finally rising. And the economy might grow by five or six percent this year--more than the economies of Japan and the U.S. Another economist, Bernardo Villegas, has been predicting an East Asian--style sustained boom for the Philippines.
Many man-on-the-street Filipinos share a version of this view, which is that Marcos was the source of all their problems, so his removal is itself a solution. There is some truth to what they say, especially as it concerns Marcos's last ten years in office, when he had graduated from his earlier, nationalistic, land-reform-and-industrialization phase and formed the "conjugal dictatorship' with his wife.
Still, for all the damage Marcos did, it's not clear that he caused the country's economic problems, as opposed to intensifying them. Most of the things that now seem wrong with the economy--grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty, land-ownership disputes, monopolistic industries in cozy, corrupt cahoots with the government--have been wrong for decades. When reading Philippine novels or history books, I would come across a passage that resembled what I'd seen in the Manila slums or on a farm. Then I would read on and discover that the description was by an American soldier in the 1890s, or a Filipino nationalist in the 1930s, or a foreign economist in the 1950s, or a young politician like Ferdinand Marcos or Benigno Aquino in the 1960s. "Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. . . . Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite.' The precise phrasing belongs to Benigno Aquino, in his early days in politics, but the thought has been expressed by hundreds of others. Koreans and Japanese love to taunt Americans by hauling out old, pompous predictions that obviously have not come true. "Made in Japan' would always mean "shoddy.' Korea would "always' be poor. Hah hah hah! You smug Yankees were so wrong! Leafing back through Filipinology has the opposite effect: it is surprising, and depressing, to see how little has changed.
BECAUSE PREVIOUS CHANGES OF GOVERNMENT HAVE meant so little to the Philippines, it is hard to believe that replacing Marcos with Aquino, desirable as it doubtless is, will do much besides stanching the flow of crony profits out of the country. In a sociological sense the elevation of Corazon Aquino through the EDSA revolution should probably be seen not as a revolution but as the restoration of the old order. Marcos's rise represented the triumph of the nouveau riche. He was, of course, an Ilocano, from the tough, frugal Ilocos region, in the northwest corner of Luzon. Many of those whom he enriched were also outsiders to the old-money, old-family elite that had long dominated the country's politics. These elite groups, often referred to in shorthand as Makati (the name of the wealthy district and business center of Manila), regarded Marcos the way high-toned Americans regarded Richard Nixon: clever and ambitious, but so uncouth.
Corazon Aquino's family, the Cojuangcos, is part of this landowning elite. (Their name illustrates its Hispanic pretensions. Her great-grandfather came from China and was reportedly named Ko Hwan Ko, which was gentrified into Cojuangco. Most educated Filipinos speak fluent English, but in the stuffiest reaches of the upper class, I was told, the residual Spanish influence is so strong that it is a sign of greater refinement to speak perfect Castilian Spanish.) Her husband, Benigno Aquino, was also from a famous family. Her running mate in the 1986 elections, Salvador "Doy' Laurel, is the son of Jose Laurel, who was the Quisling-like President under the Japanese. Many of her first Cabinet appointees and sponsored candidates for the Senate bear old, familiar names. And so when Corazon Aquino replaced Marcos, it was as if Katharine Graham, having driven Richard Nixon from office through her newspaper, succeeded him as President--or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, or Mrs. C. Douglas Dillon III. The traditional upper class was back in its traditional place. Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, a writer some of whose work was banned under Marcos, recently published a debunking biography of Imelda Marcos. Its killing blow, in its final chapters, was its assertion that while Imelda always pretended to be an aristocrat, Corazon Aquino really was one: "Her jewels were truly heirlooms, not recent purchases from Van Cleef and Arpels. She was a true blue stocking, educated in the United States, and fluent in French. She represented all that Imelda had ever aspired to.'
Especially on my second trip to the Philippines, in the summer, many Filipinos told me that Aquino had become strangely passive in office, acting as if her only task had been to get rid of Marcos and ride out the periodic coups, rumored and real. As long as she did those jobs--that is, stayed in office--she did not feel driven to do much else. Perhaps she will do something to prove that judgment unfair; the August mutiny and preceding social unrest may force her not only to control the army more tightly but also to take economic problems more seriously. But even with the best will in the world, she will have trouble dramatically improving the country's prospects.
One morning this summer, as I stared out the window at the monsoon rain, I listened to two foreign economists describe the economic trap in which the Philippines is caught. The men had worked in the Philippines for years and had absorbed the ethic of delicadeza. They did not want their names, or the name of the bank they worked for, revealed. This reluctance might suggest that their views were unusually critical, which was not the case: they were remarkable only for how concisely they summarized what I'd heard in other banks, in embassies, in business offices, and from a few Philippine government officials. The men ticked off the list of possibilities for Philippine development and explained the problems in each case.
Manufacturing? "There were not many viable sectors to begin with, and most of them were taken over by cronies. The industrial sector is used to guarantee monopoly and high-tariff protection. It's inward-looking, believes it cannot compete. People are used to paying a lot for goods that are okay-to-shoddy in quality. Labor costs are actually quite high for a country at this stage of development. They should be like Sri Lanka's but they're like Korea's, because union organizing has run far ahead of productivity. It's a poor country--but an expensive place in which to produce. American and Japanese firms have set up some electronics assembly plants, but they're only buying labor, not building subsidiary industries or anything that adds real value.'
Agriculture? "It's been heavily skewed for fifty years to plantation crops. All those traditional exports are down, sugar most of all. Copra is okay for the moment, but it's never going to expand very much. Prawns are the only alternative anybody can think of now.' Agriculture is also nearly paralyzed by arguments over land ownership. Since the Spanish days land has been concentrated in a few giant haciendas, including the 17,000-acre Hacienda Luisita of the Cojuangco family, and no government has done much to change the pattern. "You could argue that real land reform would lead to more productivity, but it's an entirely hypothetical argument,' an Australian economist told me. "This government simply is not going to cause a revolution in the social structure.' Just before the new Congress convened, as her near-dictatorial powers were about to elapse, Aquino signed a generalized land-reform-should-happen decree. Most observers took this as an indication that land reform would not happen, since the decree left all the decisions about the when, where, and how of land reform to the landowner-heavy Congress.
Services and other industries? "They're very much influenced by the political climate. I think this has tremendous potential as a tourist country--it's so beautiful. But they don't have many other ways to sell their labor, except the obvious one.' The obvious one is the sex business, visible in every part of the country--and indeed throughout Asia, where Filipino "entertainers' are common. In Davao, on the southern island of Mindanao, I watched TV one night and saw an ad repeated over and over. Women wanted for opportunities overseas. Qualifications: taller than five feet two inches, younger than twenty-one. When I took cabs in Manila, the drivers routinely inquired if I wanted a woman. When my wife returned our children's rented inner tubes to a beach vendor at Argao, the vendor, a toothless old woman, asked if she was lonely in her room and needed a hired companion.
Resources? "Exploiting natural resources has always been the base here,' one of the economists said. "But they've taken every tree they can easily get. It's not like Brazil or Borneo, with another fifty years to rip out the heart of the earth.' Every single day Japanese diners take hundreds of millions of pairs of chopsticks out of paper wrappers, use them for fifteen minutes, and throw them away. Most of the chopsticks started out as trees in the Philippines, though more and more of them now come from American forests. The Philippines has more naturally spectacular mountains and vistas than Malaysia or Indonesia, but you can travel for miles in the countryside and mainly see eroding hillsides stripped bare of trees. Like Americans who speak of "conquering' the frontier, Filipinos sometimes take a more romantic view of what "taking every tree' can mean. F. Sionil Jose, a prominent novelist in his early sixties, who grew up in Ilocos, has written a famous five-volume saga--the Rozales novels--about the migration from the harsh Ilocos region to the fertile plains of central Luzon. The Ilocano migrants made a new life for themselves, he observes, and they did it by cutting down the jungle and planting rice. "There is some hope with minerals and gold,' one of the economists said. Indeed, a Forty-ninerstyle gold rush is now under way in Mindanao. I was told that communist rebels, Moslem separatists, and former Philippine Army soldiers now work side by side in the gold mines, proving that economic development can be the answer to political problems.
The economists went on: "Geographically, the country is fractured beyond belief. The most controllable area is right around Manila, but beyond that the government's writ has never run very far.' For instance, the newspapers that blanket Manila have virtually no circulation in the rest of the country: among a population of 55 million, the combined readership of all twenty-plus daily papers is about five million. "The education system has run down terribly.' The Philippines spends about one eighth as much money per student as Malaysia does. Free education runs only through the lower grades, and after that the annual fee of $ 10 a student keeps enrollment down to 50 percent. "The fifteen-to-twenty billion dollars that Marcos creamed off has had a big effect. There's a kind of corruption that just recycles the money, but all this was taken out.
"And then you have population growth, which is closer to three percent than two-point-five, even though the government says two-point-two. The population could go over a hundred million in fifteen years. Since the economy doesn't grow that fast, the per capita income keeps going down.' Most people I met in the Philippines asked me how many children I had. When I told them, the normal response was, "Only two!' By the end of my stay I was experimenting, raising the number to test the response. "Only six!' a priest said on my last day.
The economist concluded, "All in all, you'd have to say it's a worrisome situation.'
The Meaning of Smoky Mountain
YOU'D HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING MORE THAN THAT. Most of the time I spent in the Philippines, I walked around feeling angry--angry at myself when I brushed off the latest platoon of child beggars, angry at the beggars when I did give in, angry at the rich Filipinos for living behind high walls and guardhouses in the fortified Makati compounds euphemistically called villages, angry as I picked my way among piles of human feces left by homeless families living near the Philippine Navy headquarters on Roxas Boulevard, angry at a society that had degenerated into a war of every man against every man.
It's not the mere fact of poverty that makes the Philippines so distressing, since some other Asian countries have lower living standards. China, for instance, is on the whole much poorer than the Philippines, and China's human beasts of burden, who pull huge oxcarts full of bricks down streets in Shanghai or Beijing, must have lives that are among the hardest on the planet. But Philippine poverty seems more degrading, for reasons I will try to illustrate through the story of "Smoky Mountain.'
Smoky Mountain is, I will admit, something of a cliche, but it helps illustrate an important and non-cliched point. The "mountain' is an enormous heap of garbage, forty acres in size and perhaps eighty feet high, in the port district north of Manila, and it is home to some 15,000 Filipinos. The living conditions would seem to be miserable: the smell of a vast city's rotting garbage is so rank and powerful that I could not breathe through my nose without gagging. I did finally retch when I felt my foot sink into something soft and saw that I'd stepped on a discarded half-full blood-transfusion bag from the hospital, which was now emitting a dark, clotted ooze. "I have been going to the dumpsite for over ten years now and I still have not gotten used to the smell,' Father Benigno Beltran, a young Mod Squad--style Dominican priest who works in Smoky Mountain, has written. "The place becomes infested with millions of flies that often get into the chalice when I say mass. The smell makes you deaf as it hits you like a blow to the solar plexus.'
The significance of Smoky Mountain, though, is not how bad it is but how good. People live and work in the garbage heap, and say they feel lucky to do so. Smoky Mountain is the center of an elaborate scavenging-and-recycling industry, which has many tiers and many specialized functional groups. As night falls in Manila, hundreds of scavengers, nearly all men, start walking out from Smoky Mountain pushing big wooden carts--about eight feet long and shaped like children's wagons--in front of them. They spend all night crisscrossing the town, picking through the curbside garbage dumps and looking for the most valuable items: glass bottles and metal cans. At dawn they push their carts back to Smoky Mountain, where they sell what they've found to middlemen, who own fleets of carts and bail out their suppliers if they get picked up by the police in the occasional crackdowns on vagrancy.
Other scavengers work the garbage over once city trucks have collected it and brought it in. Some look for old plastic bags, some for rubber, some for bones that can be ground up for animal feed. In the late-afternoon at Smoky Mountain I could easily imagine I'd had my preview of hell. I stood on the summit, looking into the lowlands where trucks kept bringing new garbage and several bulldozers were at work, plowing through heaps of old black garbage. I'd of course heard of spontaneous combustion but had never believed in it until I saw the old garbage steam and smoke as it was exposed to the air. Inches behind the bulldozers, sometimes riding in the scoops, were about fifteen or twenty little children carrying baskets, as if at the beach. They darted among the machines and picked out valuables that had been newly revealed. "It's hard to get them to go to school,' a man in his mid-twenties who lived there told me. "They can make twenty, thirty pesos a day this way'--$ 1 to $ 1.50. "Here the money is so good.'
The residents of Smoky Mountain are mainly Visayans, who have come from the Visayas region of the central Philippines --Leyte, Negros, Cebu--over the past twenty years. From time to time the government, in embarrassment, has attempted to move them off the mountain, but they have come back: the money is so good compared with the pay for anything else they can do. A real community has grown up in the garbage dump, with the tight family bonds that hold together other Filipino barangays, or neighborhoods. About 10 percent of the people who live in Smoky Mountain hold normal, non-scavenger jobs elsewhere in Manila; they commute. The young man who guided me had just graduated from college with an engineering degree, but he planned to stay with his family, in Smoky Mountain, after he found a job. The people of Smoky Mountain complain about land-tenure problems-- they want the city to give them title to the land on which they've built their shacks--but the one or two dozen I spoke with seemed very cheerful about their community and their lives. Father Beltran, the young Dominican, has worked up a thriving business speaking about Smoky Mountain to foreign audiences, and has used the lecture fees to pay for a paved basketball court, a community-center building, and, of course, a church. As I trudged down from the summit of the mountain, having watched little boys dart among the bulldozers, I passed the community center. It was full of little girls, sitting in a circle and singing nursery-school songs with glee. If I hadn't come at the last minute, I would have suspected Father Beltran of putting on a Potemkin Village show.
The bizarre good cheer of Smoky Mountain undoubtedly says a lot about the Filipinos' spiritual resilience. But like the sex industry, which is also fairly cheerful, it says something depressing about the other choices people have. When I was in one of the countless squatter villages in Manila, talking with people who had built houses out of plywood and scavenged sheet metal, and who lived eight to a room, I assumed it must be better to be poor out in the countryside, where at least you had some space and clean air to breathe. Obviously, I was being romantic. Back home there was no way to earn money, and even in Smoky Mountain people were only a four-cent jeepney ride away from the amusements of the big city.
In Smoky Mountain and the other squatter districts, I couldn't help myself: try as I would not to, I kept dwelling on the contrast with the other extreme of Filipino life, the wealthy one. The contrast is relatively hard to see in Manila itself, since so much of the town's wealth is hidden, literally walled up in the fortified "villages.' But one day, shortly after I'd listened to scavengers explain why some grades of animal bone were worth more on the resale market than others, I tagged along with a friend and visited one of Manila's rich young families in the mountains outside town.
To enter the house we had to talk our way past a rifleman at the gate--a standard fixture not only of upper-class areas of Manila but also of banks, office buildings, McDonald's--and then follow a long, twisting driveway to a mountaintop palace. The family was, of course, from old money; they were also well educated, public-spirited, sincere. But I spent my day with them in an ill-concealed stupor, wandering from room to room and estimating how many zillions of dollars had been sunk into the art, furniture, and fixtures. We ate lunch on the patio, four maids in white dresses standing at attention a few paces off, each bearing a platter of food and ready to respond instantly when we wanted more. Another maid stood behind my chair, leaning over the table and waving a fan back and forth to drive off any flies. As we ate, I noticed a strange rat-a-tat sound from inside the house, as if several reporters had set up a city room and were pounding away on old Underwoods. When we finished our dessert and went inside, I saw the explanation. Another two or three uniformed servants were stationed inside the cathedral-like living room, incessantly twitching their flyswatters against the walls.
The War of Every Man Against Every Man
AM I SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL? SURE--YOU COULD work up an even starker contrast between Park Avenue and the South Bronx. But that would mean only that the United States and the Philippines share a problem, not that extremes of wealth and poverty are no problem at all. In New York and a few other places the extremes are so visible as to make many Americans uneasy about the every-man-for-himself principle on which our society is based. But while the South Bronix is an American problem, few people would think of it as typical of America. In the Philippines the contrasting extremes are, and have been, the norm.
What has created a society in which people feel fortunate to live in a garbage dump because the money is so good? Where some people shoo flies away from others for 300 pesos, or $ 15, a month? It can't be any inherent defect in the people: outside this culture they thrive. Filipino immigrants to the United States are more successful than immigrants from many other countries. Filipino contract laborers, working for Japanese and Korean construction companies, built many of the hotels, ports, and pipelines in the Middle East. "These are the same people who shined under the Japanese managers,' Blas Ople, a veteran politician, told me. "But when they work for Filipino contractors, the schedule lags.' It seems unlikely that the problem is capitalism itself, even though Philippine Marxists argue endlessly that it grinds up the poor to feed the rich. If capitalism were the cause of Philippine underdevelopment, why would its record be so different everywhere else in the region? In Japan, Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere Asian-style capitalism has not only led to trade surpluses but also created Asia's first real middle class. Chinese economists can't call what they're doing capitalism, but they can go on for hours about how "market reforms' will lead to a better life for most people.
If the problem in the Philippines does not lie in the people themselves or, it would seem, in their choice between capitalism and socialism, what is the problem? I think it is cultural, and that it should be thought of as a failure of nationalism.
It may seem perverse to wish for more nationalism in any part of the Third World. Americans have come to identify the term with the tiny-country excesses of the United Nations. Nationalism can of course be divisive, when it sets people of one country against another. But its absence can be even worse, if that leaves people in the grip of loyalties that are even narrower and more fragmented. When a country with extreme geographic, tribal, and social-class differences, like the Philippines, has only a weak offsetting sense of national unity, its public life does become the war of every man against every man.
Nationalism is valuable when it gives people a reason not to live in the world of Hobbes--when it allows them to look beyond themselves rather than pursuing their own interests to the ruination of everyone else. I assume that most people in the world have the same mixture of selfish and generous motives; their cultures tell them when to indulge each impulse. Japan is strong in large part because its nationalist-racial ethic teaches each Japanese that all other Japanese deserve decent treatment. Non-Japanese fall into a different category. Individual Filipinos are at least as brave, kind, and noble-spirited as individual Japanese, but their culture draws the boundaries of decent treatment much more narrowly. Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay. The mutual tenderness among the people of Smoky Mountain is enough to break your heart. But when observing Filipino friendships I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in The Godfather: total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside. Because the boundaries of decedent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country. And because of this fragmentation--this lack of nationalism--people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen.
Like many other things I am saying here, this judgment would be hotly disputed by most Filipinos. Time and again I heard in interviews about the Filipino people's love of reconciliation and their proudly nationalistic spirit. The EDSA revolution seems emotionally so important in the Philippines not only because it got rid of Marcos but also because it demonstrated a brave, national-minded spirit. I would like to agree with the Filipinos that those four days revealed the country's spiritual essence. To me, though, the episode seems an exception, even an aberration.
For more than a hundred years certain traits have turned up in domestic descriptions and foreign observations of Philippine society. The tradition of political corruption and cronyism, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the tribal fragmentation, the local elite's willingness to make a separate profitable peace with colonial powers--all reflect a feeble sense of nationalism and a contempt for the public good. Practically everything that is public in the Philippines seems neglected or abused. On many street corners in downtown Manila an unwary step can mean a broken leg. Holes two feet square and five feet deep lurk just beyond the curb; they are supposed to be covered by metal grates, but scavengers have taken the grates to sell for scrap. Manila has a potentially beautiful setting, divided by the Pasig River and fronting on Manila Bay. But three fourths of the city's sewage flows raw into the Pasig, which in turns empties into the bay; the smell of Smoky Mountain is not so different from the smell of some of the prettiest public vistas. The Philippine telephone system is worse than its counterparts anywhere else in non-communist Asia--which bogs down the country's business and inconveniences its people--but the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company has a long history of high (and not reinvested) profits. In the first-class dining room aboard the steamer to Cebu, a Filipino at the table next to mine picked through his plate of fish. Whenever he found a piece he didn't like, he pushed it off the edge of his plate, onto the floor. One case of bad manners? Maybe, but I've never seen its like in any other country. Outsiders feel they have understood something small but significant about Japan's success when they watch a bar man carefully wipe the condensation off a bottle of beer and twirl it on the table until the label faces the customer exactly. I felt I had a glimpse into the failures of the Philippines when I saw prosperous-looking matrons buying cakes and donuts in a bakery, eating them in a department store, and dropping the box and wrappers around them as they shopped.
IT'S EASY TO OBSERVE THAT JAPAN'S HABITS ARE MORE useful economically than those of the Philippines, but it's harder to figure out exactly where the destructive habits come from. The four hundred years that the Philippines spent under Spain's thumb obviously left a lasting imprint: at first glance the country seems to have much more in common with Mexico than with any other place in Asia. The Spanish hammered home the idea of Filipino racial inferiority, discourging the native indios from learning the Spanish language and refusing to consecrate them as priests. (The Spanish are also said to have forbidden the natives to wear tucked-in shirts, which is why the national shirt, the barong tagalog, is now worn untucked, in a rare flash of national pride.) As in Latin America, the Spanish friars taught that religion was a matter of submission to doctrine and authority, rather than of independent thought or gentleness to strangers in daily life. And the Spanish rulers set the stage for the country's economic problems in the twentieth century, by giving out huge haciendas to royal favorites and consigning others to work as serfs. As in Latin America, the Spanish thereby implanted the idea that "success' meant landed, idle (that is, non-entrepreneurial or commercial) wealth. The mainly Malay culture with which the Spanish interacted was different from the Aztec and other Indian cultures in Latin America; for instance, societies throughout the Malay regions (including what are now Indonesia and Malaysia) are usually described as being deferential to their leaders, passive rather than rebellious. Perhaps for this reason the Philippines has not overthrown its clergy or its landed elite in the twentieth century, the way most Latin American countries have tried to do.
But for all that might be said about the Spanish legacy, the major outside influence on the modern Philippines is clearly the United States. America prevented the Filipinos from consummating their rebellion against Spain. In 1898 the United States intervened to fight the Spanish and then turned around and fought the Filipino nationalists, too. It was a brutal guerrilla war, in which some half million Filipino soldiers and civilians died. Losing an ugly war has its costs, as we learned in Vietnam; but wining, as in the Philippines, does too. In opposing our policy in the Philippines, William James said, "We are puking up everything we believe in.' His seems a prescient comment about the war, especially compared with President William McKinley's announcement that conquest was necessary to "Christianize' a country that in ironic point of fact was already overwhelmingly Catholic.
In its brief fling with running a colony, America undeniably brought some material benefits to the Philippines: schools, hospitals, laws, and courts. Many older Filipinos still speak with fondness about the orderly old colonial days. But American rule seemed only to intensify the Filipino sense of dependence. The United States quickly earned or bought the loyalty of the ilustrados, the educated upper class, making them into what we would call collaborationists if the Germans or Japanese had received their favors. It rammed through a number of laws insisting on free "competition' between American and Philippine industries, at a time when Philippine industries were in no position to compete with anyone. The countries that have most successfully rebuilt their economies, including Japan and Korea, went through extremely protectionist infant-industry phases, with America's blessing; the United States never permitted the Philippines such a period. The Japanese and Koreans now believe they can take on anybody; the confidence of Filipino industrialists seems to have been permanently destroyed.
During the Second World War, Filipinos fought heroically against the Japanese, both before and after the fall of Corregidor brought on the American surrender of the Philippines, in early 1942. Following the war the United States "gave' the Philippines its independence and was in most measurable ways its benefactor: offering aid, investing in businesses, providing the second largest payroll in the country at U.S. military bases. But in unmeasurable, intangible ways it seems to have eroded confidence even further, leaving Filipinos to believe that they aren't really responsible for their country's fate. Whether I was talking with Marcos-loving right-wingers or communists who hated the United States, whether the discussion was about economics or the U.S. bases or the course of the guerrilla war, most of my conversations in the Philippines ended on the same discouraging note. "Of course, it's not really up to us,' a soldier or politican or communist would tell me. "We have to wait and see what the Americans have in mind.'
In deeper and more pernicious ways Filipinos seem to have absorbed the idea that America is the center and they are the periphery. Much local advertising plays to the idea that if it's American, it's better. "It's got that stateside caste!' one grinning blonde model says in a whiskey ad. An ad for Ban deodorant warns, "Hold It! Is your deodorant making your skin dark?' The most glamorous figures on TV shows are generally light-skinned and sound as if they grew up in Los Angeles. I spoke with a black American who said that the yearning toward "white' culture resembled what he remembered about the black bourgeoisie of the 1950s. College or graduate education in America is a mark of social distinction for Filipinos, as it is for many other Asians. But while U.S.-trained Taiwanese and Korean technocrats return to improve factories and run government ministries, many Filipinos seem to consider the experience a purely social achievement, a trip to finishing school.
"This is a country where the national ambition is to change your nationality,' an American who volunteers at Smoky Mountain told me. The U.S. Navy accepts 400 Filipino recruits each year; last year 100,000 people applied. In 1982, in a survey, 207 grade-school students were asked what nationality they would prefer to be. Exactly ten replied "Filipino.' "There is not necessarily a commitment by the upper class to making the Philippines successful as a nation,' a foreign banker told me. "If things get dicey, they're off, with their money.' "You are dealing here with a damanged culture,' four people told me, in more or less the same words, in different interviews.
It may be too pessimistic to think of culture as a kind of large-scale genetics, channeling whole societies toward progress or stagnation. A hundred years ago not even the crusading Emperor Meiji would have dreamed that "Japanese culture' would come to mean "efficiency.' America is full of people who have changed their "culture' by moving away from the old country or the home town or the farm. But a culture-breaking change of scene is not an answer for the people still in the Philippines--there are 55 million of them, where would they go?--and it's hard to know what else, within our lifetimes, the answer might be.
America knows just what it will do to defend Corazon Aquino against usurpers, like those who planned the last attempted coup. We'll say that we support a demoncratically chosen government, that this one is the country's best hope, that we'll use every tool from economic aid to public-relations pressure to help her serve out her term. But we might start thinking ahead, to what we'll do if the anticoup campaign is successful--to what will happen when Aquino stays in, and the culture doesn't change, and everything gets worse.
How a Community preserves itself
MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top
by Marshall Kirkpatrick / May 17, 2008 8:55 AMread the original article here.
Andrew Sorcini lives in Los Angeles, works as an animator for Disney and is the most powerful user that social news site Digg.com has ever seen. Known at Digg and elsewhere as MrBabyMan, Sorcini has submitted a site-leading 2,400+ stories that have hit the site's coveted front page. Those front page submissions have delivered an estimated 50 million pageviews to the sites the submissions came from. A good number of those submissions have been RWW articles, and we appreciate that.
For months, a small but outspoken number of Digg's millions of other users have complained about seeing as many as three or four MrBabyMan submissions on the front page at one time. As we write this he has two front page stories. Those successes are outshined, however, by the most popular story on Digg Friday night: a cartoon accusing MrBabyMan of stealing stories from smaller Digg users.
Just before noon on Friday, Sorcini submitted the image on the left to Digg. An obtuse critique of the US Federal Government's economic stimulus plan, the image was apparently on the minds of more people than just MrBabyMan. Just after noon the image on the right was posted by Kimberly Vogt, a software engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Security, girlfriend of Digg QA Analyst Jeremy McCarthy a Digg employee other than McCarthy and a rare non-employee to have reciprocal friendships with many of the top staff at Digg.
Innocent enough, right? It was submitted in the humor category and Vogt now says the image was submitted "all in good fun."
Either way, it provided an opportunity for angry Digg users to lash out at MrBabyMan. At 7:30 Sorcini posted a message to Twitter reading: "If this is how the majority of the Digg community feels, I'll quit. I won't be a part of a group that doesn't want me" - with a link to the critical, remixed cartoon.
By eight o'clock that evening the Vogt submission hit the front page of Digg - two hours before MrBabyMan's original submission went popular. At midnight a link to Sorcini's Twitter message hit the front page with the title "MrBabyMan Might Quit Digg?" By the time the bars closed Friday night more than 2000 people had voted for Vogt's cartoon and there were 750 comments left between the two negative posts. Vogt's was the most popular of all submissions made to the site on Friday. A heated debate raged in comments between Digg users of every degree of psychological maturity and perspective on the issue that you can imagine: should MrBabyMan go or should he stay?
The Charges Against the BabyMan
There are a number of criticisms that Digg users levy against Andrew Sorcini. The primary one, which Vogt's cartoon remix refers to, is that MrBabyMan submits duplicate stories that other Diggers have submitted, knowing that his superior prowess will eliminate any chance that the original submission will hit the front page.
The next criticism is that MrBabyMan uses an unfairly large network of friends and spam-like "shouts" to garner favors and give his submissions an artificial momentum that they don't warrant on merit alone.
Finally, it's frequently whispered that MrBabyMan and other top Digg users are being paid for submitting stories. There are certainly people willing to pay them.
MrBabyMan and Friends Respond
Criticism reaching this peak really upset Sorcini. He and a group of friends who often engage in hours-long group chats on Skype decided to write up a summary of the situation and see if they could find someone to write about it. A contact brought them me. I spoke with the group of six people for more than 3 hours late Friday night.
MrBabyMan's friends say that top digg users never knowingly repost something someone else already has unless the initial post is poorly submitted and not doing well. MrBabyMan says he never sends shouts to promote his stories and he doesn't get paid for what he does on Digg. The relationship between submission, promotion and money is more complex than simple pay for diggs, though.
I came away from the conversation with a number of conclusions. The dominant one is this. Andrew Sorcini's MrBabyMan persona is sitting at the top of a small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk. That circle is further surrounded by an even larger network of millions of Digg users who try to have fun on the site but also wish they could find success there. Many of them no doubt with they too could find a way to make a living in the snake-oil filled circus that is "new media marketing," as many of the top Digg users have done.
In the middle of all this mess, though, MrBabyMan is one of the most warm hearted, genuine and in many cases naive people that you will meet anywhere. The Emperor is the only one wearing clothes.
Is He Gaming the System?
MrBabyMan says he has added friends to help promote stories because that's how the rules work, if he didn't need to do that he wouldn't. He believes that most of his critics are new users who haven't had enough experience yet to know how the site works. He says he's totally accessible and can be reached by anyone who wants to talk to him - though he didn't know that the email addresses on his profile were visible only to his friends until it was pointed out to him in our conversation.
"All I ever wanted," he said, "was just for the stories to live or die on their own merits. If everyone was on a level playing field I would love that - because I still have the skills to find the great stories...I'm not complaining about the algorithm, but I don't want to be vilified for working within the parameters of it."
Money and Digg
While Sorcini's editorial genius has put him in a place of total dominance over a site that symbolizes success for a world of marketers facing disruption of traditional media - MrBabyMan is one of the few people in the upper echelon of the Digg community whose income is completely unrelated to his activities there.
While mid-tier Diggers are far more likely to be engaging in pure pay-for-play, other people at various points in the hierarchy are building careers as "new media experts." The experience that lands them the consulting contracts they live on? A demonstrated history of success in promoting stories on sites like Digg. These people aren't being paid to Digg stories - they are being paid to do other things (like advising on social media strategy) because of their success on Digg. There may be nothing wrong with that (this author has a private consulting practice in vaguely related matters as well) but to claim that top Digg users invest as much time and energy into the site as they do entirely "for the love of it" and "to share good stories with people" - with no economic incentive, short or long term, is a cynical joke.
MrBabyMan may be one of very few people in the upper echelon for whom that is the case. He says he does no outside consulting and gets no payment for his activities on Digg. He's got a good job working as an illustrator for Disney. You could say the man helps create fairy tales on Digg, as well. The story of the democratically based user generated news site, driven by people in it for the love of the community, may be one fairy tale Sorcini helps propagate.
Surprisingly, the man doesn't have the sense to monetize what he does do online very well at all. He's the host for the excellent social media podcast The Drill Down, where the most successful users on sites like Digg discuss what's in the news and often news about the social media sites themselves. A small audience of rabid, new media savvy listeners get The Drill Down as a podcast or watch it streamed live on UStream video.Sorcini does go to the trouble to sell ads on the Drill Down, but he asks his advertisers for so little money that it will hardly buy him a nice dinner each month. Adds on the podcast hosted by a man who has helped deliver probably 50 million page views since joining Digg two and a half years ago - are essentially free. Everyone reading here should go buy an ad right now, you'd be a fool not to given the price point.
That's genuinely not what it's about for MrBabyMan, he's not in it for the money. He just likes Digg, and he probably likes all the power he's got at the site - even if he does have to fend off a hostile cartoon from National Security geeks who happen to be a Digg employee's girlfriend sometimes.
He's human, too, so sometimes he fudges a little. "The only promotion I do," he said, "is Digging the stories my friends submit and keeping the chain of Digging going. That's the same thing everyone does and that's the system Digg has set up." Blind digging of friends' stories because they're your friends' stories, if that's what Sorcini is talking about, is frowned upon as contrary to the supposed essence of the site.
Generally speaking, Andrew Sorcini appears to be honestly dedicated to delivering value to the people of the Digg community. By being an entirely un-paid player in the game - he may be almost the only person in his circle whose exclusive motivation is benevolent. There's nothing wrong with making a living as a social media expert, though the term tends to be very loosely defined, but in their revolt against the financially incentivized, conspiratorial gaming of social news - those unhappy Digg users may have picked the least logical target in the guy at the top. There's no shortage of creeps in that scene but by all indications, MrBabyMan isn't one of them.
Is the kind-hearted MrBabyMan just a patsy for a shadowy world of less honest Digg power users? Is part of his job as top dog to be the fall guy when mass user distaste of other peoples' influence peddling and grey-hat tactics needs a scape goat? All of that seems possible. More likely, though, there's no one way to look at this story. The only constant, when I look at these events from different perspectives, is that Andrew Sorcini is a uniquely valuable member of the Digg community - whether they always appreciate him or not.Monday, September 22, 2008
Politics, What are you?
from highfiber.org geeky thread "POLL: Politics, What are you?"
A thread driven by "Damaged Philippines" and "Chinese Censorship"
This is one of the oldest question in Political history, What do you think is the best?
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The Philippine Democracy
The Government of the Philippines is called The Republic or Democratic form of government. In this type of government, the power is in the hand of the people, the majority. The officials are voted by the people, for the people and given power by the people of the Philippines.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_philippines_government
"Free For All!!"
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The Chinese Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a concept used to describe political systems where a state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private life. The term is usually applied to Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Shōwa Japan or communist states, such as the Stalinist-USSR, Democratic Kampuchea, Vietnam, Mao-era and modern China and North Korea. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, central state-controlled economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror tactics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
"No Control!"
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The Singapore Parliament
The term ‘Parliament’ is usually associated with the British system of parliamentary government, a system which has influenced the development of representative assemblies in many parts of the world. In pre-revolutionary France the word ‘Parlement’ was applied to courts of justice which were not representative bodies at all.
http://aplapindia2005.nic.in/keynotesapra.htm
"We Talk! We Hear You! Then WE Decide!"
The triple filter
In ancient Greece, Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem.
One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, “Do you know what I just heard about your friend?”
“Hold on a minute,” Socrates replied. “Before telling me anything, I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”
“Triple filter?”
“That’s right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you’re going to say. That’s why I call it the triple filter test.
The first filter is TRUTH. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”
“No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and…”
“All right,” said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of GOODNESS. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?”
“No, on the contrary…”
“So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, but you’re not certain it’s true. You may still pass the test though, because there’s one filter left: the filter of USEFULNESS. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?”
“No, not really.”
“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?”
This is why Socrates was a great philosopher & held in such high esteem.
Friends, use this triple filter each time you hear loose talk about any of your near & dear friends.
Welcome to the LBMS blog
This blog aims to foster understanding between people and to better improve communication through the web in whatever level of oral argument may exist.