GOVERNMENT apparatchiks boasting of our supposed upcoming ascent to the upper middle-income economy category deliberately miss giving context to that exuberant triumphalism. They fail to state that, of the five original Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) members, only the Philippines is out of the per-capita income level required to attain that upper middle-income status. The other four — Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia — have pole-vaulted over us, with Singapore attaining that much-coveted high-income status. Thailand and Malaysia have been upper-middle-class economies for decades, while Indonesia finally moved out of its low-middle-class status trap just a few years ago.
The sad truth is this: We were never preordained to be the dead-ender in the original Asean.
The Philippines was Asia's second-most impressive economy until the early 1960s, became an economic pariah in the early 1980s, then struggled to gain low-middle-income status, which has been our economic state for decades. In the early 1980s, the world called us "Asia's basket case."
Vietnam, a war-ravaged country until 1975, is all but certain to attain upper-middle-income status ahead of us.
You can't fault the government apparatchiks for the boost without context. Saying positive things and keeping silent about the negatives is a function of the government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — or any government, for that matter. And projections of upper-middle-income status by 2035, at the very least — we can't do it in 2030 — are really attainable if we do things right. We are not yet there but the immediate future is pregnant with possibilities.
"We are not yet there" is, of course, not an acceptable proposition to the anti-poverty adviser of President Marcos, disbarred lawyer Larry Gadon. In the fact-free universe of Mr. Gadon, we are already a prosperous nation. The claim that life is hard is only imagined, he said — "It is only in their (the naysayers') minds. Look at the malls." In Mr. Gadon's simplistic bellwether of a nation's prosperity, the malls that are always packed with people seeking respite from the heat and a break from their dreary lives are a great indicator.
Packed malls equal spending power equals prosperity. Wow. If only this nugget of Gadonian economic wisdom is true. Let us have another version of the "packed malls are an indicator of prosperity" thesis of Mr. Gadon.
The first thing that you notice about the malls — if you know a thing or two about poverty and deprivation and if you have the capacity to look beyond yourself — is the plastic/leatherette shoes of the young men who bag groceries in the supermarkets embedded in the boxy malls.
These are the shoes of young men who cannot afford decent footwear because of poverty, which is rooted in their slave-wage pay scale as mall baggers. Such shoes, which offer neither protection nor comfort, would deform their feet in the long run. Bagging groceries is a work that requires standing up all day. The toxic combination of dangerous shoes, poor nutrition, and long working hours at slave wages at the malls — they are sure to retreat to their poorly ventilated rentals after work — is the hidden story of deprivation and want that even high-end malls cannot obscure. And if you are a true human being, you will surely notice the plastic shoes of these baggers.
Of course, one can rebut and say these are just anecdotes. OK, let us go to the bigger picture of poverty: in the data-backed poverty polling done by the serious trackers of poverty.
The latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey said 47 percent of Filipinos self-rated themselves as poor. There is another category — "borderline poor" — that probably includes people who are, in fact, poor but are just too proud to admit it. Those who rated themselves as "not poor" represented the smallest cohort in that survey.
Poverty has a twin: hunger. On hunger, this was what the SWS found in its first quarter survey: 14.2 percent of Filipinos went through bouts of "involuntary hunger." We all know what that meant. These are people who missed meals because there was no food on the table and there was no money to buy food. While the moneyed feed their pedigreed dogs with choice meat cuts, millions of Filipinos miss meals and grievously suffer from it.
Below these sufferers are Filipinos who eat three square meals a day on very predictable and limited food items: rice with the cheapest dried fish, rice with extra small eggs, and rice with instant noodles. Around middle age, you will see them at the government's charity offices seeking help for dialysis treatment.
The "prosperity spiels" of Mr. Gadon fall under the category called "magical prosperity." They have no basis in reality and fall apart when subjected to scientific scrutiny. But they can be conveniently drawn from thin air and useful for the propaganda of a regime.
And as a government man sworn to no higher purpose and no sense of nobility, Mr. Gadon is the perfect articulator of magical prosperity.