Why we failed

A reader has commented that with all the years behind me, I can explain how and why we failed.

It is very painful for me to do this, having witnessed so many of the obvious mistakes that our leaders and, of course, how we, as a people, failed. We must remember that in the 1950s and 1960s, although World War II laid waste to Manila and much of the countryside, we were the richest, most modern country in Asia, next to Japan.

South Korea and its capital, Seoul, were far more devastated than Manila by the Korean War in the early 1950s. In one generation, however, it has not only recovered, but it has also gained ascendancy; without a shipping industry to begin with, South Korea is now the builder of the biggest ships in the world, a leading car manufacturer and the home of Samsung, one of the world’s best electronics giants.

The South Korean economic miracle is instructive. Development starts with capital accumulation, whether it is by the state or the oligarchy. We had lots of that capital, but much of it went out, hoarded in Switzerland or invested in China, Spain and other countries. If it was not sent abroad, it was used to fund nonproductive enterprises, the golf courses and swanky resorts, the condos, all of which are not producing goods.

This can be explained by the people who held all this financial wealth. Their attitudes are not those of creative nation builders but those of exploiters and landlords, which they inherited from the colonizers for whom they worked either as partners or as agents. They are of course indolent, for their attitudes are those of landlords waiting only for the rent or their share of the harvest. Landlordism is one of the basic cultural obstructions to development. How to change landlords into producers is the primary challenge to the Filipino elite.

Read more at: https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2021/12/13/2147586/why-we-failed