Philippine Poverty is due to Prioritizing Pride over Practicality

Ironically, it is because of this misplaced prioritization of Pride over Practicality that we have actually ended up losing our Pride… Massive unemployment in the Philippines has forced millions of Filipinos to seek employment overseas where many of our people have ended up in menial and sometimes demeaning jobs (below their qualifications and educational credentials) so that now we – as a nation – have become typecast into such roles. We have, in fact, more than 10 million Filipinos working overseas out of a total of a little over 100 million Filipinos. That’s more than 10% of the total estimated population, and if we were to base it on the total working-age population, that’s actually more than about 30% of all working-age Filipinos!

Every so often, some of our compatriots working abroad get abused or duped by recruiters. But more than anything, our people tend to be looked down upon because we are seen as coming from a society that cannot get its act together despite our huge potential. We wouldn’t have had to

A misguided prioritization of Pride over Practicality has thus ironically made it hard for us to be “Proud.”

Worse, there are certain vocal sectors among Filipinos (like those from left-leaning backgrounds and those who work in certain types of NGO’s) whose “high-mindedness” on all sorts of minutiae has caused them to totally forget the welfare of ordinary Filipino people who have real material and practical economic needs in the form of jobs. By protesting against certain types of companies that could have created jobs for these hitherto unemployed people, they have actually doomed these people to joblessness and poverty.

This, sad to say, is the story of the Philippines.
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(Singapore was not included in the graph above as its advanced First World status and extremely high FDI figures would dwarf all the other ASEAN countries as Singapore’s FDI in-flows are generally more than twice the highest FDI-inflows in the graph.)

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About the Author

Orion Pérez Dumdum is an IT Professional based in Singapore and is an accomplished and award-winning Stand-up Comedian during his free time outside of his IT day-job and his Constitutional Reform advocacy. Orion won First Prize in the 2014 Magners Singapore International Comedy Festival Best New Act Competition. He also won the August 2014 “Open for Steve-O Competition” that got him becoming the opening act for International Stunt-Comedian Steve-O from “Jack-Ass” in his Singapore tour.

Being an Overseas Filipino Worker himself, he has seen firsthand how the dearth of investment – both local and foreign – is the cause of the high unemployment and underemployment that exists in the Philippines as well as the low salaries earned by people who do have jobs. Being Cebuano (half-Cebuano, half-Tagalog), and having lived in Cebu, he is a staunch supporter of Federalism.

Having lived in progressive countries which use parliamentary systems, Orion has seen first hand the difference in the quality of discussions and debates of both systems, finding that while discussions in the Philippines are mostly filled with polemical sophistry often focused on trivial and petty concerns, discussions and debates in the Parliamentary-based countries he’s lived in have often focused on the most practical and most important points.

Orion first achieved fame as one of the most remembered and most impressive  among the winners of the popular RPN-9 Quiz Show “Battle of the Brains”, and got a piece he wrote – “The Parable of the Mountain Bike” – featured in Bob Ong’s first bestselling compilation of essays “Bakit Baligtad Magbasa ng Libro ang mga Pilipino?” He is the principal co-founder of the CoRRECT™ Movement to spearhead the campaign to inform the Filipino Public about the urgent need for Constitutional Reform & Rectification for Economic Competitiveness & Transformation.