By Amado P. Macasaet
The health of the economy was used to be measured by the gross national product, the value of goods and services produced in one year. This has been changed to gross domestic product, the value of goods and services produced internally, without the benefit or harm from exports. International trade should not be a factor in the GDP. When we import more than we export, the value of goods and services is reduced.
To us, unlettered in the debatable discipline of economics, quality of life is the best way to describe and feel the meaning and substance of growth. In a country of 100 million people, majority of whom did not even go through high school, economic growth as indicated by the GDP hardly has any meaning.
The quality of their lives has not improved. On the contrary, it deteriorates largely because there are too many people competing for scarce resources that the state and the economy cannot, as yet, provide.
In my time, people grappled better with poverty than they do today. We had very simple needs. Food was reasonably abundant. There was peace. There was hardly any thievery or corruption in government.
In the barrio where I was born and raised until I ventured in Manila after graduating from the best high school in Batangas, health workers called “sanidad” came and visited every family at least once a month.
They checked on the health of people but they were not physicians or nurses. They were health workers who taught uneducated families ways of staying healthy with what they had which were nothing more than home-grown rice and vegetables. Fish came mostly from Taal Lake.
I used to catch fish with hook, line and sinker, not as a sport but to help my parents feed their children. I am the eldest in a brood of nine.
We never developed an appetite for what we cannot afford to buy. There were only three radio sets in the barrio.
We never heard of commercials luring people to buy this and that product or service.
Physicians are on call. They go to the homes of the sick which had no electricity. Everybody used firewood to cook meals.
Firewood has since then practically disappeared. Most of the people in my barrio use cooking gas that cost more than P700 per 11-kilo cylinder.
There is a barrio high school in my place. It is a good one. Most of the graduates go to college in Lipa City or Batangas City.
They take up computer courses, business administration, tourism, nursing or whatever their parents believe will land them a job.
I go out of my way to talk to graduates I personally know as relatives.
They cannot speak in English. None of them ever heard of Shakespeare. I conclude their schools have no subjects in classical English literature or some such subjects in the humanities.
Everybody has a cellular phone.
A few young women have been impregnated by married men. The parents take it on the chin.
The dream of college graduates in the provinces is to work in airconditioned offices in Metro Manila although the number of business establishments in my province is growing but not fast enough to take in college graduates.
Many of them try to come to Manila looking for jobs. They find themselves competing with graduates of the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila and De La Salle University.
De La Salle has a branch in Lipa City that offers nearly all courses except medicine.
It is a good school. Most of the accountancy graduates passed the licensure examination.
About a hundred young men and women – college graduates or least educated – work abroad as house help, particularly in Italy. There are more of them in the Middle East.
They make their family feel the effects of growth from the sweat of their brows, not from the improvement of the economy as certified by statistics that show the uptrend of the GDP, the slow inflation, boom in the property sector and in the stock market.
I feel life was easier in my time although very few of us kids had shoes. We went to elementary school in bare feet. We were in slippers or wooden clogs going to high school in Lipa City.
Economists and leaders of the state talk about economic growth. People in my barrio don’t feel it at all. Worse, they refuse to take mean jobs or start a business particularly food. They feel doing so is below the dignity of college graduates.
As far as my poor relatives, including college graduates who cannot find jobs are concerned, the growth of the economy as indicated by the GDP has no meaning. In fact they do not understand the subject.
The quality of their lives has not improved largely because they long for more that they cannot afford.
There seems to be a continuing change in the attitude of people towards life. They want more but hardly work for themselves
In the metropolis, many people survive scavenging in garbage heaps. We do not appreciate the fact they try to make an honest living rather than beg or pick pockets, or push drugs.
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Email:amadomacasaet@yahoo.com
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