We compete against the past
The effort to improve the well-being of the Filipino people is not a competition against any other people. It is not some kind of contest or sport, with winners and losers, and their corresponding statistics. Rather, it is an effort to improve the lives of Filipinos at present compared to their lives in the past. It is also an effort to prepare for the tasks of maintaining and further advancing Filipino well-being in the future.
To measure progress from the past, the statistics for scoring well-being should obviously be periodic. They should have been measured in the past, and the records permanently kept; they should tell about the present, and keep telling about the future as it happens.
Ranking is incidental. There’s no need to aspire for a high world ranking in “Happiness,” for instance. Finland is the perennial No. 1 in the World Happiness Index, but that’s no reason to envy the Finns. I think the 0-10 scale, “from the lowest possible to the highest possible satisfaction with life,” just happens to work well in Scandinavia, including Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
Consider the alternative of ACSA. An alternative life-satisfaction scale is from -5 to +5, “from the best time in one’s past life to the worst time in one’s past life.” Very few Filipinos give a negative answer to this scale (see “Social Weather Report: Anamnestic Self-Assessment (ACSA) falls to record low +1.72 in November 2025, surpassing previous low of +1.97 in May 2021,” www.sws.org.ph, 3/30/26).
The ACSA median response has been steady at 3.00 during 2017-2025, though it was not surveyed in 2020 due to the pandemic. The ACSA arithmetic mean started at 2.82 in 2017, and by 2023 was back at 2.76 before falling again last year. Whatever the scale, an advance from the past is good, and backsliding is a problem that needs fixing.
Well-being has many dimensions. The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (sdgs.un.org) make a highly acceptable agenda. The first five, and surely the most important, are: 1. No poverty, 2. Zero hunger, 3. Good health, 4. Quality education, and 5. Gender equality. Their general priority is to minimize the number who are badly off, rather than to maximize the number who are well-off: to eliminate child wasting and stunting; to reduce infant mortality; to achieve universal completion of basic education—first junior high school, then senior high school; to equalize opportunities by gender. One can discern good governance as an implicit goal. The statistics should refer to people, rather than to things like production.
Getting awards in areas of human endeavor is certainly good for national pride. In fact, one of our three most important sources of pride is achievements in sports (“Sports and national pride,” and “Pride from international sports,” inquirer.net, 12/7/19 and 8/3/24), in addition to our history and our achievements in the arts. However, the enhancement of national pride per se is not among the SDGs.
Social Weather Stations (SWS) measures what it can, within its resources; its most important surveys are the quarterlies, which is the most we can afford to do. Other institutions are welcome to fill the gaps and to compete in subjects we already work on. Being a market-oriented economist, I believe that competition benefits both demanders and suppliers. The SWS data are addressed to everyone, in all sectors, public and private, domestic, and international. The best judges of their adequacy and quality are the Filipino people.
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Why is the Chinese government recalling its Chinese-language teachers from the Philippines? It occurs to me that these teachers, being academics, are in a good position to tell their friends and neighbors back in China the truth about their government’s unjust and unlawful behavior in the West Philippine Sea.
“How many of the Chinese people know about the 9-dash and 10-dash claims that their government is still making? How many of them know about the Philippine victory in the 2016 ruling of the Arbitral Tribunal on the Law of the Sea? How many of them know that their government refused to take part in the case that we raised at the tribunal? How many of them will fail to draw the conclusion that their government knew from the start that it lacks evidence for its claims?” (see “What is Chinese public opinion?” inquirer.net, 7/19/25.)
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mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph
