Nothing wrong with Philippine culture

There is nothing inherently wrong with our culture. We Filipinos don’t have to get transfusions of Korean or Singaporean blood to achieve inclusive economic growth. We just have to persevere in building inclusive, rather than extractive, political and economic institutions.

That was one of the main messages of Harvard guru James Robinson to hundreds of top business executives, government officials, academics and NGO officers last May 20 at the Makati Shangri-La in an Investment Summit organized by the Financial Times and First Metro Investment Corp. Robinson is one of the authors of the bestseller “Why Nations Fail,” which demolished, among others, a theory proposed by American journalist James Fallows in the 1980s.

Fallows wrote in 1987 in The Atlantic that it is culture that explains our having been known as the “sick man of Asia” for decades. Let me quote the relevant passage from his article: “It seems to me that the prospects for the Philippines are as dismal as those for, say, South Korea are bright. In each case the basic explanation seems to be culture: in the one case a culture that brings out the productive best in the Koreans (or the Japanese, or now even the Thais), and in the other a culture that pulls many Filipinos toward their most self-destructive, self-defeating worst.”

The “damaged culture” hypothesis was swallowed hook, line and sinker even by some Filipinos. “Only in the Philippines” became a tagline referring to miscreant behavior, a cry of exasperation at seeing men relieving themselves in public, pedestrians crossing highways, teenagers throwing food wrappers anywhere, or any action in complete disregard for the public good.

Thanks to the authors of “Why Nations Fail” (Daron Acemoglu and Robinson), the “damaged culture” theory has been totally discredited on the basis of a more accurate analysis of historical facts about the countries to which we are usually compared unfavorably. Let us take Japan, the lead goose in the “flying geese” theory of the last century. In a blog that appeared on Dec. 13, 2012, the two authors did not deny that the Japanese people study and work hard. They, however, pointed out that the phenomenal growth of Japan in the last century was not due to culture. Japan had a thoroughly feudal culture for centuries under the Tokugawa clan. Before the restoration of the Meiji empire in the 1860s, Japan was a very poor feudal society lacking a modern state. Thanks to the leadership of the samurai class after the overthrow of the Tokugawa clan, a political revolution created new institutions that set it on the path to modern economic growth.

The same can be said about the current poster boy of modern economic growth, South Korea. I still remember some of my professors in development economics at Harvard in the 1960s describing South Korea as a hopeless society in which there was rampant corruption, lazy citizens and a chaotic political system before Park Chung-hee took over as an authoritarian leader. Acemoglu and Robinson went for the jugular when they wrote: “But have the prospects of South Korea always been bright as Fallows claims? Were the economic prospects of North Korea, which shares the same Korean culture, of course, not just as bright until the economy became enmeshed in collective ownership and central planning which destroyed incentives and opportunities? As we discuss in ‘Why Nations Fail,’ this example is telling. North and South Korea had the same culture when they were divided but very different institutional structures were created in the South. It is of course not culture that explains South Korea’s success but institutions.”

The authors quote Benigno Aquino Jr., the father of the present President, who described Philippine society in very dark tones: “Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor… Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite.”

Only in the Philippines? Absolutely not. The authors rightly point out that the description of the problems of the Philippines (including the many anti-common-good behaviors of private citizens) can perfectly apply to any “run-of-the-mill” Latin American, African, or South Asian country. In the final analysis, it is not culture but institutions that are created by enlightened and self-sacrificing leaders that enable countries like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan to break away from the vicious cycle of poverty that characterizes feudalistic and elitist societies.

As historian Francis Fukuyama wrote, in commenting on “Why Nations Fail,” Acemoglu and Robinson have two related insights: that institutions matter for growth, and that institutions are what they are because the political actors in any given society have an interest in keeping them that way.

We should be grateful that both the spouse and the son of Benigno Aquino Jr. did much to build more inclusive political and good-governance institutions.

Bernardo M. Villegas ([email protected]) is senior vice president of the University of Asia and the Pacific.