salespersons, elevator attendants, and so forth. I also read local newspapers to see how local development is reported by way of what local politicians and businesspeople say about the progress of their respected localities.
Economists used to measure development in terms of the size of the country’s total final output of goods and services , the so-called Gross Domestic Product and its per capita equivalent. It was not long, however, when they found out how inadequate their measure was when, after reporting rapid GDP growth in the development decades of the fifties and sixties, they still find many people in poverty, jobless or underemployed, and living in squalid homes, if not homeless.
In one of my previous columns I wrote that in 2015, we crossed the 100 million mark in our population. In this, we ranked number 12 among all the nations in the world. In size of the nominal Gross Domestic Product, however, we ranked only number 39. In per capita income, we ranked number 123. Our lackluster performance could not be blamed entirely on what Rizal called the indolence of the Filipinos as a product of the way we were run by the Spaniards for three centuries. That was more than a century away already when the Spaniards left. There must be more than our indolence. Perhaps this is due to Manuel L. Quezon who preferred to see the Philippines run by Filipinos like hell rather than by Americans like heaven.