Category: Pettiness

I just love it when I find something that expresses what I’ve long believed to be true but cannot express in a way that satisfies the frustrated essayist/writer in me.
The new spiel that politicians and social change advocates of the Philippines profess to advocate is entrepreneurship. Bullshit. There is a reason that Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. There is a reason that no matter what a lot of countries do the game is still played by the valley’s rules. The valley is structured to allow the next yahoo, google, youtube and, facebook.
If you are professing to be more than a snake’s oil salesmen then what are you doing to create the structure that would allow entrepreneurship to result into amazing wealth. Think of the Henry Sy’s , the Lucio Tan’s, the Andrew Tan’s. How do we make things just a little bit easier for the next batch of tycoons? If all you can say is entrepreneurship and nothing else, please shut up and don’t waste our times.

Thing 15: “People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than people in rich countries”
George W. Bush: “The problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneurship.” Lot of people like to say you need entrepreneurs to make a rich country, the problem with poor countries is the lack of entrepreneurs.
In fact, developing countries teem with micro-entrepreneurs selling things you didn’t know could be bought and sold. Like professional line queuers who get in line early and sell the place. If full of entrepreneurs, why are these countries poor? Rich countries have many people doing specialized jobs for large companies. In rich countries 1/8 people is self employed. The rate is 2-3x that in poor countries. Ratio of rich to poor is 4:2. Bangladesh to US is 10:1 . Norway to Benin is 13:1.
The reason this doesn’t result in wealth is entrepreneurship is rarely an individual event now, if it ever was. You need social infrastructure; corporate, legal and financial systems. This is why microfinance has had such little result. Poor country’s with high self employment numbers prove this — you need structure.
For example: a Croatian microfinance group, helped everyone buy cows. As a result the milk market (which is based on perishable goods) flooded and collapsed, and everyone ended up in more debt. In Denmark, during last century, they bought cows, but had cooperative creameries, made cheese for export, and fed whey to pigs which were then slaughtered in collective slaughterhouse. Individual farmers couldn’t set up creamieres or slaughterhouses themselves.
95% of economics is common sense made deliberately complicated . Priests used to do in Latin, economists do it with numbers. All professions build jargon to keep people away, but it’s more advanced in economics. Why treat economists with kid gloves when we have strong opinions on everything else? … “I’m like the magicians that show you how tricks are done on TV.” There are certainly some secondary things only trained economists can and should do. However we’re often lacking facts that would help us make decisions — the purpose of the book is to help educate people about economics and encourage them to be “active economic citizens.”
via 10tonfunk LITE – Notes from Ha-Joon Chang’s Lecture at NYU on “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”.

This is why it is quite important for successfull Filipinos to reach out to their communities and become role models. I remember reading about how the lack of role models (non rap artist/sports star/actor/actress/singer) for african american males/females are one of the leading reasons why african americans under achieve. I think the same applies to most of the people who live in depressed communities through out the Philippines. In our country success is defined less by people like Manny Villar (pre campaign business man image that has been shattered by the campaign investigations.) and more by people like Manny Pacquiao. See when you are young and your dreams are still in flux you tend to orient your dreams to what can be achieved. Without proper role models showing you that success is possible, that hard work pays, you will probably not go that route.
Read the whole thing an excellent blog post.

All of which is a way of saying that our beliefs are shaped not just by class but by age. There’s firm research on this. This paper finds that individuals whose formative years (18-25) were spent in recession:
tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Generational determinism.