Top 1% of population or roughly 174,000 families of five people made an average of P122,000 per month or higher. The TOP 1%! If you look at the roughly estimated top 8,500 families, I figure they make roughly P500,000-600,000 per month in income on average. In other words, if your annual income for a family of 5 is roughly PHP6-7 million, then you can say you are in the Top 99.95% of income earners in the Philippines.
The Top 10% or roughly 1.74 million families of five made an average monthly income roughly PHP55,000 per month. However, this data is skewed due to the real big income earners in the group, and if you did indeed make P50,000 or so a month for a family of 5, that would actually place you roughly in the top 6-7% of the entire nation. In other words, a whopping 93% of families or so LIVE BELOW the PHP50,000 “lower-middle class” budget I outlined above. This also, by the way, translates into the top 7% being the A/B/C. And everything below that is D and E. If you were a single income earner, and you did NOT support anyone else, and you lived in the city and made say PHP20,000 per month say at a call center or as a bank teller or executive secretary, you would be solidly a B+/A- on the socioeconomic scale. I just find that amazing because I think if you asked these folks if they felt they were in the top 3-4% income earners in the country, they would vehemently disagree. But I am a numbers guy, so they better believe it…
via Market Manila – Income Levels / Poverty in the Philippines – General.
Hugh Rocks::Going Crazy
Going Crazy
Everybody wants to be insanely successful, but nobody wants to lose their sanity in the process.
Everybody wants the work-life balance, but nobody wants to be a boring nonentity, either.
Everybody wants to have amazing experiences, but nobody wants to make an amazing sacrifice in order to have it.
Everything has a price. Very few people actually want to pay it.
Life is suffering…
rePost :: HIGHS AND LOWS « The Professional Heckler
Eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao is the first billionaire member of Congress. And perhaps, the first and only multimillionaire solon who acquired his fortune through honest means.
via HIGHS AND LOWS « The Professional Heckler.
Why I Believe It Should Be NO to Mining!!!! :: Should it be YES or NO to mining? – AS I WRECK THIS CHAIR By William M. Esposo | The Philippine Star >> News >> Opinion
The problem with such a stance is that the people most probably going to oppose and/or be most affected by mining are the people who will be displaced by mining, the people who will suffer the pollution caused by mining, and the future generations that would have to deal with the effects of mining in the fragile ecosystem of the center of water biodiversity in the world. The benefits accrue to the country but as shown by 100 years of incompetent/corrupt leaders these resources are best left underground. We must not be swayed by simple cost benefit analysis because not everything can be easily measured or easily priced. When something cannot be priced accurately or even priced at something akin to accurate how can an acceptable cost benefit analysis be made.
The government owes the nation a BENEFIT versus COST accounting. Based on past experience, it would appear that neither the Filipinos near the mining site nor the nation at large really benefit from mining. The people must be told what they will pay in the short and long term for all these mining activities. The people should know how many Filipinos will really benefit from these mining operations and what is going to be the cost of environmental degradation and loss of natural resources that our nation will pay.
Let the people know the real score and after that – let them decide if they want mining.
via Should it be YES or NO to mining? – AS I WRECK THIS CHAIR By William M. Esposo | The Philippine Star >> News >> Opinion.
rePost::10 Myths About Introverts || CarlKingCreative.com || Los Angeles, CA
I wish people were more sensitive to introverts.
A section of Laney’s book maps out the human brain and explains how neuro-transmitters follow different dominant paths in the nervous systems of Introverts and Extroverts. If the science behind the book is correct, it turns out that Introverts are people who are over-sensitive to Dopamine, so too much external stimulation overdoses and exhausts them. Conversely, Extroverts can’t get enough Dopamine, and they require Adrenaline for their brains to create it. Extroverts also have a shorter pathway and less blood-flow to the brain. The messages of an Extrovert’s nervous system mostly bypass the Broca’s area in the frontal lobe, which is where a large portion of contemplation takes place.
Unfortunately, according to the book, only about 25% of people are Introverts. There are even fewer that are as extreme as I am. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, since society doesn’t have very much experience with my people. (I love being able to say that.)
via 10 Myths About Introverts || CarlKingCreative.com || Los Angeles, CA.
rePost::Billions to help Wall St, Nothing for those who can't help themselves. This system is fucked. ::Economist's View: "Millions Set to Lose Unemployment Benefits"
This is the Say’s law of jobs coupled with morality — the supply of workers somehow creates a demand for them, it’s the benefits that stop people from taking them — and it’s just as false here as it is more generally. There are not enough jobs, and ending unemployment benefits won’t change that. We can always find someone who abuses any system, that’s true in both the public and private sectors. But the vast majority of people still receiving help are struggling against a system they have no control over. They are trying to overcome problems they didn’t create, and they deserve more help from the rest of us than they are getting. As noted here in a discussion of a poll showing that those doing well have a much more optmistic view of the economy than those who are still having trouble:
Rich people have seen more improvements than the poor in the last few years, considering factors like the rise in the stock market (which primarily benefits wealthier Americans) and the surge in commodity prices (which disproportionately hurt the poor).
And perhaps this explains some of the callousness — I’m doing well why can’t you? But I think it’s more the idea that it’s the “lazy others” that are having troubles, and hence don’t deserve help (an echo of the deserving and underserving poor used in the past to determine who is worthy of help), a convenient belief if you are worried about being asked to help those who have not been so fortunate.
via Economist’s View: “Millions Set to Lose Unemployment Benefits”.
27 Club – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
27 Club
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 27 Club, also occasionally known as the Forever 27 Club or Club 27, is a name for a group of influential rock and blues musicians who all died at the age of 27.[1][2]
The 27 Club consists of two related phenomena, both in the realm of popular culture. The first is a list of five famous rock musicians who died at age 27—Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain. The second is the idea that many other notable musicians have also died at the age of 27.[3]
via 27 Club – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
rePost::UK, Not OK – NYTimes.com
April 27, 2011, 9:18 AM
UK, Not OK
The bad GDP number for the UK isn’t a surprise — in fact, judging from market response, investors seem to have expected something even worse. Still, if you step back and look at what has been happening, it’s doubleplusungood: zero growth over the past 6 months, with every reason to be worried on the downside looking forward, as Cameron’s austerity bites deeper.
Jonathan Portes gets to the nub of it:
On fiscal policy, the message is that we should listen to economists, not credit rating agencies. Most mainstream economists argued that the impact of the government’s fiscal consolidation on confidence and consumer demand would be negative; so it has proved.
…
Meanwhile, the argument that fiscal overkill was necessary to appease the credit rating agencies has again been disproved by market reaction – or the lack of it – to the Standard & Poor’s outlook warning last week in America, where US Treasury yields hardly budged.
In short, there is no confidence fairy; and S&P can call invisible bond vigilantes from the vasty deep, but they won’t actually come when called.
Portes hits, in particular, on a point I’ve tried to make a number of times, here and more recently here: right now, we’re living in a world in which basic economics points to conclusions utterly at odds with what Very Serious People are supposed to believe, in which radical outsiders base their views on standard economics while orthodox types turn to heterodox, highly dubious speculations.
Econ 101, buttressed if you like by fancier New Keynesian models, says that contractionary fiscal policy is, well, contractionary. Yet much of the world of movers and shakers bought into the exotic notion that expectational effects — the confidence fairy — would make contractionary policy expansionary. And they clung to this belief even as the supposed historical evidence in favor of expansionary austerity was thoroughly debunked.
via UK, Not OK – NYTimes.com.
rePost::Data Miconceptions – NYTimes.com
Second, about unemployment: the U.S. unemployment numbers have nothing to do with unemployment benefits. The Census surveys households, and asks whether adults are employed, and if not, whether they are actually searching for a job. So searching but not employed is the definition. And that in turn means that expiring benefits, whatever you may think of them, don’t have any direct effect on measured unemployment.
via Data Miconceptions – NYTimes.com.
rePost::More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World – By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo | Foreign Policy
But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. Weve also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What weve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesnt necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.
via More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World – By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo | Foreign Policy.