Can Filipinos Learn Something from Icelanders?

Written on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 7:37 am | by cocoy

UK’s Guardian has an article by John Carlin on why Iceland has the happiest People on Earth. According to Carlin, the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index ranks Iceland— society and economy (in terms of health and education) on top of the world. The irony is that Iceland, now the best country in the world to live in, is also a country with the highest birth rate in Europe. Not to mention, the highest divorce rate and the highest percentage of women working outside the home.

Carlin suggests that individually, Icelanders are self-confident. They are culturally driven to “bring up happy, healthy children, by however many fathers and mothers”. He explained that they have a sense “that, no matter whether the father lived in the same home or the mother was away working, the children belonged to, and were seen to belong by, the extended family, the village.”

You can read the whole article here.

What can the Filipino learn from Iceland? What insights can we draw?

Tags: , ,
Add to del.icio.us | Digg this! | Yahoo MyWeb | Google Bookmark It! | Stumble It!
About The Author: cocoy is a twenty-something neoliberal, Linux & Mac user, technology geek who enjoys a good cup of Coffee and who believes in New Media. He hangs out on twitter as @cocoy and blogs at Big Mango.

Filed Under Politics

Related Entries:

Comments

9 Responses to “Can Filipinos Learn Something from Icelanders?”

  1. Pochero on May 19th, 2008 2:22 pm

    One thing that we seem to share with the Icelanders is the idea of the extended family. On the other hand, we could also learn from their optimistic and can-do attitude during hard times. They do not have the “victim mentality” and they do not seem to be judgmental of others.

  2. cocoy on May 19th, 2008 9:41 pm

    yep. “victim mentality” and being “judgmental of others” are practically laws in the Philippines, right? kidding. yeah, those things need to be thrown out.

  3. cvj on May 20th, 2008 12:24 am

    Iceland is a more equal society with an income GINI coefficient of 25 compared to the Philippines’ ~45. I suggest we throw out the Oligarchs along with the ‘victim mentality’.

  4. cocoy on May 20th, 2008 5:07 am

    cvj, lol yes. sadly, I wish it was that easy. To grow wealth it would really require all hands on deck.

  5. benign0 on May 20th, 2008 7:49 am

    We have to be careful with this quaint “kill all the Elites” rhetoric though. Zimbabwe and Indonesia come to mind. You kill them or kick them out, and so goes the capital that they created.

    And then the reality sets in that the remaining people are hopelessly inept at managing whatever resources (no matter how abundant they are) left in their hands.

    Remember that at the end of the day, the Philippines is still largely a free market. So the strong possibility that the concentration of capital ownership and wealth in the Philippines may simply reflect the REAL aptitude — and ineptitude — for creating, growing, and managing wealth across various sectors of our society.

  6. cocoy on May 20th, 2008 8:01 am

    hehe. benign0, yeah. It’s ok to joke about it but really, when as you put it, all you see is ineptitude from the big boys running the show. When I say big boys, i really mean government which is really the real rotten Apple that needs to be fixed.

    For some reason people forget that Communism/Socialism went out last century and pretty much everybody— especially the Chinese have concluded that Capitalism is the way to go.

    Seriously, running a company is no easy task. growing employees, taking care of them when they stab you in the back at every opportunity— it’s hard to balance human nature sometimes. On the flip side, The PCCI has had campaigns for good corporate governance for years. Many of those Captains of Enterprise are well aware of the problems at hand and are working on their own to be good businesses.

    At the end of the day, it really is all about human nature.

  7. cvj on May 20th, 2008 12:05 pm

    Cocoy, i definitely agree that we need to have ‘all hands on deck’. That’s why we need to get rid of the elitist mindset. On forgetting ‘communism’, we have to remember that China’s history did not start in 1978. Deng’s reforms were made possible because their Oligarchs were kicked out (to Taiwan) in 1949. We haven’t even done that first step yet.

    Benign0, in economics, there is a concept called ‘path dependence’. As far as the landed elites are concerned, the concentration of wealth and capital is largely a function of that.

    It’s not so much ‘killing the elite’ but recognizing that inequality is a problem in itself and addressing it just like what our neighbors (whether communist or capitalist) did.

  8. Jon Limjap on May 20th, 2008 2:57 pm

    cvj,

    Hmmm, last time I checked, Taiwan, with its uprooted oligarchs, has been prosperous.

    So perhaps they weren’t really *the* problem?

  9. cvj on May 20th, 2008 3:22 pm

    Jon, they were the ‘problem’ in the Mainland before they got kicked out. They became the ’solution’ in Taiwan when they themselves initiated a comprehensive land reform program which they completed in around four years.

    As i mentioned in a blog entry economist Alice H. Amsden recounted:

    “The potential threat of an impoverished peasantry had been driven home to the Nationalists on the Mainland, and they were concerned with restructuring agriculture accordingly.”

    Ika nga, natauhan (thanks to Mao and his peasant revolutionaries).

Leave a Reply