Change can come quickly like during a boxing match, where the momentum suddenly changes because of an unexpected punch below the belt. It can also be like watching a train roll down the tracks. The election of Donald J. Trump or, perhaps, Rodrigo R. Duterte may be examples.
However, the changes that we do not see coming are usually the most profound, and yet we are unprepared for them.
In 1929 Lt. Col. J. L. Schley of the United States Army Corps of Engineers wrote in The Military Engineer: “It has been said critically that there is a tendency in many armies to spend the peace time studying how to fight the last war.” French generals were well prepared in 1939 to fight a war that required long lines of trenches. They were not prepared for Germany’s mobile Blitzkrieg strategy.
We fight the “last war” in much of what we do. Investors on both the United States and the Philippine stock markets have been anticipating the coming crash for at least the past five years and have watched from the sidelines as prices and profit opportunities go higher and higher.
The Philippines was passing a law to put a telephone landline in every barangay when IBM Corp. was introducing the world’s first “smartphone.” We were still working on that landline initiative when the first full Internet service on mobile phones was introduced by NTT in Japan, in 1999.
But, in order to understand the changes around us, we must have an historical perspective. For example, when did the world experience the highest global economic growth? Sixty percent believe that the peak occurred either in the 1990s or the first decade of the year 2000. The reality is that world economic growth as measure by GDP peaked in 1973. It has been downhill ever since.
The global average fertility rate is currently slightly just below 2.5 children per woman, and over the last 50 years has decreased by 50 percent. In Thailand, the fertility rate in 1950 was 6.1, in 1985 it was 2.6, and today it is 1.5 children per woman, which means Thailand’s population will be shrinking sooner rather than later.
In the period from 1950 to 1955, the Philippines had a fertility rate higher than 7 children per woman. The fertility rate of the Philippines fell from 3.48 children per woman in 2000, to 3.02 children per woman in 2017. That is an enormous decrease of 13.2 percent. Yet, the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act was passed in 2012, to in part “ensure the availability of reproductive health-care services, like family planning.”
We know that the Philippine economy was, for a variety of reasons, in a coma if not intensive care for decades coming around only in the past 10 years. In a sense, it was like the nation missed having landlines only to catapult into the cellular phone age. That may not be the optimum situation but it is the reality. However, adapting to change late should not continue.
Our public transportation, including buses and jeepneys, is using 50-year-old technologies. The showcase Metro Rail Transit System is still stuck in 1999 or worse. Our Metro Manila urban planning is nearly the same as rebuilding from the destruction of the war. Even the Boracay infrastructure assumes the newest resort is a two-story nipa hut.
We need to think and plan for the next decade, not the next election. Unfortunately, our political scene now fueled by “ordinary citizens” on social media is fighting the last war. Our economy and our people suffer because of it.