Brilliant Vietnamese factory concept

Post Reply New Topic

The ongoing protests in Manila might help to reduce corruption. The People Power revolt brought down Ferdinand Marcos, but did not end corruption by any means. Koreans and Japanese have been investing a lot in the country--even building roads, bridges and schools. Plus resorts.

It will probably be a very long time before wages ever go up, if ever. There are just too many people.

One thing that has gone up is the price of housing. Lots and lots of people, and not much room. Filipinos working abroad are the only ones who would be able to afford a house any more. There are millions of Filipinos who live as squatters, in shacks that they have put together, on land that they do not own.

Okay, but if you're living in a country where everyone has a satisfactory sex life, then this particular taunt doesn't carry much sting.

I blame Catholicism.

It's not meant to carry much sting - it's meant to be a statement of fact and a way of telling people that they can't expect to have sex with someone who doesn't want to do it with them. I don't think people are really complaining about not being able to have sex, they're complaining about not being able to have sex with someone they think (or usually, their friends/society thinks) is hot.

Well, you could change the slogan to "Sex with a Hottie is Not an Entitlement." Rather than "You're not getting ANY! Ha, ha, HA!! !"

That's not going away, either.

I didn't realise we had a slogan like that.

Doesn't stop me blaming it because it seems a fair thing to do in this situation.

The Catholic Church is one part of the equation. Most Catholic countries don't adhere to the Catholic line on family planning quite as closely as the Philippines does.

On top of that is the Asiatic tradition of children supporting their parents (and extended family members). If you have a dozen kids, then you stand a good chance that maybe one or two will work abroad, possibly as an engineer in Saudi Arabia, or even as a domestic servant in Hong Kong. Then, everyone else can sit back and relax, and enjoy the fruits of this investment.

Compared to here,mom and dad go to Green Pastures retirement home,or the kids have a drug problem, and throw the grandkids off on the old folks to raise.

And, we'll certainly have to identify something to blame for this situation. Feminism, maybe?

Individualism, tbh. Too much of it isn't healthy for society.

Doesn't really pay off when you're struggling to feed all those offspring because the wages are too low because there's too many people (it's a vicious cycle.) Wealthier Asian families have less kids because the women are in more control of their fertility (being more educated and everything.) The reason an Indian state like Kerala has a higher standard of living than Rajasthan is because in Kerala girls have many more years of education than in Rajasthan and generally have about 2 kids as opposed to 7 kids per woman (I watched a documentary about this a long time ago, but those are the figures I remember.)

Even that wonderful, sacred tradition of knocking up your wife 20 times in her lifetime disappears if you send her to school for long enough. Surely you can't be opposed to girls having an education (even if it means they kinda get to control their lives a bit more as result?)

Education for girls is really the only solution to poverty caused by overpopulation (you could make like China and have an autocratic government reduce the birth rate with an iron first, but that's not really necessary.) It doesn't erode family values, either - China and Japan have low birthrates but their Confucian culture means that old people are cared for in their old age. The decline of family values in the West isn't caused by women being too educated/feminist, I think it's caused by having a strongly individualist culture. In my own country, social decay amongst working class people only really occurred due to the class-warfare enacted by Thatcher and we'd been educating women for decades before the 1980s. I'd happily look after my parents when they're old, but I'm really glad they only had two children (and they are, as well.)

As for how to provide education for girls in those countries; I guess if Western governments are worried about third-world countries becoming too populated (which they are, for various reasons,) I reckon it should be an aid priority (for those countries that can still afford to give aid.) And religious institutions should help to solve this problem that they partly helped to create. I know the Catholic church opens up a lot of schools for street kids in particular, but it would be fun to put government/international pressure on them to really target the girls (they don't have to give them condoms or sex ed.)

Actually, education is valued fairly highly in the Philippines, and, as elsewhere, women are outperforming men.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/world ... d=all&_r=0

But, there is so much competition for available jobs that you pretty much need a university degree just to become a bank teller.

I think that wealthier Filipinos might tend to have fewer children (like maybe 5 instead of 12). But, oftentimes the husband will take on a mistress or three, and get a dozen or so progeny that way.

As for feeding them--well, if you can't tap into an income-earner abroad, then some of the children might be transferred to the household of a wealthier relative, where they would be expected to do chores to earn their keep. Or, there are the street beggars.

^ Ah, Then I guess the Philippines has issues that Kerala doesn't have. It's a general trend observed worldwide though that more years in school for girls = lower birthrate and the only non-totalitarian measure proven to work.

The place does seem rather Malthusian, as far as I can ascertain.