Numbers on ‘happiness’

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 03/25/2023

The annual International Day of Happiness (March 20) saw the release of World Happiness Report (WHR) 2023 recently. In this 10th WHR since the Day was established by the United Nations in 2012, Finland, scoring 7.80 on…

Subjective data, objective science

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 03/18/2023

Subjectivity in survey data cannot be avoided. The simple act of asking a sample of people certain questions, and recording their subjective answers, entails faith that the data will be useful to you. Surveys of voters’ intentions…

No cultural deficiency

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 03/11/2023

The phrase, “A damaged culture,” which first appeared in 1987 in The Atlantic magazine, is readily trotted out by lazy writers when things go wrong. But characterizing the Filipino people by it is wrong. It merely sounds…

Periodically blind to poverty

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 03/04/2023

Think of the government’s economic managers as pilots guided by instruments that periodically flash important figures on a panel in front of S. Some figures appear daily, like the stock price index and the foreign exchange rate.…

Religious, because Filipino

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 02/25/2023

In my opinion, our people, anywhere in the world, are very religious, not due to being mostly Catholic, or even due to being mostly Christian, but simply due to being Filipino. A few days ago—timed for Ash…

‘Pantawid’ is survey-backed

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 02/11/2023

The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) is the government’s first true venture into solving the great poverty problem by identifying and targeting poor people to receive benefits directly, rather than by assuming that much benefit from untargeted…

GNP has expenditure sectors, too

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 02/04/2023

The gross national product (GNP) of the Philippines is the money value of all goods and services produced in a given time period by Filipino entities. As a measure of aggregate economic activity, it works; more GNP…

Net Gainers reach +8

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 01/28/2023

As 2022 closed, after three pandemic years, the people getting better off have finally outnumbered those getting worse off. In the SWS December 2022 survey, there were 34 percent of Filipino adults saying their quality of life…

The perennial problem of hunger

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 01/21/2023

In 2022, 12 percent of Filipino families experienced hunger at least once in the previous three months (“Fourth Quarter 2022 Social Weather Survey: Hunger moves from 11.3% to 11.8%,” www.sws.org.ph, 10/19/2023). The December 2022 round was SWS’…

What we practice and preach

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 01/14/2023

The start of a new year seems a good time to clarify the vision and mission of Social Weather Stations. My perspective is simply that of the oldest of the SWS veterans, where my title has been…

40 years of poverty surveying

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 01/07/2023

This year marks 40 years since the pioneer national survey of Self-Rated Poverty (SRP) in the Philippines, done in April 1983, which discovered that 55 percent of household heads interviewed rated their families as Mahirap, rather than…

Hope for 2023

Mahar Mangahas - @inquirerdotnet 12/31/2022

As the calendar year closes, oldies like me simply feel grateful for having survived the past 365 days, from which we must brace up for another 365. However, for Filipino adults as a whole, normally—but not always—at…

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