This is an information message
We use cookies to enhance your experience. By continuing, you agree to our use of cookies. Learn more here.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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’…
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…
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…
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…
Pasasalamat is what Social Weather Stations, a consciously nonsectarian institution, calls its annual holiday season party. We started using the name 20-plus years ago, upon discovering that a staff member’s religion forbade attending any party and receiving…
The measurement of happiness is a regular activity in quality-of-life research. There is a World Database of Happiness (WDH) and a Journal of Happiness Studies (JHS); Professor Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University, Netherlands, WDH founder and JHS’…
Have you noticed that many indicators of human well-being are formulated negatively, in terms of the reduction of ill-being, rather than positively, in terms of the addition to well-being? Consider, in particular, the United Nations’ top two…
Upon invitation of the National Economic and Development Authority, I was a panelist at its recent monitoring and evaluation network forum (11/28/22). There I showed the time-charts of four of the Social Weather Stations quarterly indicators of…
This is an information message
We use cookies to enhance your experience. By continuing, you agree to our use of cookies. Learn more here.