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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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
MANILA, Philippines — The number of Filipinos expecting a “happy” Christmas in 2022 has increased compared to the previous year, according to a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey released on Friday. In its survey, just two days…
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’…
There’s a lot of crowing, especially from the banking profession, about the latest report that the quarterly gross national product (GNP) grew by over 7 percent from last year. The new figures are nice to see, but…
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