Our moralistic paradigm of development

THE ARREST of Bong Revilla this January was met with public celebration.

- By Cesar Ilao Ill

After months of investigations into the flood control scandal, there was a palpable sense of relief: finally, someone —a “big fish” — had been caught. Memes circulated, and many took this as a sign of the wheel of justice spinning.This reaction is understandable. Butit also reveals something deeper about how Filipinos talk about politics, and fundamentally, development.

The most common way we do so is not economic, technological, institutional, or political. It is moral.

When longstanding structural reforms are proposed, whether amending the economic provisions of the Constitution, reforming political parties, or improving the efficiency and transparency of lawsand regulations, the pushback is familiar, both from prominent academics and politicians: “Hindi ‘yan ang tunay na problema” (That isnot the real problem).

The real problem, we are told, is that Filipinos are morally deficient. If only leaders were honest. If only voters were wiser. If only citizens behaved better, we wouldn't be in this mess.

This moral diagnosis has been repeated so often to the point of being “common sense.” It is echoed in slogans that once dominated our polities: “daang matuwid,” “kung walang korap, walang mahirap” (“straight path,’ “if there is nocorruption, there isno poverty”).

These phrases are rhetorically powerful because they frame development as a matter of virtue. Poverty persists because someone is corrupt. In this sense, our development discourse resembles religious evangelism, perhaps a legacy of our Catholic heritage. True to its Zoroastrian roots, such talk divides the world neatly into the “righteous” and the “wicked.”

But what this paradigm consistently misses is a basic social science insight: corruption, like all other human behavior, does not occur in a vacuum. As institutional economist Douglass North famously notes, human behavior responds to incentives, constraints, and rules.