The ‘nouveau’ poor

RATHER alarming is the March 26 to 29 survey of SWS where 51 percent of Filipino households rated themselves as poor.

But that is not the whole picture of poverty in these benighted isles.

“Compared to December 2022, selfrated poor rose in Metro Manila from 32 percent to 40 percent and in the Visayas from 58 percent to 65 percent. However, it fell in Balance Luzon from 49 percent to 43 percent, while it was statistically steady in Mindanao, moving from 59 percent to 62 percent,” SWS said.

“Poor families have been lowering their living standards, i.e., belt-tightening,” the report said.

6.5 percent are considered newly poor, as they did not consider themselves poor one to four years ago. Another 6.7 percent were non-poor five or more years ago, and 37.9 percent were “always poor.”

The SWS survey showed only 19 percent of Filipino households consider themselves “hindi mahirap.” The 51 percent rated themselves poor, while 30 percent were borderline.

What is an obvious conclusion one can make of these survey findings?

Rice has already inched upwards, but wait until it spirals, the caveats being the severity of El Nino, and the strength of forthcoming typhoons

It is something our economic managers and our leader already know: inflation is eating up the incomes and little savings of our middle class, gouging out the little that our poor are earning on a hand-to-mouth existence.

It has created a new class of the “nouveau pauvre,” as the French would say, while making a very few, i.e., the economic oligarchs and the politicians, the “nouveau riche,” with a handful of the ancien riche whose forebears had so much to give succeeding generations by way of hefty inheritance now bringing out their savings to buy properties in Europe.

At about the same time though, the Philippine Statistics Authority trotted out findings which showed that unemployment has inched downwards to 4.7 percent in March compared to 4.8 percent in February and 5.8 percent in the same month last year.

Wow! Will wonders never cease.

Will the PSA and NEDA kindly inform the public about how they define unemployment?

If a person happens to have found work as a weekly-paid construction worker, and then finds no work after the project is finished, they were statistically employed at the time of the survey, and unemployed after.

This happens in our farms as well, when farmhands find back-breaking but menially-paid work harvesting palay, or cutting cane.