Damaged culture

The phrase comes from the title of an essay James Fallows published in The Atlantic in November 1987, twenty months after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship.

The argument, in its structure: the Philippines lags its regional neighbours because obligation there stops at the family and does not extend to strangers, and corruption is downstream of that shortage rather than upstream of it. Culture is the independent variable.

The course states it at full strength rather than dismissing it, for two reasons. It was taken seriously at the time and was a National Magazine Award finalist. And it describes things Filipinos say about themselves, which is why waving it away does not work on anybody who has heard those things said.

The answer the course gives is about the direction of the arrow. A narrow circle of obligation is what people build when the wide circle has never protected them, and the institutional literature predicts exactly that. Fallows also, in the same essay, granted that Filipinos performed well when working in other societies and blamed the country rather than the people, which places the constraint outside the person and concedes the structural case.

Source: James Fallows, “A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?”, The Atlantic, November 1987. The Atlantic archive is paid and was not obtained for this course, and every Fallows quotation in the research base is secondhand, reproduced from Philippine commentary rather than from the magazine. The concession described above is therefore carried as a paraphrased attributed claim, sourced to Fallows 1987 via this course’s history research map. Nothing of his is quoted verbatim anywhere in this course, and no direct quotation may be used on camera until the original issue has been bought and checked. The academic counterweight the course cites instead, where precision is needed, is Alesina and Giuliano (2015), “Culture and Institutions,” Journal of Economic Literature, 53(4), free NBER version.

First used in: 2.4 · The lazy Filipino, and who needed that story