Our political dysfunction has economic consequences

The social critic Solita Collas-Monsod has done us all a service. She has summed up in her Inquirer column how generations of our political leadership have devastated our country by leading it through a succession of policy mishaps, mistakes and failures during these last 50 years—the half-century from 1960 until 2009.

Ms Monsod doesn’t even argue. All she does—because it’s all she needed to do—is to compare our economy’s rate of growth in individual incomes with those of the group of East Asian states the World Bank dubbed the “miracle” countries when their economies began to grow at a rate the world hadn’t seen before.