Our moralistic paradigm of development

By Cesar Ilao III

THE ARREST of Bong Revilla this January was met with public celebration. 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. But it 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 long-standing structural reforms are proposed, whether amending the economic provisions of the Constitution, reforming political parties, or improving the efficiency and transparency of laws and regulations, the pushback is familiar, both from prominent academics and politicians: “Hindi ’yan ang tunay na problema” (That is not 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 politics: “daang matuwid,” “kung walang korap, walang mahirap”(“straight path,” “if there is no corruption, there is no 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.

The “rules of the game” — formal rules such as laws, constitutions, and regulations — gradually reshape behavior. Because politics and economics exist only through human interaction, they are sustained by the rules participants follow and reinforce.

People do not act on values alone, nor are values otherworldly. They act according to what the rules reward and penalize. Over time, incentivized behavior hardens into habit, and habits pass for virtue or vice.

Consider elections. The moralist sees voters who support the “wrong” candidate as “bobotante”* — misguided at best, immoral at worst. Case closed. But a systems thinker asks questions: What kind of political system and digital landscape produce personality-based voting?

In a country without strong, programmatic parties, credible campaign finance enforcement, or a fast and reliable justice system, voters rationally gravitate toward name recall, patronage networks, and perceived access to power. Calling this a moral failure may feel cathartic, but it explains nothing. It solves nothing.

And what of the economy? Many industries remain dominated by the same names and faces. Our instinctive response is moral condemnation, labeling them “evil” or “selfish” capitalists, instead of calling for laws that open markets to competition. We beg for subsidies from the same government we denounce as corrupt, inefficient, and incompetent, and then act surprised when it uses the same rigged system to steal. Does this not resemble a toxic relationship? One repeatedly hopes an abusive partner will change without taking steps to alter the underlying dynamic.

While we spent the last four decades calling for moral renewal, our neighbors have been pushing technological and economic frontiers to their limits.

Take China. As Yuen Yuen Ang shows in his book, China’s Gilded Age, its long boom occurred not because corruption disappeared, but because it evolved into forms that did not stifle investment and enterprise. Beijing’s high-profile anti-corruption campaigns have focused less on purifying the system than on disciplining its excesses, curbing the most destabilizing abuses while preserving the institutions that sustain economic integration and development.

Vietnam, meanwhile, weathered one of Southeast Asia’s largest fraud scandals: the Vạn Thịnh Phát case, involving the embezzlement of about $12.4 billion, or roughly 3% of its GDP (by comparison, our own flood control scandal, at around $2 billion, appears modest). Yet the episode did not spell apocalypse. On the contrary, Vietnam still recorded growth of over 8% in 2025 and is now pursuing double-digit expansion through sustained investments in infrastructure, trade, and institutional reform.

In Malaysia, the 1MDB scandal exposed the misappropriation of about $4.5 billion in public funds (still higher than our recent scandal) under former Prime Minister Najib Razak, who has since been sentenced to prison. The episode triggered renewed institutional reforms precisely because it revealed systemic weaknesses, not because Malaysians suddenly rediscovered virtue.

The uncomfortable lesson for the moralist is that development often depends not on eliminating imperfections, but on preventing them from becoming fatal.

These countries are not in denial about corruption (nor is this piece supportive of it). They simply refuse to treat it as the main cause of stagnation. Their economic and political institutions, though not a spotless lamb, are resilient enough to absorb scandals while continuing reforms. In contrast, the Philippines, with its fragile economy, weak industrial base, poor education system, and underperforming tourism sector, suffers finishing blows from corruption controversies, leaving little room for sustained progress. Unfortunately, we still refuse to accept that the EDSA Revolution, for all its good intentions, left behind legal and institutional legacies that have since become obstacles to reform.

We see and experience these rules-based barriers daily. Our justice system allows cases to drag on for years, lowering the expected cost of wrongdoing. Our regulatory agencies are often slow and vulnerable to bribery because of unclear mandates and opaque processes. Meanwhile, we have a constitution that allows political leaders to run without adequate education, competence, or clear party-based advocacy. These are design failures. But thankfully, design solutions do not presuppose a Great Awakening. They are measurable, scalable, and actionable.

Policy reforms are more feasible — and ultimately more effective — than “appeals to the heart.” Take the Konektadong Pinoy bill, for example. By loosening barriers to entry, it weakens the grip of a few dominant telecom players who have long controlled the price and quality of internet services.

A moralistic critique would end by condemning these firms as selfish or evil. But a systems view recognizes that their dominance was enabled by the rules of the game. The steady decline in internet prices and improvements in service following liberalization show that rewriting the rules outperforms moral condemnation in solving real-world problems.

Why emphasize the distinction? Because our moral paradigm has produced a peculiar political outcome: a perpetual search for pure-hearted messiahs. For decades, we have waited for the incorruptible leader who will finally save the country. And once this rare figure leaves office after their three- or six-year term, the old order quickly reasserts itself. Each election turns into a moral crusade, with every disappointment only deepening cynicism.

It is hardly surprising that moralism also breeds helplessness among its followers. By framing politics as a cosmic battle between good and evil, it suggests that ordinary citizens can do little but wait, hope, or eventually leave (“wala nang pag-asa sa Pilipinas”).** It reduces policies into catchy slogans while flattening complex trade-offs into virtue tests. Moralism is emotionally satisfying but prone to despair when salvation fails to arrive.

A systems mindset is less glamorous. It is technical, incremental, and often counterintuitive. It does not promise heroes nor saints, nor an eschatological utopia. It assumes, as public choice theorists and the framers of the American Constitution did, that politicians are not angels. Like all of us, they have their interests. Effective rules and institutions are designed to manage these realities, not pray them away.

This mindset understands politics not as a morality play but as a continuous negotiation among competing interests. Its goal is modest but enduring: make doing good easier and doing bad harder. Align private incentives with public outcomes. Increase business competition, increase transparency, speed up enforcement, and strengthen feedback mechanisms.

Until we move beyond our moralistic paradigm of development, we will continue playing the waiting game. As the saying goes: “If we wait until we are ready [in our case, our leaders to be ‘renewed within’], we will be waiting for the rest of our lives.”

* Bobotante — A portmanteau of “bobo” or “stupid” and “botante” or “voter.”

**The Philippines is hopeless.

Cesar Ilao III is a researcher and communications specialist for the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEF). He is a lecturer at the University of the Philippines and was formerly a researcher at Monash University, Australia.