On naming the moon
Carlin, David R. Jr.
try from receivership. In return for standby credits, the IMF imposed austerity measures on the Philippine government, limiting, for example, money supply, government spending, and budget...
...To those who say that the moon already has ~t name -namely, "the Moon" -- he replies that calling the moon "the Moon" is like calling your dog "Dog" or your cat "Cat...
...In the last two years, clouded by IMF regulations and blown by political instability resulting from the murder of Ninoy Aquino, new economic activity has been nearly nonexistent...
...No one doubts that Aquino can command the assistance of a wide and talented group of advisers, but the troubling question is whether Aquino can assemble her group quickly enough and whether she will be able to provide firm : leadership over these eclectic -- albeit talented -- allies...
...It's as though we live on a planet called "Soil" or "Dirt...
...Will Aquino be able to turn the economy around...
...It's a matter of recognizing that their effects have of course been both good and bad, and then estimating which set of effects has been greater...
...or the Niebuhr Principle, after Reinhold Niebuhr, who had a rare genius for discerning the evil that is inevitably mixed with every good in the realm of public action...
...And being a thoroughgoing social reformer does not involve merely producing a reform and then sitting back in a quasi-eternal seventh-day rest, pronouncing it permanently good...
...But those left behind were deprived of the leadership, example, and support of those who had moved up and out...
...and the Middle East, and the extended family system which cushions the burden of individual poverty...
...No wonder we have so little planetary self-respect...
...That tour reinforced in her, a woman born to the wealth of sugar plantation ownership, her compassion for the poor...
...1. Great progress has been made in recent times in opening interesting and high-paying occupations to women, who before this breakthrough could not practically aspire to anything more lofty than schoolteaching...
...One of the unintended consequences of this equalization of the sexes has been a deterioration of the intellectual quality of new public school teaching recruits...
...Couple this with a 2.8 percent increase in population each year, and the depressing results are roughly a 7.5 percent decline in per capita income in 1984 and a 6.3 percent decline in 1985...
...I mean that genuinely progressive developments produce results that are not only surprising but downright disastrous...
...It might be said that we already have a name for them: the Law of Unintended Consequences...
...Opposition parties in the Philippines squabble with the intensity and bitterness of half-brothers...
...the last state of those falling behind is even worse than their state in the days before the devils of racism were swept out of the house in the 1960s...
...Could the Aquino revolution be merely the restoration of the old elites...
...Commonweal: 136...
...According ~-~--'--"---~-'--"~--- --,Z:~ " .------~Z72--to an old theological mystery, God can extract good out of evil...
...It's too early to say...
...After all, who cares about blowing up a planet with so ignominious a handle...
...3. Twenty ye/trs ago race relations in America underwent a gre~ and edifying legal, political, social, and cultural revolution...
...In return for standby credits, the IMF imposed austerity measures on the Philippine government, limiting, for example, money supply, government spending, and budget deficits...
...But one of its results is that a substantial portion of our national income is now consumed in restoring increasingly large numbers of the aged sick, not to health or social utility (for these are things they will never see again), but to a lingering condition which falls somewhere between life and death, where they wait, shades of their former selves, for their nunc dimittis from some ailment which, for the moment at least, remains mercifully beyond the reach of medical science...
...The task of rebuilding the economy, as difficult as it may be, may be easier than the task of constructing a solid political base for her new administration...
...But even encouraging upward movements of the economists' bar graphs will not immediately improve the simple lives of the nation's millions of poor people who turned out en masse to cheer Aquino when she toured the provinces during the campaign...
...Real unemployment, as opposed to the lower official numbers published by the government, is estimated by economists at between 15 and 20 percent...
...Sympathetic critics suggest that Aquino will replace the Marcos group of cronies and family members, who dominated and destroyed the Filipino economic and political fabric, with a group of Aquino cronies and family members...
...and to suppose that they are names is to betray an extremely vulgar quality of imagination...
...She enjoys the warm enthusiasm and confidence of the business community -- a curious fact considering Marcos kept calling Aquino a Communist...
...She now hopes to initiate projects to provide all the small towns of the nation with clean and safe well water as a simple symbolic gesture of her commitment to the poor...
...Or will the stunning and stimulating victory of simple democracy lead to new politics in the Philippines...
...But what I have in mind is something worse than a mere unintended or unanticipated consequence...
...This perhaps explains why the arms race is out of control...
...or the Dewey Principle, after John Dewey, who said that there never can be an end to our problems, since the solving of one problem creates a condition in which new problems arise...
...Evaluating social reforms is not simply a matter of discovering that they have good or bad effects...
...After all, Aquino generated support from bt~siness and financial groups because Marcos, the provincial upstart, had cut this traditional elite out of power and influence...
...Underemployment, as dreadful a problem as unemployment, is estimated at between 20 to 40 percent...
...Aquino has worked a number of impressiv e political miracles in recent months...
...She formed a union with Doy Laurel, the leader of the opposition party, UNIDO, a party long in competition with Ninoy Aquino's own opposition party, Laban...
...Only the hatred of Marcos kept them together...
...BARRY FIILLENBRAND (Barry Hillenbrand, a correspondent for Time based in the Persian Gulf, covered the Philippine elections...
...they're rifles for classes in which our individual dogs, cats, and moons fall...
...nounces as reactionary any.'-'~-- ./ one who calls attention to the harmful side effect of some favorite reform...
...But no matter how much enthusiasm the business community has for her, it will, as prudent investor, wait and see whether Aquino can fashion political stability out of the present uncertainty...
...But glorious as this moment was, one of its results has been the loss of solidarity which used to exist, under conditions of forthright oppression, within the black community...
...Of several minds: David R. Carlin, Jr...
...At all events, some handy name is needed so we can quickly refer to the principle the next time some damned fool conservative denounces a social reform purely and simply because it has had negative side effects - - or the next time some ~---"x'.,~ damned fool liberal de~r~,~.,,..r...
...The political uncertainties of the country kept bankers and investors sitting on their checkbooks...
...Half the people of the Philippines do not have sufficient work and survive only through the remittances of Filipinos, working both in the U.S...
...It might, for instance, be called the Berlin Principle, after Sir Isaiah Berlin, who has remarked that it is impossible to maximize all goods simultaneously...
...It involves getting to work again on the eighth day (one day of rest and complacency ought to be granted the successful reformer), identifying and trying to correct the evil consequences of your latest good deed...
...Today black America is increasingly divided between those who are making it and those who are falling ever further behind...
...These aren't names at all...
...If Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus can have moons with such picturesque names as Io, Titan, and Oberon, why shouldn't Earth also have a fancy name for its moon...
...I I I ON NAMING THE MOON THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES A WITFY FELLOW who lives in my home town recently made a pubtlic proposal that a great international contest be conducted to find a name for the moon...
...2. Recent progress, both in medicine and in our system for paying for medical care, has enabled us to keep alive millions of people who earlier would have died for want of new medications and surgical techniques, or for lack of means to pay for this life-saving treatment...
...national life...
...Any Filipino with cash to invest headed straight for opportunities abroad...
...What general name do you suggest we give to these ironic catastrophes...
...Domestic capital formation was minus 37.9 percent in 1984 and minus 14.5 percent in 1985...
...Perhaps the principle could be named after certain distinguished theorists who have reflected deeply on the ambiguity of social and political action...
...What I'm talking about is a historical mystery according to which evil is produced out of good...
...But the name-giving contest which really concerns me is one that has to do with a sociological, not an astronomical, phenomenon -- a phenomenon that suffers not from having a dull or rude name but from having no name at all...
...Most economists see flat growth this year and a slight upturn next, if Aquino succeeds in calming the nation...
...Blacks who were ready for new opportunities seized them, gaining further education, better jobs, higher incomes, and improved housing and neighborhoods...
...Laurel has been appointed prime minister, and other oppositionists, including members of Ninoy's party, have been given key positions...
...Perhaps...
...Some examples, all of them drawn from American experience during the last twenty or thirty years, will show what I have in mind...
...They are only now sweeping up the confetti...
...We might call it the principle of the wheat and the tares, except that according to the Gospel parable the tares, while they grow up with the wheat, do not spring from the wheat...
...While mending the Philippines' balance of payments ailments (good news for bankers), this bitter IMF pill pushed the economy deeper into crisis (bad news for workers...
...The gross national product declined 5.3 percent in 1984 and 3.9 percent in 1985...
...14 March 1986:135Perhaps we need a second name-giving contest...
...DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...
...While personal fondness and political respect grew between Laurel and Aquino during the campaign, they now have more than a campaign to manage: they have to run a government...
...Come to think of it, "Earth" itself isn't such a classy name...
...For the first time in the nation's three-hundred-fifty-year history, blacks were invited to enter the mainstream of...
...No question about it: this is one of the great accomplishments of the twentieth century...
...for the old system, unfair though it may have been to women, guaranteed that the brightest among them had no place to go but into the classroom...
...The root of the problem was investment confidence...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 5
