Manong Ernie (former Senate President Ernesto Maceda) started it all, as far as I know. In his highly politically charged daily column in The Tribune, he recently wrote what at first seemed an innocuous item about autism being on the rise in the Philippines.

I enjoyed reading that particular piece, primarily because of the seamlessly subtle way it delivered its lethal message—that one candidate with an autistic disorder is aspiring for a high office in the 2010 elections! Manong Ernie did not have to name the candidate or specify the position aspired for; he knew that he did not have to. True enough, the issue of autism suddenly exploded as never before in the days that followed.

The more the economy grows, the more poor people we have.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Common sense tells us that the higher the rate of economic growth, the fewer will be the number of the poor. But that cruel paradox of more poor with higher growth is described by economists as the “poverty elasticity of growth,” which is the measure of how much poverty is negatively correlated with economic growth.

In the 1970s, government implemented the Balik Scientist Program to allow foreign-based Filipino experts to return and share their expertise with the Department of Science and Technology in its priority projects. However, except for some cases, it was generally a failure. The program did not succeed in bringing back our top Filipino scientists to share their knowledge and competencies in improving the country’s science and technology (S&T) capacity, mainly due to the lack of government support.