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Hate to nitpick, but how is "Regie eventually settled for $25,000 — after attorney fees were taken out, roughly equivalent to a year’s middle-class income in th
by laser 10y ago
Hate to nitpick, but how is "Regie eventually settled for $25,000 — after attorney fees were taken out, roughly equivalent to a year’s middle-class income in the Philippines." factual if the GDP per capita of the Philippines is ~$2600?
- throwaway5000 10y agomaybe because the equivalent of "middle class" is so rare there?
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoJudging from my own time living in Manila I can vouch for this. The middle class has been slowly emerging since the 1980s - thanks to increased education and foreign investment - but it's still a tiny proportion of the country. I used to live in Makati and when touring the rest of the country it felt like the entire non-poor, but non-superrich were confined to just that part of Manila. (Shout out to ISM Bearcats!)
- wyclif 10y agoThe Filipino middle class is developing in the same way that the Philippines is a developing country...very slowly and incrementally. So, for instance, you're starting to see things like Ayala malls, iStores, and more upscale cars. But those aren't hugely popular or mass-scale because most people in the Philippines cannot afford to buy them or shop there.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoThe income distribution of the Philippines, like many developing economies is very uneven, which leads to great disparities between median and mean incomes. I'm not convinced that GDP is a reliable proxy for "average income" anyway.