Marketplace of ideas

Marketplace of ideas

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Dumaguete is a free City. Everyone here has the freedom to express their ideas, and to defend those ideas.

No one has a monopoly of those ideas and solutions on how to protect and pursue the general welfare of the City. There will be different views and alternatives on how to tackle the many issues and challenges that the City faces.

Mayor Felipe Remollo is smart, well-informed, and has a sharp legal mind. But how does he educate his decision-making? For me, in the many instances where we discussed and shared planning ideas and solutions, one notion unconsciously stands out — that of the marketplace and its attendant principles of competition and efficiency.

In fact, when he was mulling over the two water service providers for the City, he told me that competition is good.

I am a happy camper. I personally subscribe to this idea as a professor and planner. I always remind my students back at California State University that the classroom setting is a marketplace of ideas.

I like this metaphor because in the market, you can find vendors selling piles of stuff, colorful knick-knacks, etc. If you are not careful, you get conned from buying a fake or an inferior product. But if you’re cautious, you might get a genuine or superior product. And so, I advise my students, caveat emptor (Let the buyer beware).

I also like this metaphor because it trains my students to be competitive. Competition is good because it keeps you on your toes. If you are not competitive, you close up shop. It is a very simple fact of life.

Interestingly, I have Sillimanian friends who do not consider the academe as a marketplace of ideas but a “refuge of nostalgic escapades and teary-eyed remembrances”.

I must confess that I like nostalgia but in its romance. I am what some may refer to as an “incurable romantic” especially in its idealistic and quixotic sense.

Nostalgia is good but it has a problem: it forgets that there is tomorrow.

The marketplace reminds us that we have to competitively earn our future. We cannot just keep patting ourselves on the back with the “glories of the past” and expect that success will just fall on our laps. We have to plan and invest on that future, and make the right choices to realize it.

Making the right choices is a daunting task but the good Mayor once again, and without realizing it, displays his ease towards efficiency by willingly working with the likes of Gov. Roel Degamo, Cong. Arnie Teves, Cong. Chiquiting Sagarbarria, and Cong. Josy Limkaichong — all for the sake and welfare of the people of Dumaguete and the Province.

I know Congressman Teves has a penchant for planning and design. In the lone occasion that I flew with him in his helicopter to survey a planning site of his friend in Bais City, he impressed me with his knowledge of the site. When we landed, like a planner, he started sketching a land use plan. He has great planning ideas.

Congressman Sagarbarria is a friend who used to be the traffic czar of the City during the first administration of Mayor Remollo. He drove and accompanied me in his four-wheel pickup truck traversing the entire boundaries of Dumaguete City (I think three times), identifying potential locations for new roads, and growth centers for the masterplan.

You see, this is Mayor Remollo. He is always finding ways to unite all forces regardless of political affiliations, but does not seek their loyalties to him. Instead, he counsels everyone to be loyal to the general welfare of the City and the Province.

I appreciate such leadership quality because while it undermines the bane of our traditional patronage politics, it also enhances the efficiency of achieving his planning goals for the City.

I shared with him my observation that unconsciously, his political sense and sensibility even in the midst of unexamined criticism and opposition exemplify the basic economic principles of resource allocation founded on Pareto efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency.

That is, without realizing the Pareto principle, the good Mayor recognizes that it is extremely difficult to make any change without exacting a negative effect at least on one person. And that like Pareto, he is so convinced that an optimal can be found where at least one party benefits and nobody is made worse off.

And so the trick is to find the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency option where the net gain produces more benefits than costs for the City. Theoretically, it will also enable the City to compensate potential losers from the net gain.

For me, this is an important reason why one can’t simply criticize or oppose based on motherhood and blanket statements of environmental alarms without taking into consideration the specific issue the Mayor is dealing with, or the specific alternative intended to ameliorate the problem at hand.

It just dawned on me that I started my pro bono (or puro abono) urban planning work for Mayor Remollo in 1998. Then he asked me to help him at the Clark Development Corp. at the Freeport zone in Pampanga when he was president/CEO there, and now, back here.

People ask me why I continue to help. Well, its #DumaGeTmE. It’s for the sake of the City we love.

Dr. Efren Padilla
[email protected]

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