"We just need more jobs." It's one of the most repeated lines in every conversation about poverty in the Philippines — from politicians, from economists, from ordinary people trying to make sense of why life still feels hard despite being employed. I believed it too, for a long time.
But something never sat right with me about that idea. I couldn't fully explain why until I looked closely at my own life and the pattern playing out around me — and once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it: having a job does not automatically mean having money.
The Assumption Everyone Makes
The usual logic goes like this: not enough people have jobs, so the government should create more opportunities, and once everyone is employed, life gets easier.
It sounds reasonable. It's also incomplete.
An economy isn't just made of workers looking for jobs — it's made of consumers and producers. Producers exist to meet the demand of consumers. That's the whole engine. So here's the question that logic conveniently skips: what does a consumer actually buy if they have no real capacity to buy anything?
You can have full employment across an entire country, but if every worker's wage barely covers survival, the economy still doesn't move. Jobs alone don't create spending power. They just create people who are busy.
The BGC Test
Here's a simple way to see this play out in real life. Walk through a business district like BGC — restaurants full, shops active, foot traffic constant, sales happening everywhere you look. Why is that specific area so alive compared to so many others?
It's not because BGC has more businesses than everywhere else combined. It's because the people circulating through it have money to spend. That's the entire mechanism. Businesses don't thrive because they exist — they thrive because someone nearby can actually afford what they're selling.
Now flip that picture. Imagine an area flooded with shops, stalls, and businesses, surrounded by people with no disposable income. All that infrastructure, and still — nothing moves. That's not a hypothetical. That's the daily reality in a huge number of Philippine communities where "opportunity" exists on paper but purchasing power doesn't exist in people's pockets.
Why This Order Matters
The common belief is: more opportunities → more jobs → more money circulating → better economy.
I'd argue the sequence is backwards. It should be: more purchasing power → more actual demand → more opportunities created to meet that demand — naturally, because businesses go where people can pay.
Give people the ability to buy, and opportunity follows. Flood an area with opportunity while ignoring people's purchasing power, and you get a checkmate — plenty of businesses, nobody who can walk in and buy something. You end up with malls that look busy but sales that don't reflect it, sari-sari stores that stay open out of habit more than profit, and workers who are "employed" but still can't get ahead.
What This Means If You're the One Living It
If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right — working hard, budgeting carefully, staying disciplined with money — and still can't seem to get ahead, this is probably why. It's rarely a personal failure of effort. It's the mathematics of an economy where wages and purchasing power were never designed to move together in the first place.
This isn't a call to wait around for the system to fix itself. It's a case for understanding the actual mechanism at play, so that whatever path you build for yourself — a skill, a service, a business — is built with real purchasing power in mind, not just a job title.
That's a big part of why I moved from being an employee chasing a paycheck to building a bookkeeping business of my own. Understanding how money actually moves through an economy changes how you position yourself inside it — and how you help others do the same.
To know more about my services, writings — connect with me here — here's my website: https://www.kylenelsonomac.com/
Mahal na mahal kita. Mahal na mahal ka ng Diyos. Faith without action is nothing.