Why countries should measure dreams and ambitions (just like GDP) | Lance Katigbak

**Elise Hu** (0:03)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
What do you want to be when you grow up is a universal question, and yet at some point, we stop being asked. Instead, it becomes, what do you do? Or how much do you make? Where are you going on vacation?

**Lance Katigbak** (0:22)
We've become really good at hitting metrics. So whenever ours to begin with, and climbing a ladder that was designed by those who are already sitting on top of it.

**Elise Hu** (0:32)
Consumer researcher Lance Katigbak decided to ask a different kind of question. Not how fast is your economy growing, but what do people actually dream of or aspire to? In this talk, he shares what he found and makes the case for something that doesn't exist yet.

**Lance Katigbak** (0:49)
We all still want to be something when we grow up. If every country has a Department of Defense, why couldn't we have a Department of Dreams?

**Elise Hu** (0:58)
It's coming up right after a short break. And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Lance Katigbak** (1:09)
What do you want to be when you grow up? At age four, I wanted to become a computer scientist. At five, a vacuum cleaner salesman. At six, a priest. At 17, an award-winning filmmaker. And at 22, when it was finally time to decide on my first job, I became a management consultant.
What do you want to be when you grow up? I'm sure everyone here has been asked some version of that question, but perhaps not recently. Somehow, the questions have changed. What do you do for work? How much money do you make? Where are you going on your next vacation?
We've become obsessed with asking these types of questions to measure even our nation's productivity. We track growth rates, remittances and exports, without really asking if these numbers reflect the lives that people are trying to live. I see the problems with this system at home in the Philippines. Our GDP is soaring. But we're doing it in a way that doesn't quite align with the kind of lives that people want to live. For one, we send millions of people abroad to take care of other people's parents and children, and we train millions more to stay awake while their families are asleep, so they can be up all night answering phone calls from halfway across the world about how much money is in their bank account. And somehow, we're rewarded for it. We're told that we're Southeast Asia's second fastest growing economy, and in a few years, we'll be upgraded to an upper-middle-income country.
As a nation, we've become really good at hitting metrics that were never ours to begin with, and climbing a ladder that was designed by those who were already sitting on top of it.
But what would happen if you asked Filipinos what metrics mattered to them? What would happen if you tried to measure dreams? Last year, my colleagues and I at BCG ran a nationwide, nationally representative survey to answer this very question. Now, look, no client had ever asked us about dreams, but if you look at the websites and mission statements of the country's largest businesses, all of them are trying to connect their work to national development in some way. And so we knew that even if nobody was asking the question, the answer was one that many people would be interested in. We discovered three things. First, we discovered what the Filipino dream was. The number one ranked dream across all social economic segments was to achieve financial security, to absorb health scares. Well, we learned more than that. We also heard stories. We heard stories like that of Tidri, 26-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of becoming a beauty queen, a host, a politician, and opening a hair salon just like her grandmother.
But right now, Tidri can't afford to do that because she still has to help pay for her grandfather's health care bills because he just had a stroke.
Second, we learned who those dreams are for. Most Filipinos don't actually dream for themselves. They dream for their extended family. We met people like Joey, 56-year-old radio technician who works from 2 a.m. to 11 p.m. most nights. He lives in a boarding house close to the station given the demands of his job, but still wants to be a farmer, a social worker and a high school teacher. But he really wants to retire, but every time he asks his company, they say, not yet. Right now, he doesn't really have a choice, because he still has to finish paying for his daughter's education.