In This Economy? No Thanks!: When inflation is measured in sacrifices

For economists, inflation is measured in percentages. For my mother, it is measured in sacrifices.

Every payday, she sits quietly at our dining table with a worn out notebook and a calculator that has survived years of budgeting. Beside her are bills waiting to be paid, receipts from the market, and a list of expenses that always seem longer than the money available. My father works hard to provide for our family. Yet despite his efforts, my mother performs the same monthly ritual—dividing, subtracting, and stretching every peso to make sure five mouths are fed. Rice, electricity, water, and school expenses. Then comes the hardest part: deciding what can wait until next month.

Growing up, I thought this was normal. I thought every mother spent hours solving financial puzzles at the end of each payday. It was only when I became an Economics student that I realized what I was witnessing. My mother was confronting inflation long before I learned how to define it in a classroom.

The Philippine Statistics Authority said inflation reached 7.2 percent in April 2026, with food and transportation costs continuing to rise. My mother experiences them through groceries. She notices when the same amount of money buys fewer items than it did months ago. She notices when a kilogram of rice costs more than expected. She notices when transportation expenses consume a larger share of the family’s budget. She notices because she has no choice but to notice. Inflation may be an economic concept, but in Filipino households, it is a daily reality.

It is the reason why a family that was once able to afford meat several times a week now settles for less. It is why some parents postpone medical checkups. It is why students worry about transportation fares before they worry about examinations. And it is why many mothers have become experts in turning “not enough” into “just enough.”

The cruelest part is that these sacrifices rarely make headlines. We hear about growth rates. We hear about investment pledges. We hear about economic forecasts, but we seldom hear about the mother standing in a public market, mentally calculating whether she can still afford cooking oil after buying rice. We rarely hear about the parent who removes an item from a grocery basket because the total exceeded the budget.

Those stories do not appear in economic reports. Yet they tell us more about the economy than any graph ever could. Because an economy is not successful simply because numbers improve on paper. It is successful when ordinary families can breathe a little easier. When fathers no longer need extra sidelines just to survive. When students can focus on their studies instead of worrying about fare money. When mothers no longer have to perform financial miracles every payday.

Until then, I find it difficult to celebrate economic victories that are invisible to the people carrying the heaviest burdens. So whenever experts discuss inflation rates, economic growth, and fiscal targets, I think about my mother sitting at our dining table, trying to solve another impossible equation.

And the longer I watch her make sacrifices that no economic report will ever record, the more convinced I become of one thing:                

In this economy? No thanks.

Joshua B. Marqueza,

marquezajoshua@gmail.com