NOT LAWYERS or Psychics but Professors of Management who teach quantitative techniques (within operations research) in decision-making should be able to give the ultimate advice to Vice President Binay to pull him out of the quicksand where he is bumbunan-deep now. I don’t have the credentials as my UPCA transcript of math grades will attest high probability to bungle it. But I can try as I have done before with the satisfaction of a Sherlock Holmes solving the puzzle of unsolved crimes.
To be unscientific and anecdotal I posted here in this class 59 website a comm joke about a kinky journalist who wrote in his news sheet the headline : “SEVEN INCHES OF SNOW IN JUNE” to chronicle a rape crime in the town the night before. I even said the older brother of Vanguard brod Fabian Ver reacted with displeasure to that joke. I remember now because of the earthquake magnitude of the Binay Gordian Knot that my lecture was about President Nixon and his Watergate. From much of the Binays saga in the news Online I paid attention to quantified values and the quantifiable qualitative values involved in the costs and benefits SIMILAR to President Nixon of his decision, court costs, his future pension, impact on family honor, etc.
I used the decision-tree model (if I spend time to search my file I can still perhaps find that old lecture). The d-m model actually is a tree lying on its side with its branches intact as if typhoon Ondoy just kicked the tree down and didn’t bother to break the branches. Anyway, low side quantification of even the qualitative decision variables (honor and shame, etc. ) lent support to the dollar variables. So I told the class (mostly Cag de Oro senior bureaucrats) President Nixon with his back on the wall has no choice. I remember old Engineer Ver expressed big doubts and disagreed with the results. I can’t convinced him and the lecture must end with me feeling down. I thought the lecture was big let down on most of the participants. Months later, may be just weeks later 41 years ago in 1974, 40TH VP Gerald “Jerry” Ford became the 38th President of USA. The decision tree proved Nixon can win against the odds.
Back to VP Binay’s decision making, he should not think of being a Ford, but of a lucky Nixon. What are the variables? The billions in pesos and the hundred millions in US and Canadian dollars (Euros too?) are solid quantities, equally important are the qualitative variables of immense value like the political careers of the children and grandchildren, his health and age, jail term, making the BINAY name just a watermark instead of garbage in history and so forth and so forth. With the internet and new cyber and i- technology a second year student of management could do the exercise in two hours.
By analogy, if the Philippines is crunched into the likes and size of polluted Laguna Lake, Lawyers outdo them all as the more visible floating debris that define it as human habitat. Not widely known for proficiency in Math only lawyers really know the series of zeroes come later when their services are offered pro bono. Mathematicians might dare not to quantify if VP Binay and his lawyers claim their symbiosis is pro bono. The best free lunch enjoyed much much later are preferred by connoisseurs of subterfuge . ****