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I can comment a little on the living conditions of most people here. And let me tell you, I come down HARD on Doc's side of the argument w/r/t superstar cultural impact precisely because I've sat here and seen what Hollywood culture on 24/7 exposure does to people who are genuinely fighting to survive month-to-month.
I"m not going to go deep into it, because doing so will cause my blood pressure to go up, but they have a few hand-picked media darlings here (Kris Aquino being the worst) who eat up 90% of all the spotlight time across this country's entire media network. The people here see her with Guess bags and branded sandals and they run en masse to the mall to Be Like Kris. The result, unfortunately, is that many of these people (primary among them: young women) will debase themselves in order to 'keep up' with the rest of their peers in not falling behind the gadget/fashion curve. I literally cannot count how many times I've seen this phenomenon play out just among the people I've actually met.
And the worst part? The parents were, largely, raised on the same TV culture. So they not only see very little wrong with their children behaving like this, but in so many instances that I get sick just thinking about it, the parents tacitly encourage their kids to go do things they shouldn't be doing just so they can feel....whatever it is that they feel when sporting a $50 pair of sandals paid for with ill-gotten gains.
Generation after generation the march goes deeper into depravity, until you're left with a culture that really has no direction, no character, no morals, and no soul. Ferdinand Marcos had his problems, but read that man's first State of the Nation address given ~fifty years ago and he says exactly the same things. Under his leadership this country became the world's top exporter of rice and coconut, and the national wealth quadrupled during his first two presidencies while the poor were lifted up by a path-to-property-ownership system he instigated that allowed workers to sue for outright ownership of lands they had diligently worked, but were not fairly paid for (and by 'fairly' I mean: were unable to sustain themselves in a reasonable fashion with low-quality food) by their multi-millionaire landlords.
So, yeah, I'm dead set against the whole 'Greed is Good' when it comes to our public icons. When it comes to business practices, competing against outside interests like foreign nations, or even your own government on occasion, I'm all for Greed is Good. But when it comes to the moral character of a nation...that stuff isn't just made-up sentiment that means nothing at the most fundamental levels. It's a real problem to lack character - as the Industrialized World is discovering with no small amount of pain involved.