Indonesia: The most amazing development story on Earth? | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia: The most amazing development story on Earth?

noahpinion.substack.com

98 pointsRickJWagner50 comments

As someone who visits Indonesia regularly, the article has some points but the development is so radically unequal and division of the people's are so strongly held that "development" in this sense is those in power choosing winners. Huge swaths of the population is held in poverty because they are not of the right village or island.

There is literally no mobility between economic and social classes in this country. Skill, desire with a touch of luck is not enough to move you ahead in Indonesia like it is in other places. If you are a poor village person you will be that forever. Your only option is to marry in to a better social/economic class but even that's difficult because poor village people aren't desirable there, except to westerners who well... You know why.

I'll believe it's an amazing development story when stop seeing 15yo girls shipped in to the cities where their only job they can get is giving out favors for less than a cost of a meal at a mid priced restaurant in that same city. Because if you're not able to get those people from the village to participate in your developing society in a meaningful way that doesn't include exploiting them there is no amazing story here.

That seems like majority of 3rd world country. It isn’t unique to Indonesia.

Doesn't Indonesia have a fascist past? That would explain the strong classism and immobility.

How would that explain it? Past authoritarianism seems a poor predictor of social mobility in the modern world.

Why?

Because if you look at the countries that have high social mobility many of them have had authoritarian governments in the past/present. Japan, China, and Germany are the most obvious examples.

Germany had a fascist past as well.

Indonesia was colonised by Europe for centuries (1). If anything, that would explain the poverty and difficulty in eradicating inequality, than a few years of “fascism”.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia

Lived and worked in Indonesia, and am married to an Indonesian. "Huge swaths of the population" living in villages is not true, the majority of the population works and lives in the major cities.

I saw very diverse mix of Indonesians originally from those small villages working in the big cities in a variety of jobs in a variety of sectors and positions. Every year after Ramadan when the mass migration happened back to their home towns it was great hearing where co-workers were all going to. I even joined one year and went to a smaller town/village with family and friends, and it never struck me as poverty - but rather a farming town like we get in the middle of America.

I'm sure you are right though about the situation of some people living in remote villages, or islands today, and I also saw poor (many) but what I don't agree with is your wording that make it sound like more than half the country or something is in that situation.

> the majority of the population works and lives in the major cities

Technically true at 57%, but your wording makes it seem like you think it is much higher. Or perhaps you have a different definition?

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...

I don't think any country has transformed from our natural dirt poor state to modern industrial prosperity in an evenly distributed way.

Japan did it. South Korea as well, maybe slightly less equally distributed.

No, Japan still has not done it. The major metropolitan cities may reflect it, but there are tons of cities where that is not the case across Japan.

It sounds like you’re just arguing that no country in the world has wealth distributed equally enough? Japan is some where around #15 in global equality rankings, well above other nations that have been rich for far longer.

>"As someone who visits Indonesia ..."

I was curious, do you visit for work or just recreational travel? I would love to see more of it. Any recommendations outside of the usual Bali or very touristy places?

That's like asking what the best place to visit in the US is, besides the Grand Canyon. There are so many!

And yet people ask for travel recommendations for the US all the time and people are happy to give them, often for the specific region of the country that they are from or familiar with. You realize there's an entire travel industry that runs on this very premise right?

True, there's good money to be made off googling for people.

Here are some places:

- Lombok (east of Bali)

- Raja Ampat (West Papua)

- Mentawai (northern part of Sumatra)

- Yogyakarta (has its own autonomy, kingdom based province). From here you can visit Borobudur. 8th century Buddhist temple, largest in the world

- Bunaken a small island in North Sulawesi

Find more information in internet.

Outside of Bali, you won't have too much problem visiting major cities in java without knowing the language. Yogyakarta is a nice place to visit. The city strongly preserve their culture (compared to other city in Indonesia), the people are friendly, and cost of living is cheap (compared to other big cities in java).

Outside of Java, other comments mentioned Raja Ampat in West Papua which is really beautiful, but please remember that West Papua is one of the least developed part of Indonesia with ongoing armed conflicts, so there is always risk (however small it is) when exploring that region.

The gini of Indonesia, at ~37, isn't low, but it isn't particularly high either. Below Malaysia, China, and the Philippines, but above Thailand. Mobility is hard to track at Indonesia's level of development. All I could find was this study, which suggests relatively high educational mobility in the Jakarta "slums" [1] and this study that suggests that Indonesia is an outlier in terms of having high mobility relative to its level of inequality [2].

[1] https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/488961/a... [2] https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/W...

As someone from one of the countries on Noah’s chart, I hate this attitude. It epitomizes allowing perfect to be the enemy of good.

Indonesia’s development isn’t just those in power “choosing winners.” Indonesia’s under 5 mortality rate has dropped from 400 in 1,000 in 1950 to 23 per 1,000 today. You can’t achieve that just from top-down redistribution.

For the same reason, it’s an “amazing development story” even if there’s still lots of desperately poor people in villages. My dad’s village in Bangladesh is still poor, but the school has walls now, unlike when he was a kid when it was just a roof. He was complaining the other day that “kids these days don’t know what it’s like to take a boat to school during monsoon” because drainage projects addressed annual flooding.

For developing countries, it’s so incredibly hard to get a system in place that merely makes progress. 99% of approaches to making progress simply don’t work. Shitting all over a system that is making progress, however unequal and flawed, is bad. Do you need a quasi dictator to enable development, like in Chile, Singapore, and Korea? Do you need growing inequality, like America’s own industrial revolution? All that is fine! Millions of kids’ lives will be saved from that in the long run.

That seems to be a common theme among the ever pessimistic crowd online.

Progress is never perfect and course corrections need to be made constantly. But the improvement in the QOL among many SE Asian countries is truly remarkable. People have gone from subsistence living where starvation is a real threat to a low income life where basic medical care, housing and food is a given for most of the population.

I grew up with no electricity and telegram being the fastest way to communicate with families living on other islands. Now my village has fiber-optics internet (my parents still live there), and the city where I live now will have a high speed rails soon.

That's not true. Indonesia is a country where education can still give you an opportunity to lift yourself out of poverty. If you talk to people working in the city, you'll find many of them actually grew up in a village and climbed their way up into middle class through hard work and education. Yes, not everyone is lucky, but you can't dismiss it entirely given the proportion of middle class in Indonesia is going up steadily (around 12% per year according to some sources).

John McWhorter suggested that colloquial Indonesian would be an ideal universal language for the world.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/john-mcwhorter/

fascinating, I am indonesian and since I have spent majority of my life abroad, my indonesian has been stuck in the past. It's very colloquial as in, I cannot speak like a news caster, due to this, I tend to speak english to fellow indonesians simply because I dont know the formal words for ideas that I try to convey, but I can almost make every english word indonesian-ified.

In Indonesia the vast majority of everything -- population, wealth, power, infrastructure, development etc -- is concentrated on the single island of Java, which is about the size and population of Japan. On Java basically everybody speaks Indonesian (if often as one of several languages), and the vast majority are culturally Javanese & Muslim. Yet, compared to Japan, it would be hard to describe Java as a success story, and it's quite clearly both poorer and developing more slowly than its neighbors.

50/50, not "everything" there is Bali, which is much more for Tourism, Foreigners - and more to the point that most people do not think Bali is Indonesia.

Culturally Javanese and Muslim, yes but there are sects of Christianity, and outside Java it goes dependent of island, Manado, Bali, Lombok, etc. There is religious freedom.

Java is a success story, for most of South East Asia and Central Asia.

Bali has an outsized profile due to the tourism, but it has only 4M of Indonesia's 273M people, plus the island is swamped with (mostly Javanese) migrants.

I'm well aware that there's a lot more to Indonesia than Java, but from an economic lens, Java is Indonesia. The island generates well over half the country's GDP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indonesian_provinces_b...

Well, the exploitation of "natural resources" (i.e. environment destruction) happens mostly in Sumatra, Papua, and Borneo and is the major economic driver :/

They make a huge amount of guitars there now. Go to a music store and check where a sub $1000 guitar is made. Probably 80% of them are now made in Indonesia. This has all happened in the last 10 years.

And it is high quality.

You may interested in this guitarist channel for his finger style:

https://youtube.com/channel/UC8ulHx3SxnYY-e1lVzx5K3A

> In the 1960s the army, with support from the U.S. CIA, committed a mass slaughter of half a million suspected communists. In 1998 there was a huge series of riots against ethnic Chinese people, which ended up toppling the country’s dictator at the time.

There's book called The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins that goes into this topic in detail. It's a very interesting (and tragic) read.

I also recommend the documentary The Act of Killing about this topic (Academy Award winner).

For a fictional connection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Living_Dangerously...

Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt with a stand-out and very deservedly academy award winning supporting role.

And for entertainment there is the multiple AA winning preAmerica Mel Gibson vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Living_Dangerously...

Once banned in Indonesia..

One part of the development of Indonesia that is conveniently left out of the article, is the annexation of West Papua. An area rich of gold mines. Unfortunately for the indigenous population, things didn't end with the annexation. An estimated 500,000 West Papuans have been killed in the bloody conflict that has continued until now.

It's a conflict that rarely makes it into the news, a common thing when the victims are poor and lots of money is at stake. See e.g. https://www.indigenouspeoples-sdg.org/index.php/english/ttt/...

Well, he mentioned West Papua as an ethnic conflict, lol.

They are relocating the capital instead of fixing the old one. And I'm guessing none of Jakarta's poors get to live there.

I've lived in Jakarta (long time ago) and visited recently for work. One story sums up how I feel about Indonesia:

I worked for a globally-distributed company. The founder, org, and some engineers were located in Indonesia. We had a company-wide "working retreat" in Bali for a month where I got to work alongside our Indonesian Software Engineer team.

At some point, I got up and started to refill a disposable Dasani water bottle I had been using at the water dispenser. The senior dev comes over to me looking shocked.

"What are you doing?" "Umm...I'm getting some more water?" "Don't you know about BPAs?" "Yeah"

He began to explain I shouldn't re-use water bottles because it gets more BPAs in the water. I just said "thanks, I'm okay" and kept re-using the bottle. I also asked around, it was a common belief among the rest of the group.

> He began to explain I shouldn't re-use water bottles because it gets more BPAs in the water. I just said "thanks, I'm okay" and kept re-using the bottle. I also asked around, it was a common belief among the rest of the group.

Any reason to believe that is not the case? BPAs in plastic bottles are well known at this point. I guess I'm not understanding what this anecdote says about your feelings about Indonesia.

It's true, you shouldn't. The plastic leaches off in multiple forms. Doing it a couple times won't really hurt you, but it's a bad long-term habit.

This is definitely true. Although it's a bit extreme to not refill a disposable bottle once or twice, you should instead buy a bottle that is meant to be refilled and not buy bottled water if it can be avoided.

What I'm curious about is what you thought that said about the entire country of Indonesia, so much so that nothing else needed to be said. (Even assuming that the BPA claim is false.)

> not buy bottled water if it can be avoided.

That goes against every advice I've ever heard for traveling developing countries. It's usually "yes, even for brushing your teeth, use bottled water!".

I don't think I am particularly dense, but I heavily struggle to tell what this is supposed to mean. I definitely appreciate this story being posted here, but I cannot put a finger on what kind of a feeling about Indonesia it is supposed to sum up.

So on your work trip to Bali, the devs from Indonesia suggested you dont reuse a plastic bottle due to BPAs in the water getting higher with reuse, you ignored their suggestion (presumably because BPAs arent a concern in this case?), and that sums up how you feel about Indonesia? I feel like I am missing something important in this story.

I was once talking to a senior dev from country X, he explained to me how vaccines cause autism, or how the moon landing is fake or Bill Gates is implanting microchips in all of us, that sums up how I feel about the country X.

Context: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43823883

And… I’m not the expert but I’m pretty sure the BPAs in the second fill are negligible compared to the first. The point is that they are all drinking single-use bottled water and trashing the bottles because of a tiny irrational concern for themselves.

The owner of Jungle Bay in Dominica said a similar thing. Like how we go to watch leatherbacks nesting, and Dominicans show up with hatchets. He was trying to do conservation from a banker’s chair in Morgan Stanley, but it wasn’t working because the people felt no connection to the ecosystem. He started the resort so that the locals would see the value that ‘we’ ascribe to it.

What’s your point?

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