[HN Gopher] Indonesia: The most amazing development story on Earth?
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Indonesia: The most amazing development story on Earth?
Author : RickJWagner
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-07-01 11:56 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noahpinion.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (noahpinion.substack.com)
| misja111 wrote:
| 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/...
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
| immigrantheart wrote:
| And it is high quality.
| zakki wrote:
| You may interested in this guitarist channel for his finger
| style:
|
| https://youtube.com/channel/UC8ulHx3SxnYY-e1lVzx5K3A
| humbleMouse wrote:
| MarketingJason wrote:
| 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.
| jl2718 wrote:
| 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.
| statguy wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.)
| jlg23 wrote:
| > 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!".
| rajup wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| stainablesteel wrote:
| 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.
| filoleg wrote:
| 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.
| gobrewers14 wrote:
| > 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.
| ngai_aku wrote:
| I also recommend the documentary The Act of Killing about this
| topic (Academy Award winner).
| corrral wrote:
| 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.
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| 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..
| frankosaurus wrote:
| John McWhorter suggested that colloquial Indonesian would be an
| ideal universal language for the world.
|
| https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/john-mcwhorter/
| goldfeld wrote:
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| 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.
| rootsudo wrote:
| 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.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| goombacloud wrote:
| Well, the exploitation of "natural resources" (i.e. environment
| destruction) happens mostly in Sumatra, Papua, and Borneo and
| is the major economic driver :/
| [deleted]
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| They are relocating the capital instead of fixing the old one.
| And I'm guessing none of Jakarta's poors get to live there.
| elmerfud wrote:
| 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.
| immigrantheart wrote:
| That seems like majority of 3rd world country. It isn't unique
| to Indonesia.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"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?
| zakki wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| That's like asking what the best place to visit in the US is,
| besides the Grand Canyon. There are so many!
| bogomipz wrote:
| 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?
| brnt wrote:
| True, there's good money to be made off googling for
| people.
| Gimpei wrote:
| 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...
| SimpJee wrote:
| 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.
| Jabbles wrote:
| > 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.
| ..
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| refurb wrote:
| 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.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Doesn't Indonesia have a fascist past? That would explain the
| strong classism and immobility.
| yunohn wrote:
| 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
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| How would that explain it? Past authoritarianism seems a poor
| predictor of social mobility in the modern world.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Why?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Germany had a fascist past as well.
| baybal2 wrote:
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I don't think any country has transformed from our natural dirt
| poor state to modern industrial prosperity in an evenly
| distributed way.
| aikinai wrote:
| Japan did it. South Korea as well, maybe slightly less
| equally distributed.
| rootsudo wrote:
| 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.
| aikinai wrote:
| 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.
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