1 Comment on "Slideshow: Itinerant Vendors"

1. Ted Stannard | September 8, 2014 at 6:14 pm |

   Any look at the roadsides of Indonesia belies the condescending comments of Indonesian and foreign elites alike that Indonesians lack initiative and the entrepreneurial urge.
   What they have lacked since independence is the freedom and official support of entrepreneurship by those at the bottom instead of catering to the big capital at the top. Big money can take care of itself.
   But real development will come when Indonesia focuses on creating and maintaining a level playing field, unleashing the latent energy and talent of its hundreds of millions of ordinary people.
   I spent over two years in Pakistan before my transfer to Indonesia in the early sixties, and found Indonesians far more versatile, enterprising, and free-spirited than the up-tight, repressed culture and social structure of Pakistan.
   Insofar as Indonesia finds ways to empower its general population and curb exploitation by the wealthiest 1% — domestic and foreign — the country can flourish through the largely untapped power of self-investment and innovation rather than extraction from the land and common folk. A fertile economy is one that plows its earnings back into its own soil and discovers the power of shared returns to generate a huge domestic market.