Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Jeffrey Winters: Indonesia’s Path through Uncertain Future

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

This episode discusses the recent successes of Indonesia's partners in ASEAN, the role of the USA and China in the region, and how Indonesia might pivot as we move into the 21st century. Housed in the context of Indonesia's place in the dynamic Asia-Pacific region, discussions of wealth inequality, oligarchy, and the inability for Indonesia to capitalize on its vast potential as a regional powerhouse are prominent. Jeffrey Winters engages the conversation about the obstacles to Indonesia's future prosperity in an uncertain global future while detailing the rising Indonesian scholars' optimistic role in navigating these challenges.

One thing you can say about the human spirit is that no matter how frustrated people are with the failures of democracy, the desire to be free, the desire to participate, to be a player in determining one's life, that desire appears to be a human desire. No one wants to be a slave. No one wants to be dominated. This is Endgame. Hey friends, I'm Gita Were You One, and this is the Endgame podcast. Today, I sit down with Jeffrey Winters to discuss how Indonesia might pivot as we move into

the 21st century, given our unique place in the dynamic Asia-Pacific region. Jeffrey Winters is a political scientist and professor at Northwestern University. I've personally known Jeffrey for around 20 years now. His wide-ranging areas of studies include the science. study of oligarchy, state capital relationship, the mobility of capital and structural power of investors, the World Bank, human rights, authoritarianism, and democratic transitions in post-colonial countries. Also, for those of you listening to this podcast for the first time, Endgame is an Indonesia-based podcast presented by the School of Government and Public Policy Indonesia and produced

by Viscinima, an award-winning content and entertainment company based in Jakarta, Indira. We've interviewed dozens of leaders and opinion makers as we unpack their hopes and imagination for the future of Indonesia and the world in 2045. Enjoy this episode. Hi, Jeffrey. Hi, Gita. How are you? I'm okay. Welcome to our podcast.

It's so good to see you. Yeah, it's very, very good to see you, and I'm really honored to be invited to this conversation with you and your audience. Thank you. Let's start off with just, you know, a few seconds on how you got interested in political science in your early life. And you can also talk about anything else that you would have been interested in before then and how you got, you know, more hooked to political science. You know, growing up, I always thought I was going to be a medical doctor. And I entered college, still believing I was going to be a medical doctor. and then I took organic chemistry,

and that suddenly convinced me I was not going to be a medical doctor. So it was kind of a choice, but imposed by the sorting system that's in place in the United States to knock out pre-med students. So I quickly had to figure out, well, what was I going to be in life?

Because you always have to have an answer to the question, what I'm going to be. So the only thing I could think of, and this was not being too creative. The only thing I could think of was a lawyer. If you're not a doctor, you have to become a lawyer. So I thought, all right, I started telling all my friends, you know, I didn't really want to be a doctor anyway, so I'm going to be a lawyer.

And I started to take government, economics, politics, classes, history classes, to really switch out of the pre-med track. And it turns out I really likes that a lot more. So I ended up, I ended up, graduating as a at my college was called a government major or political science. And then it was, you know, I thought I was just going to take a break from school, a kind of a gap year or two. I was going to go do something completely different. And then I was going to get back on track. And that completely different thing was heading off to Java. And when I got there,

I still thought I was, so I put all my law school admissions and things on hold. And while I was in Indonesia during the time of the Suharto government, I became even more interested in political science, political economy. And about halfway through the time that I was in Jog Jakarta, I decided, instead of coming up with all kinds of theories, why don't I study this formally? Why don't I actually do a PhD in this? So that's how I ended up doing political science as a profession. That would have been, what, in the 80s or 90s? Yeah, I graduated from college in 1982. So that's summer.

And I arrived in Indonesia in the fall, September, 1982. Wow. And I stayed until 85. So I stayed there almost three full years. Okay. Look, we're going to talk about Indonesia a lot, but let's go around the world a little bit. I want to ask you about what we can expect from this new era called the Joe Biden presidency. And you have been an expert witness into the politics of things in many countries,

including that in the U.S., right? Talk a little bit about that. and how you think it's going to impact upon the lives of people in Southeast Asia. Yeah, so I think people who know me from an Indonesia or Southeast Asia perspective really aren't aware that I spend an enormous amount of time actually studying the United States and U.S. politics in part because my main field is to study oligarchs and wealth power, and I look at that in multiple contexts. So I pay very close attention.

to the U.S., and this election, in terms of foreign policy and in terms of what it's going to do to the United States' engagement in the world, there's going to be an attempt for the United States to go back to where it was. That is, Joe Biden is very much a mainstream establishment figure, very much so. He believes in an interconnected world. He's known in his past to be among Democrats, something of a hawk. He's voted for multiple wars that the United States has been in. But here's one of the, so he believes in trade agreements. He believes in WHO and multilateral organizations.

He also believes in an attempt for the U.S. to have a position of leadership in the world. Trump was someone who withdrew. Trump's view of the world was basically from a hotel perspective. So his understanding was from a property, real estate perspective. That's how he looked at the world. And the world was, you know, am I going to make money from my hotel there or not? And he viewed foreign policy as, are we making money or aren't? aren't we making money? Are we spending too much money on international organizations? Is our trade beneficial to us? If not, are our troops benefiting us economically spread all around the world? So he was in favor of withdrawing the U.S. military presence. And the U.S. military presence around the world is a problem, but it's also an element of leadership in the world. And so,

The biggest problem, I believe, that Joe Biden is going to face is reestablishing credibility of the United States. Because one of the things that happened as a result of the Trump administration, but not just that, the base that voted for him and the role that the Republican Party played in supporting him is that there was a withdrawal from. a position of leadership and a damage, a great deal of damage done to U.S. credibility. And so people around the world, imagine the U.S. tries to reassert itself on any number of issues, from trade to monetary policy to conflict and peace. The question is, who's really going to believe that the amount of votes that Biden barely got to win is really, really means that commitments made now are going to be commitments four years from now. And so I think the world is wary and justifiably wary of the tumult going on in U.S. politics.

And I think it's hard for a country like the United States to fully reestablish its position under these circumstances. Wow. You know, I read your book about the oligarchs, right, which I think apply to many places around the world. If we take a look at the election in the U.S., right, I forget the exact stats, but Joe Biden would have won in 30% of all the counties,

whereas Donald Trump, 70% of all the counties. But the 30% of the counties, of the counties would have controlled 70% of the GDP, right? How do you connect the dots here, you know, with your theory, you know, manifested in your book? Yeah, the theory of wealth power is quite simple. It is that to be a contender in most political systems, and this includes Indonesia's democracy as well as the U.S. democracy, you have to have to have, sufficient money backing. You can't play the game if you're not fully financed. However, that doesn't mean that winning is as simple as how much money do you have or who's backing you. So think of it

this way. If there's a candidate who has a great set of ideas for the country, a great agenda, but has no money backing them, those ideas are very unlikely to prevail. However, if you have two candidates who don't have particularly good ideas, but they're both well-backed, turns out those become your choices. So it's the way in which money sets the pretty much the parameters of the agenda and who people get to pick from democratically. So do people still get a choice? Yes.

But money plays a big role in determining who those choices are. Okay, sounds familiar. Yeah. But, okay, let's peel the onion a little bit more here. How do we get to a situation where, you know, money behaves democratically, right? It's like water. It seeks gravity and it seeks return, right? But if there is no return and there is no apparent side of its ability to recycle in a good way,

when do you think could we predict that money is actually going to attach itself to something that's good, or a set of good ideas or a set of good, whatever, visions? That's a really good question, and it's a hard one. I think my own theory of the way money works in politics is that people who have a tremendous amount of wealth power also have many, many issues that they're engaged in. I mean, give you an example from, again, from the U.S., say. Someone who's a billionaire and another billionaire may have very different views on abortion. They may have very different views on the role of religion and politics. But what they share is a view of reducing the government's ability to take their money in the form of taxation.

They want low regulation on their businesses. They want as few limitations as they can. And they want to defend their wealth against redistribution. That doesn't mean they're not philanthropic. There are many people who are very rich who want to help. but they want to use their money for things they want to support as opposed to what the legislature wants to do with the money. And so most oligarchs are interested in what I call wealth defense. That is making sure that their pile of great fortune is not taken and is not redistributed.

And that's what unites all the oligarchs. And then there's a million things that divide them. So mainly at certain economic policies. And on your question, well, how do we get them all to row in the same direction towards something that's actually good for the society? To be honest, if we look at history, most of the time, the business community, and not you in particular, but the business community in general,

tends to be more interested in their own fate. And they go along with government usually kicking and screaming, but they do go along, ultimately. That is, powerful decision makers need to have a vision, and they need to bring the empowered, wealthy folks along with them. And sometimes, as in the case of Roosevelt after the Great Depression in the United States, they take business along and save them, even though they didn't realize. they were being saved. So I know a lot of oligarchs. I think to the last one, they always strike me as very good, decent people, but not necessarily the policies they get behind for the society. Not always. It's a challenge sometimes. But Jeffrey, I mean, I don't mean to drill down on this too much. But, you know, isn't there a point where the results,

resentment just becomes a little too excessive when governments in some countries or around the world have become so evidently, you know, co-conspirators as opposed to, you know, what they're supposed to be doing by way of the pre-existence of, you know, these oligarchical forces. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And where's that inflection point where the fatigue or the resentment will basically entail a new beginning? Yes, yes. And you mean particularly, I think what you're saying, Gita, is you're talking also about societal resentment. Correct.

Yeah. Well, here's what we need to be aware of. just because super powerful people win over and over, and society ends up not necessarily working for everyone else, it doesn't mean that they win forever. And ruptures occur. Anger builds up and it becomes very dangerous. And it's when people are angry and desperate and they lose all,

trust in the established order, that's when figures can come forward and offer very extreme positions that ordinarily wouldn't sell to the population, but they sell under conditions when the established order repeatedly doesn't deliver. And so one of the problems is people who are accustomed to winning, over and over and over for themselves, they don't imagine that that gravy train will ever end. Yeah. And it either comes through cataclysm,

that is a tremendous economic rupture, that is the consequence of all of this behavior, or it comes from very angry citizens who just have had enough. And Gita, history is full of these lessons that people, that people don't learn. Yeah. You talked about that in your book. I remember during the ancient Roman times and all that stuff.

Sure, absolutely. And these cataclysms continue right up to the present. So one of the most difficult things in any moment of order is for people to imagine that the order is coming to an end. It's usually not visible to people. until historians look back and say, it was inevitable that this was going to end. Yeah, it seemed, it wasn't inevitable the day before it started.

It didn't seem inevitable then. But in hindsight, we see how the pieces come together to be devastating for society. Well, sometimes I get confused as to whether or not I should think of oligarchy as a renewed. renewable resource or as a non-renewable resource, right? You know, just by way of the sheer fact that it's been so sustainable in many economies, many countries, many whatever nations. You know, I think one of the most astonishing things about inequality, material inequality, wealth inequality, is that thousands of years ago, when it first emerged, remember that societies had certain kinds of inequalities, but they didn't have wealth inequality originally. So they had elders who were more powerful or seers of religion. Those were more powerful actors. Or warriors were very

powerful. So they were always inequalities in very early societies. But wealth inequality is one of the last major inequalities to emerge. But here's what's interesting. Once wealth inequality emerged, it's never been dethroned. That is, it has always been there. But here's the thing that varies. And I think it gets to your question, Gita, which is there may be tremendous benefits to having large sums of capital

in certain people's hands because they're particularly creative or their investments are super productive for society and they produce things that otherwise wouldn't be there if those resources weren't in their hands. There's the benefit side of it. Right.

The downside of it is, and what has varied throughout history, is the degree of inequality, the degree of stratification. So in order for there to be oligarchs doesn't mean that we have to have inequality on a mind-boggling scale. And we are actually, weirdly enough, we are probably, in terms of the historical data we have, we are probably at a moment in human history, where inequality has never been as great as it is today, ever. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. Ancient Rome, ancient any kingdom, you can't find this kind of gap between the average person and the folks at the stratospheric other extreme. Right.

And the question is, at what point does having a lot of resources in few hands become net pathological instead of beneficial. I mean, clearly the genie coefficient ratios and some of the more developed economies are skyrocketing. And in many, a bunch of developing economies, have skyrocketed. Yes.

And in fact, even more troubling, over the last 230 years of the history of expanding democracy in the world, the genie coefficient has not gotten better, it's gotten worse over those same 230 years, which means, just to put it bluntly, democracy is failing people. And one of the big puzzles we try to study in political sciences, how can there be rising equality and rising inequality at the same time? How does that work? And I think that kind of undermines

people's confidence in democracy itself, which is tragic. Look, I've talked about this a few times, right? How we got a good taste of individual democratization and how it has not yielded the necessary kind of equality or fairness or even economic slash social justice and how market democratization or call it neoliberalism has not yielded the same kind of aspirational objectives or goals. And third would be the data democratization, right, which has not really yielded the kind of equality that people or humanity would have aspired for. So how does this boat for the reshaping of, call it capitalism or call it democracy in the next, I don't know, one or two decades?

Well, Gita, you are asking some incredibly downer questions, you know. I got to make it look interesting, man, with you. It's an honor to get your time already. Yeah, well, I, you know, I try to stay optimistic and I try to stay positive and constructive, even as I and you and others study incredibly deep enduring problems. And I'll say this. One thing you can say about the human spirit is that no matter how frustrated people are with the failures of democracy, the desire to be free,

the desire to participate, to be a player in determining one's life, that desire appears to be a human desire. And there are moments when people turn toward fascism and turn toward authoritarianism, usually out of desperation. But the human urge to be free is a powerful thing. No one wants to be a slave. No one wants to be dominated. And so that urge is not easily snuffed out.

And that's a good thing. Now, have we perfected? Have we gotten to where we need to be in terms of our macro systems that are shaping how power is held and how power is wielded? You know, we're not there. But I'm a believer in the pursuit of knowledge. I'm a believer in the role that artists play in their subtle, powerful critiques of what we're doing to each other and how, and even, believe it or not, the role of humor. You know, one thing authoritarian can't stand more than anything else is being laughed at. Oh, it just, you know, nothing bothers them more than not being taken seriously or just having somebody say, you may be popular.

but you're pathetic, you know, and it's really hilarious. That's just devastating to really, really powerful people who want to be taken seriously. So believe it or not, even the role of satire and humor is so important in that struggle to have everybody have human dignity. Everyone should have their human dignity. And that's, we're not there yet. And we should as a people, not only just within nations, but across them, we should never give up that commitment. And by the way, and this is a really, really important thing for people who struggle. The reason to struggle and keep fighting is not whether or not in your lifetime you think you will win.

It's to be part of that multi-transgenerational struggle for the right thing. and all of us stand on the shoulders of people who struggled before us, and they sometimes gave their lives, and they never saw the result that we're enjoying. And so you never should struggle because you hope to get instant gratification. You struggle because it's the right thing to do. Yeah, I agree. And that's so important,

because otherwise you're going to be a very frustrated person for the most part. Well, as they say progress is not a straight line. That's right. So you got to go through whatever you got to go through. Yep. Absolutely. The important thing is directionality, right? So I believe in that. All right, let's let's shift to Southeast Asia here. And I want to ask you, what is your view of the collective and cohesive nature of ASEAN? Do you think it has, you know, done itself good, net good or net bed in the last, you know, ever since, what? and I want to just put that more specifically in the context of how we've weathered or how we've handled the COVID-19 situation. Yeah. So I would say, first of all, ASEAN deserves credit for navigating so many decades and so many challenges.

That's not easily done. And I think it is an organization, which, which has matured in important ways. So ASEAN was a very tentative body at the beginning, very, very reluctant to pursue too many strident agenda issues, didn't want to step on each other's toes too much. And so I think ASEAN has exerted itself more in that regard. And in fact, the fall of Suharto, interestingly enough, was one of the biggest freeing elements for ASEAN, because the organization was sort of afraid of the Suharto regime.

It was the big dominant player. Also, there's been a convergence in the region of Southeast Asia. So Vietnam and Cambodia in particular had been ideological and otherwise outliers. and are now much more in the fold. There's a convergence in many ways. There's a convergence toward greater democracy and concern for human rights, I think, overall. So there are many positive things, and we've seen most recently that ASEAN has succeeded in achieving trade breakthroughs and negotiations at a time when countries like the United States and Europe are breaking apart and on, able to have that kind of coherence.

And I think those breakthroughs on trade are going to be important for stitching and weaving the Southeast Asia region together to a far greater degree than had been before. And Southeast Asia is an enormous market and a very important one, potentially. And ASEAN is important for one last reason, which is you have a very delicate dance with China. You can't live with them and you can't live without them. For the last few thousand years. Right, right.

For the last few thousand years, literally. And so that dance continues. And it is a combination of opportunity and fear. And China is obviously a great place of opportunity. but history also teaches us that when China is feeling its power, it has exerted its power. And so ASEAN needs an eye to balance, balance in the region. Sometimes that means playing powers off each other. Sometimes it means different kinds of alliances.

So we already see that the South China Sea is an epicenter of potential explosive conflict. And how much of a role are superpower going to play in that theater? How much of a role is Southeast Asia going to have to play itself? So very challenging. But I think ASEAN has weathered the – the challenges. I don't know. Do you agree, do you agree from a former trade minister point of view? I do. I do. I mean, as a matter of fact, you know, we had just signed this regional comprehensive economic partnership with, of course, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand,

except for India. And I think that's a reflection of the cohesive nature of how people in ASEAN, you know, have been behaving and are likely to behave going forward and how they're able to take the long view, right, of the intertwining of the regional economies. We have been hearing interesting views on this show about how China has increasingly become a meritocracy and how the U.S. has seemingly become more of a plutocracy. There are different, differing views about this dichotomy. But I want to push this to you. Not only in terms of whether or not you agree with the view,

but whether or not ASEAN or more specifically Indonesia will gravitate more towards one or the other. Well, first of all, having just survived four years of Trump, I'm not sure the U.S. is anything that anyone would want to gravitate towards. So I just put that caution out there. There were times in U.S. history when I would say we were a better model than we currently are. So the U.S. has a lot of house cleaning to do at home before it starts playing that game again of becoming a world example. So we've heard ourselves and shot ourselves in the foot, and we have to deal with that and the consequences of it. Meanwhile, China, here's what's interesting about China.

They are an authoritarian regime, without a doubt, with a very low tolerance for dissent of any kind, regional dissent, intellectual dissent. And yet, China has managed to build a system that is not just patron client. And I say this partly as a sort of backdoor critique of Indonesia, actually, because Indonesia has not gone far enough in really rewarding merit. Indonesians basically learn at their parents' knee that networking, networking, networking matters for your future. and who you're a part of and what you're a part of is going to determine what you get and who you're excluded from. It's a very important part of the way Indonesia operates.

And sometimes that involves merit. A lot of times it doesn't because you want to be the in-group. You want to be the one connected to the bagi-baggy game, whether it's through political parties or whatever it is. Now, in China, here's what's interesting. Being a member of the Communist Party has always mattered. And the Communist Party has factions, patrons, clients, and so on. But it turns out you could not really move up in that party, up in that political system. If you didn't achieve results, if you were governor of a province, if you were a high official,

in one of the regions. And if your region underperformed, no amount of patronage was going to get you to the top. So there was always an important performance element, especially post-Mao, was really built into the system. So what does that mean in the end?

It means that China is a controlled environment in which almost in a, dare I say Singaporean way, they built performance into the power game, both on the economic and on the political side. Right. So we know there's an integration between being politically connected and getting opportunities to become an oligarch in China, right? But poor performance, and by the way, the Koreans did this too with their Che-Bol. Poor performance, performance was penalized. And I think in the case of both Korea and China, it wasn't market forces that were setting

this agenda. It was decision makers saying, we need to be powerful. And the Koreans needed to be powerful because there was North Korea. And their decision makers said, we have no slack for underperformance, none. If we're going to give you government resources, we're going to support you. But if you waste, if you steal on a mind-boggling scale, forget it. And China has built in some of the same kinds of things. But don't underestimate the authoritarian character of China.

It's there and it's very real. And that will come home to roost. Is there a risk for meritocracy to be co-opted or undermined by this degree of, I don't know, the premium that everybody puts on loyalty in a typical authoritarian type of government, right? And if that were to happen, that will erode, right? Yes, it will. The spirit of meritocracy. I try to avoid a predictive kind of situation because these things can play out in a lot of different directions.

But for sure, risk is a key factor. security. And we know that the government in China, for example, is very security obsessed, right? But you can overdo it to the point where they played a very heavy hand in Hong Kong. And the world looked at that. And by the way, ASEAN looked at that and said, when China decides it doesn't like something, it says to hell with the consequences. and we'll take the negative reputation in the world and we'll do as we wish.

So people look at that and they say, hmm, this is a tough player when pushed. And that goes for other minorities in the country. But I will say this. China currently, the government, is riding high in a nationalist sense because, let's face it, no country has ever been transformed economically the way China has in such a short time on such a scale. I mean, and the people of China, basically the average person of China is feeling more proud,

more dignified, less stepped on by the world, more in line with how the Chinese have seen themselves historically. And that buys a lot of forbearance from the population. They'll endure a lot if this regime can keep producing, if it can keep it going. Questions arise when it can't. Well, at the rate that it has been producing and at the rate it's likely to produce or continue producing in the near foreseeable future, it's tough to discount the temptation, right, for ASEAN to, you know, try to emulate, you know, whatever system that's prevailing in China.

Sure. And frankly, the closest emulator is clearly Vietnam. Yeah. Vietnam is in a certain with all of its differences from China, it is basically playing a Singapore-China game. And Vietnam is moving in ways that Indonesia and Thailand and Thailand and Philippines are not. And I, you know, I haven't looked at the latest data. maybe you know it off the top of your head of GDP per capita, export levels. Clearly Vietnam has decided that the pathway to riches are to play the export production game.

Yeah, it's scary. It's scary good, what they're doing and how are they doing it. Yeah, and the question is, why not Indonesia? Yeah. Why won't Indonesia make that move? Yeah. And here's the sad thing we learn from our studies in political science. In order to make such a move, you have to feel a sense of urgency that you have to. And in Indonesia, that sense of urgency is still lacking.

So what will create that sense of urgency, hopefully not some sort of horrible crisis. why should Indonesia have to go through that in order to make a major breakthrough? But nevertheless, what we don't see coming out of Indonesian policymaking is that reorientation of the place, saying we're going to be an export-led manufacturing powerhouse in the world. They're not doing it. Let's save the last many minutes to talk about Indonesia. But I want to push the envelope a little bit on ASEAN and Vietnam. Look, I mean, the LeBron James of FDI thus far has been Singapore, right?

And Singapore has been getting FD on a per capita basis at about $19,000. Right? Malaysia, about $260 to $270 per capita. Vietnam, out of the blue, it shut up to 160. Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia are at a mere $91 per capita in terms of FDI attractiveness on a yearly basis. And I can just see the future where Vietnam is going to gangbust on Malaysia and they're probably already thinking,

when do we surpass Singapore. And they seem to have gotten it, you know, And in terms of being an export-oriented country, and they've gotten it right in the sense that, you know, they know China is not going to be able to produce enough goods and services for itself. Yep. And who will be the alternative supply chain, right, capability? And they just seem to be getting it right. And I do believe that, you know, I've talked about this with some of our guests that, you know, we shouldn't be. probably going to Singapore to learn, we should be going to Vietnam to learn.

Right? And certain things. And it's not even in the conversations, you know, amongst many Indonesians. Yes. You know, you've hit on something which is so fundamental, which is Vietnam's posture to the world is very different from Indonesia's. So Singapore had to open up. They had to be externally connected. This was a Chinese enclave with a Malay minority surrounded by Malays. So if they were going to survive, they had to be super, super competitive.

And so they decided, I mean, this goes all the way back to raffles. They were going to be a place that was open and free and competitive. And that was the stamp on their DNA. The difference between Vietnam and Indonesia, if you ask me, is that the attitude of Indonesia toward the outside world is fear and apprehension. Whereas in Vietnam, they don't fear the outside world. They fear China. than anyone else. And they see the rest of the outside world as the guarantor of their posture

toward China. They're not afraid of Indonesia. They're not afraid of Australia. They're not afraid of the Americans whose butt they kicked in a war. Right. So the Vietnamese don't approach the outside world or even outsiders with the same deep apprehension that Indonesians have. It's just amazing within a few decades, they've changed the way to think of foreigners from being invaders into investors. Exactly. And I'm quoting somebody here, you know. But that's absolutely true. And the weird thing about Indonesia is Indonesia actually hasn't been invaded. And yet they still view everyone as a potential invader. Indonesia firmly believes, that outside powers want to break the country up.

They firmly believe that. And I don't know quite why they believe that. Maybe that's, look, the country does have a lot of centrifugal forces. You're an archipelago. You're made up of really, really different people that are in different economic conditions, right? And so there's a certain amount of projecting onto the world of a fear. that Indonesia actually has domestically, which is that you might break up. And around every corner is a shadowy figure who wants to break you up.

So Indonesia just approaches the world differently than Vietnam does. And frankly speaking, you know, the Vietnamese, you want to hear something? I've been coming to Indonesia for decades. I speak Indonesian fluently and I could not possibly be hired as a professor at the University of Indonesia. And yet I can be hired tomorrow in Vietnam as a foreign professor. And I can't even speak Vietnamese. And they'd still take me. And they would probably prefer that you speak English out there because they want to learn how to internationalize.

Yeah, they would probably prefer I speak English. But at Ui, whether I spoke Indonesian or English, there's this – or Javanese, there is this incredible apprehension that someone might teach from outside. And that's only one microcosm. Do you know that medical doctors that are trained outside can become fully accredited medical doctors in Vietnam from anywhere in the world? Not in Indonesia. And on and on and on it goes. So Indonesia has enormous walls built up and it's apprehensive. And I'm not trying to break walls down.

I'm simply saying if you're going to integrate into the world and take advantage of the world's markets and its capital and its technology and turn it to your benefit, you've got to integrate. great and you've got to step up and compete. And the Vietnamese are willing to compete and so are the Chinese. And so you know better than anybody. You did FDI and you did trade. You've seen it. You know what you're up against. And here's one of the key things to understand.

Just because you integrate with the world doesn't mean the world dominates you. it's you know you've got to use it as a as a kind of as an impetus yes as an impetus and also as a

what's that called when you when you go around a planet and you come around it and you get kind of slingshot slingshot you've got to actually view the outside world is something that you come out of stronger

as opposed to that acceleration by way of the slingshot Yeah, that acceleration, that swinging around, that it's all about leveraging those relationships, not controlling them, leveraging them. And the posture in Indonesia is, okay, we'll have foreigners, but we think foreigners just want to make profits here. Well, yes, of course they do. Yes, they are not aid programs. They are not developed, you know, these people want to come, want to employ your workers, want a share of your market. But guess what?

The dynamism of it all is transformative to the place. So, you know, there are enormous obstacles and they're deep and cultural. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure Indonesia can switch on an engagement the way the Vietnamese did. I also think it helped that the Vietnamese won every conflict they were involved in. So they beat the Chinese twice. They beat the French. And they beat the Americans. Okay. So that that made them a little less. Now I actually spent some time in Vietnam and this is the late 90s just before the crisis, just before 98 crisis. And there was still some paranoia. They were just making the turn. But there was still some paranoia. And I said to some of the Vietnamese military people that I happened to be talking to, I said, frankly speaking, you are the last on the list of any

country that someone wants to invade because you repeatedly give a bloody nose to anybody who comes after you. So trust me, there are other places higher on the list that people would go after. I'm sure they didn't disagree with what you said. Yeah, well, they actually turned their heads. and said, come to think of it, who would try to invade us? Even the Chinese don't dare try it again. That's got to give them tremendous amount of confidence when they walk into a room, when they sit right across you at the table, right?

They come to the table with that sort of a position of strength, you know, psychologically at least. And I can also tell you that, of course, they call it the American War. We call it the Vietnam War. But the Vietnamese got over it much more quickly than the Americans did. They got over it. They said, hey, we've got to move on. And yes, we'll open up diplomatic relations and so on. And it was the Americans because they lost who couldn't handle it.

So, you know, look, the Indonesians, frankly speaking, you know this. We've talked about this, Gita. Indonesians underplay their leverage and their power globally. They punch below their weight class. I'll just give you one example. One example. A bunch of countries in the Middle East are now moving diplomatically on question. Normalization.

Normalization. They're moving on that question. And frankly, Indonesia had an opportunity a decade, a half ago, to make a splash on the world stage by being a leader in the negotiation. of what's going on in the Middle East, could have done it, and missed that opportunity. Indonesia doesn't realize how incredibly important they are, actually. So lots of missed opportunities, which is a shame. We actually talked about it in the other show and how, I didn't talk about how we would have missed the boat, but I put that in the context of how this could be an inspiration.

for Indonesia. It's okay to be a follower. We don't need to all the time be the leader or the pioneer. But going back to the Vietnam example, it's just that ability to put forward first principles thinking. And it's, okay, let's segue to Indonesia, your most favorite place. My favorite place by far.

My second home. What would it take then? to awaken from this sleep or, I don't know, sleepiness, so that we could be the LeBron James or we could be the Steph Curry. Yeah. And this, I think, dofftails back into our earlier conversation about oligarchs, right? And please, go ahead. Yeah. So one of the biggest triggers or push factor,

for a country is fear, and Indonesia has no fear. Indonesia's biggest fears are domestic, never foreign. So there's all that paranoia I was talking about, but it's completely unfounded, right? So no one is poised to invade Indonesia. And frankly, most of the big powers don't want to see Indonesia break up because that would mean an enormous amount of complication.

So big fear factor can really focus the minds of decision makers and economic actors. It can work that way in certain circumstances, and it has in the region of Asia for sure. But on the domestic side, Indonesia, as I said a while ago, has lacked a sense of urgency. And the question sort of turns on, what would be the breakthrough?

Does it take a crisis? I hope not. But maybe, maybe what it takes is a generational change. So we have people in charge today who, let's be clear about it, were raised in the Suharto era. That's what they were raised in. Everybody who's in charge parties, corporations, the palace, Everybody grew up under Suharto, and that mentality of the Ordebaru casts a long shadow. But there's a younger generation coming up now. And people like Nadim, for example, are an example of people who are emerging on the business side, on the governing side, who just aren't encumbered by a lot of that mentality. So I would say, now is the moment when a younger generation has an opportunity to assert itself and say, we want to forge a new Indonesia. We've given a lot of the old ideas, a long run.

They've produced some results, but it's time for a dynamic new thinking. If that kind of narrative and voice emerges, there's hope. But that also means Indonesia has to set aside some of the divisive politics that is currently hampering the country. And a lot of that politics centers around, unfortunately, questions of the role of religion in society and politics. That's a tough one for Indonesia. And I think there's a tension there between a kind of reorientation toward the world, younger generation move on the one hand, and a more inward-looking, very conservative turn on the other. And it's in the hands of Indonesians to decide which way they want to go. And by the way, that comment I just made is in no way an attack on the role of religion in society, not at all.

Yeah. It's more of a comment on whether, fundamentally, religion is going to be something that is voluntary and between a believer and their God, or whether it's something that's compulsory, meaning the power of the state is engaged. And what we can say looking around the world is that in places where religion goes from being something that is in civil society, where a society can be very religious,

but the state isn't involved. It's you and your mosque, you and your church, you and your temple, and there's no problem with that and a politics of development and global engagement and so on. But when religion becomes an issue of enforcement and law, a very different outcome faces a society. And Indonesia has multiple times in its history played with that issue. of is society going to be, society going to be religious or are the politics going to be religious? And that is something you've, as it were, bounced off of multiple times and you're facing it again right now.

And it's a tough one to navigate. Yeah. And that's a challenge. But I think that the economic is inseparable from the societal and from the political. I'm actually encouraged by the fact that we've got this group of young people that, as you say, are unencumbered by the past, which may not necessarily be great. and at the rate that we're likely to hear more of these voices vocalizing all the positivities, especially in the context of putting food on a table,

I think there is optimism in sustaining secularization. And that, I think, has been a characteristic of Indonesia. just passed, which I think has been beautiful, and has been a characteristic of Southeast Asia, which has been beautiful. That's how we've been able to basically maintain our cohesiveness. There are these, of course, episodic stresses that we're going through right now, which cause us to ponder or pause, right? What's going on, man? You know, there's this push and pull or pull from both directions. But I do believe that at the rate

that we're going to see more and more of these young generations thinking in the right manner for the people in the country, that just gives us hope for Indonesia. Sure, and redefining the Indonesian identity. What does it mean? What does it mean to be Indonesian? And that's a question of being aware where you've come from, where you are now, and where you want to go. It's those three brought together, right?

And sometimes the older generation, sorry to say it, they're a bit stuck in the past. And the younger generation can't be, as you said a moment ago, they can't be unaware of the past. But they need to be unshackled from the past so that they can be agile. so they can move in a LeBron James kind of way. Right. Or Steph Curry kind of way. Yeah. Or whoever. Or, you know, Sugiarto, what was his name? Ichuk.

Ichug Sugiarto. The one from my... Rudi Harto, Limswicking. Yes. All these very agile players who adapted rapidly to changing circumstances. You know, how amazing they were. And so I believe if there's any answer to the change coming to Indonesia, it's that there's a very new cosmopolitan generation coming up who are not afraid of the world. Right. Are not afraid of the challenges.

Not afraid of the competition. But speaking of shackles, Jeff, we seem to be shackled, right? however good we are, however excellent we are, we seem to be shackled systemically by a pre-existing political system. And I want to push this a little bit. I want to compare this with some of the more positive illustrations earlier with respect to Singapore, Vietnam, and China, where there is no multi-party system where one guy basically makes decisions for most people, if not everybody in the country. Whereas in this country, in Indonesia, we have a multi-political party system. That, in a way, inhibits our capacity to think, right, what matters in the next 50 years, right?

Isn't that a systemic issue that we've got to basically think about or try to address? Yes, but I would say this. on the question of whether a society advances or not, I don't think democracy is either necessarily a tremendous benefit or a liability. I don't think it's the right issue to focus on. I think the real question is, what motivates decision makers to set up the parameters in a way, coming back to you what you said about merit,

meritocracy earlier. Set up the parameters in a way where merit and innovation are rewarded, as opposed to political subservience. And I would say the biggest problem in Indonesia's democracy is that it's such a patron-client system. It's so marked by patron-client relations that it's a quasi-democracy in certain senses, and those aspects are the real shackles, the real legacy from the past. Let me give you an example. Singapore and Korea both became and are becoming much more democratic, and that's not undermining their ability to really be focused countries in terms of their economic

behavior. And so I would just say, the last thing I really want to go on record of doing is saying, you know, democracy really needs to get out of the way of development. I don't think that's a choice we have to make. Instead, the question is, how are the political parties and their leaders oriented? Are they on the same page about what needs to happen for Indonesia? And, I would say weeding out the patron-client nature of the parties is far more important than not having multiple parties. And you know very well that Indonesia has a lot of personalistic parties. Some of them created by single individuals and lord it over. I mean, they literally are an instrument for the individual and their families to rise.

That's a very unhealthy kind of democracy, and that's not necessary. It doesn't have to be that way. And so I never thought I would be saying this. I can't believe I'm going to say this. We can edit this later if you want. Yeah. The healthiest best party in Indonesia is Golkar. Believe it or not.

And I would have never thought, you know, that I would say such a thing. They always say it's a publicly listed company. It is. I mean, so it's not that patron client isn't completely, you know, not there. But look at the sheer turnover of leadership in Golkar versus the lack of turnover in leadership in the other parties, just as an illustration. And so there's a certain amount of not perfect, but healthy, what we've seen is when people were frustrated in Golkar, they broke off and made their own parties. We saw that phenomenon, right? And Golkar has spawned what?

Three, four, five parties? I don't know how many, but quite a few. But nevertheless, I want to go on record as saying, democracy and freedom aren't Indonesia. biggest problem. It is the fact that you have a solid grip by folks who want to play a buggy-buggy game instead of a competitive game, which is why no matter who wins and who you ran against, they end up in your cabinet. It's unimaginable, frankly speaking, in most places, but not in Indonesia. Okay, I can't resist the temptation of asking you or pushing this, right?

I get the point about our seeming inability to infuse merit or meritocracy, right? Who performs should be rewarded, right? Who doesn't perform should be discouraged or even penalized, right? We don't have that yet. or probably not nearly to the scale that we're seeing in China, Singapore, and Vietnam. But again, I go back to the pre-existence of the multi-party system. Because of that, I think, it makes it very difficult for people. Because hypothetically, there could be one that things that the planet Earth is round,

and there could be another party that still things that planet Earth is still flat, right? It's going to be very tough to converse on what matters in anything beyond five years from today. And we're shackled by these cycles of five years worth of political processes. Whereas if you have one single party or you only have two parties or three parties at most, I think it's easier conversationally about what it takes to infuse meritocracy. Well, let me ask this, okay, because that's a great question, but I want to ask a counter question, which is. This is more about you, man, not me. Okay, go ahead.

So, I know, but I'm really fascinated by what your answer is going to be. So Indonesia is not without an experience of a single party, essentially. You had the Orde Baru for 32 years. Now, would you say, genuinely speaking, Now, certainly the politics were simpler. Yeah. Certainly. But did it result in meritocracy?

I'd like to know what your answer is because you've had an experience already with essentially a single party. What were its benefits? And did it produce what you are hoping for? I would argue that there was more meritocracy at the beginning, right? I would also argue that there was an ability to think long-term more than what I'm seeing today. I've never been suggesting that it was better than it is today, right? Now you're in that tough situation of not wanting to go on record as lauding the Ordebao, right? No, no, no, no, I'm happy to go on record.

But, you know, I think it's possible that whatever we're seeing in Vietnam may not last, right? do good things. I think it's possible that whatever we're seeing in China and Singapore may not last, right? But I'm only making the comparison between what we're seeing there today, vis-a-vis what we're seeing here today. That's all I'm making the case off. Yeah. So, I mean, we've got to repurpose, right, to get better. So how do we do this repurposing to get better? Yeah. I understand the urge to simplify, to take a lot of the cacophony of voices and bring it down to something manageable. Right. I would say I can see why those steps would promise some results.

But I would say there is also something missing, which is just having a single voice doesn't guarantee that that single voice regime will be oriented towards something that helps the people. And so I would be much more likely to jump on that bandwagon if I was confident that the, that the narrower regime would really, really not just grab all the resources for themselves, which is, by the way, a big part of what the Suharto regime did, if we're honest about it. And those people who were more meritocratic at the time, those were largely the technocrats. And they struggled to be heard from period to period. And getting back to the fear factor, they were strongest when Suharto was most afraid, most afraid of instability, economic and otherwise.

And when those technocrats could convince him that we're going to go back to hyperinflation and this country is going to break apart and you're going to have a hell of a problem on your hands, if you don't let us be in charge of this area of policy. And Suharto relented under those circumstances. But, and I wrote a whole book about this. Right. During the times when the resources were flowing in and the oil boom was at its peak, Suharto didn't listen so much to the technocrats.

And they struggled to be heard. And other voices came forward saying, hey, there's all these petro dollars. How do I get in on the baggy-baggy game? Right? Give me a piece of that, and I won't cause trouble, which is the sort of the threat. And he bought off generals, and he bought off all kinds of people. And he managed to play that game for 32 years. Extraordinary.

But did he really implant a meritocratic orientation and mentality? My own reading would be sometimes when he had to. But overall, maybe not. So I would say, Gita, I agree with you. There's an ingredient. Let's put it this way. There's an ingredient in Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, and China. That is important to why they made economic transformation urgent.

and the question is, what puts that ingredient into the Indonesian cocktail and mix? What puts it there? Because I've been watching this place for a very long time, and the elites of the country, I don't read as being very urgent in their posture. Because, frankly, the system is working for them pretty darn well. And not necessarily for everyone else.

So what is it that gave the sense of urgency elsewhere and what would create it in Indonesia? I think if you could figure out that, you have figured out the country's future. And that's where we were saying maybe, maybe the young generation is tired of being a sort of stuck country economically. Maybe they're tired of it. And they, in a conversation among themselves, say, how about we forge a new Indonesia? Just as young people in the country's history always were the ones, it seems to me, who said, enough of the way we're doing things. Let's make a change.

Maybe that history, that inspiring history of Pomuda is one of the sources of inspiration, potentially. for Indonesia's young people? I've been trying in my small way, right? To try to take the young people on a detour, right, of creating this urgency, or at least sensitizing them to this urgency of where the climate change is taking us, right? And this is not conversational in many. in many circles, right? But I'm pushing this as much and as quickly as I could in that whatever carbon we have left,

which is about 3,000 to 4,000 gigatons on the planet, only leaves humanity about 50 to 60 years worth of life expectancy. And that awakens some of the people that I've talked to in classrooms, right? Holy shit. I mean, it is a holy shit moment. Right?

You know, what's going to happen to me? What's going to happen to my kids? Will I be able to have grandkids if we only have 50 to 60 years left? That to me is sort of like a means for me to unify and unite people to think about, as you referred to, the kind of urgency that would basically put us on a different level of thinking. And secondly, I've been pushing this idea of how in many developed countries, in laboratories, people are seemingly trying to hack the future of humanity by way of this new intersection of artificial intelligence and biological intelligence. And is that the kind of manifestation of where Indonesia needs to go, right? because if we want to be relevant, I mean, we always celebrate and cheerlead upon the fact that, or the possibility that we're going to be the fourth largest economy in the world and all that, but are we still just going to be champions in badminton? Or are we going to be able to win 10 Nobel Prizes, 10 Oscars, 10 Grammys, so that we can be a much more broad-based nation? So, yeah, two things. Number one, climate change. And number two, basically this idea of embrace.

you know, capabilities and artificial intelligence and biological intelligence so that we could become a better nation. Yeah, you know, Indonesia needs to get excited about the idea of being a leader in something. You know, there's all these sectors that Indonesia is engaged in, but Indonesia doesn't lead in manufacturing in any sector. So you can become the fourth biggest economy in the world, but on a per capita basis, way down the list, right? And related to environment, you have a declining resource future. And that declining resource future is going to drag on Indonesia if it doesn't start making much more of its economy out of things

as opposed to extracting things. It's just going to have to do it. But I think Indonesians need to get excited about being, number one in things or top five in certain things. And there is absolutely no reason, none apart from Indonesia's own self-imposed limitations. Wyatt can't do that. It can do it. Absolutely can do it. But it's not easy. No one's going to hand it to you. You have to fight and struggle for it. So is climate change, you know, let's face it, Indonesia is an archipelago country,

Lots of water. And the effect climate change is going to have on Indonesia. These things are hard to predict, but let's say very likely massive. And that means, you know, countries like Indonesia really need to be leaders in the way that the United States seems to be failing in pushing the envelope on climate change and global warming. It's proper for Indonesia to say, hey, industrialized countries of the world, you've had your run, you've polluted our environment, we haven't even had a chance to catch up yet. A little bit of anger and frustration about that is completely warranted and criticism, but also leadership. And so I think you're absolutely right. Here's the strange thing about climate change.

It's so big, but it happens so slowly in big time scheme of things. We keep talking about sense of urgency. How to convert that into action tomorrow, action in the next government plan. And that's not an easy thing to do. We're like frogs in the water that's about to be boiled. Exactly. And it's warming at a very slow pace, but there is a point at which it gets too hot and you can't jump out anymore. You're now debilitated by the heat. You're now aware of the heat and you're going to boil. You know, I'm wondering whether I know, I don't want to turn this into some kind of big, you know, debate about, you know, things like capitalism and socialism.

But I'm wondering, how much more environmentally can the world take of just exploitation without planning? And is there a middle ground between the incentives for profit and the need to control and plan? I mean, you're saying long-range planning, and you admitted earlier, that investors sometimes are pretty short-term oriented, which means there's a reason we have government. Government is supposed to step in and play that role of planning that markets don't do. And that means being comfortable with the idea that there's an interplay between planning and markets and competition. meritocracy both in the sense of winning in the market, but also leading in the leadership side of the game. There's two kinds of meritocracy there.

And I know you're frustrated that parties don't seem to produce merit, especially a cacophony, right? They're debating is the world flatter round? That's not a good sign. But also, there are people who rise up, who are inspired. who do care. I agree. And they can mobilize people through their message.

It's about speaking the right words at the right time. It's about getting into people's minds and saying, I know you weren't thinking about this, but you need to think about this. And when they do, they say, I see, I see. And that means being convincing. And being convincing doesn't necessarily mean being confrontational. I'll pick up on this point of capitalism. I've been following, and I'm a believer of the fact that the new form of capitalism is going to be very, very much environment-centric.

I've been saying this openly that the new trillionaire is going to be somebody that's going to resolve climate change problems. And that's going to happen in the next five to ten years. And I believe it. And that is not because of regulation. That is not because of politics. That is just because of the sheer luck of getting somebody who gets to be crazy and visionary and he figures out the necessary execution for this to happen.

And I can relate to how years ago, when I was in public service, I was talking about electric vehicles and it fell on deaf ears. But now the fact that battery technology, has gotten so much cheaper, it's broken the level of parity with combustibles, right? That it only makes sense for you to buy electric vehicles. And before you know it, I think in five to ten years, I think electric vehicles are going to make up 40 to 50% of all cars sold.

So the regulators. And by the way, not just that, Gita, but self-driving vehicles that you don't need to privately own. Oh, my gosh. say a car comes, picks me up, takes me where I want to go, and then it goes to someone else and picks them up and takes them where they want to go. And the sheer need for cars becomes one-fifth. One-twentieth. One-twent even. Because we only use our cars 5% of the time. Exactly. And I can say, pick me up in a nice seven-series Mercedes. Or sorry, sorry, I don't own a Mercedes. So BMW is what I meant. I'm getting the cars, I'm getting the luxury cars mixed

It's going to be a subscription model for just about anything we consume. Sure. And this new generation, by the way, I don't know if this is happening in Indonesia, but in America, it used to be that the right of passage when you turn 16 was you got your driver's license. Today, young people don't want to get a driver's license. Correct. They don't want to own a car. Correct.

There's a change in that mentality. To be a little bit of a downer, I want to just say, here's what I notice about. our current mega billionaires and trillionaires. I don't know what this means exactly, Gita, but I notice all of them are focusing on space. And the reason that scares me is I think they're planning to get off the planet. I'm worried that they are preparing for this to go down really badly here. Did you see the movie Elysium?

Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Where down on Earth, it's a dystopian. and up on that beautiful thing floating around in the sky is Tamanferdows, you know, a great beautiful, you know, Bezos and Elon Musk and Virgin Atlantic, wherever that guy is, all those folks, they're all investing in Mars and space stations. And I'm wondering, what's that about? is that, you know, because it seems like the oligarchs have two plans. They're either going to go out into space or they're going to burrow down into the earth and hide down under there while the rest of us play out some awful dystopian movie. I don't know.

I don't want to sound too apocalyptic, but I just kind of wonder what they're investing in. It's a little weird to me that these ultra-rich people all seem to be. to be so fixated on getting off the planet? I'm not in your camp yet. I'm still in the camp where I'm still in the camp where I believe that they're just, I think they're true believers of existential, you know, crisis by way of a meteor or anything that's going to cause disruptions in a big way to planet. at Earth. And we do need an alternative. And there is a pattern, right? They've been able to

disrupt things in the way we buy books. They've been able to disrupt ways, you know, the ways we've been transporting ourselves from one point to another in a more efficient manner, right? It's not all about themselves. I think it's all about how to make it easier, how to make it cheaper, how to make it more efficient for as many people as possible. You know, I'm sorry to keep making these references to Hollywood, but, you know, it seems, it seems that the only time, at least in Hollywood's version of reality, the only time the earth truly comes together is when there's either a meteor or some kind of attack from aliens, right?

Then we all set, and there's always those scenes in the movie where the Chinese are working together with the Americans and the Russians and every, and the Middle East is working together with the Israelis and so, you know, the Arabs and the Israelis. It's always that moment when we are simultaneously threatened. And the question is, we still view, unfortunately, we still view the environmental threat as segmental. That is, who's going to bear the burdens, right? And it's unfair that we bear the carbon burdens and you don't. So it is a systemic threat in the same way that a meteor is, but unfortunately we're not reading it.

as a common threat yet. Right. Yet. And the moment we can actually, I mean, look at what Trump did. Trump unsigned us from the Paris Accords for crying out loud. You know, I mean, talk about a segmental view. His view was, hey, we're not making money on this thing. You know, and he pulls us out.

And by the way, his backers in the United States, his base applauded him for his America a first approach to the environment. And so I want to say to Trump and his base, it's a meteor. It's not just going to hit one place. It's going to knock the whole planet out like a cue ball hitting the eight ball. Okay. It's going to be just like that. But right now, the mentality, unfortunately, is I'm going to somehow free ride.

and you can't free ride when the aliens attack. But so we need the next step in the response needs to be there are no free riders. No one is going to survive this. And we will not overcome it until we view it as all of our problems simultaneously. All. No one's free rides. All right. Hey, Jeffrey.

This is fascinating. But we got to end on a positive note. And I want to bring up what you have done for Indonesia. You founded the EDGS, the Aramon Institute. Talk about that. And I think it's so noble what you've done and what you're doing. I think it's going to mean so good for the long gain for Indonesia and Indonesians. Please.

Well, thank you, Gita. That's so kind of you to recognize that effort. I've worked together with American and Indonesian colleagues, and our goal was very simple. We wanted to invest in the young people of Indonesia. We wanted to invest in their minds. We wanted to invest in their creativity, in their brilliance, And frankly, the only point in doing it was to try to create an asset for the country. And I'm a firm believer, maybe because I'm in the so-called educational sector, I do need to believe in it. But I do believe that education is a pure good.

It's a pure good. And the more Indonesians themselves are on that cutting edge of creating knowledge. knowledge, pushing the envelope in terms of science and innovation, the stronger Indonesia is going to be. And so about a decade ago, I got together with other folks. I got some of Indonesia's oligarchs to play a role in this. And they knew, by the way, that there was no immediate payoff. They knew that this was a lot, you're planting an olive tree. and it's a long-term payoff, but it's a payoff worth having.

So we trained something like 20-21 Indonesian scholars. We selected them from around the country in Indonesia, and we pulled all the money together from Indonesians themselves to fund this group of really talented people. And the idea then was they couldn't scatter around the world and teach in Illinois or Chicago. They all had to make a commitment to go back and become assets in Indonesia. And we are in the final stages. I don't want to mention anything too specific because we're still in the negotiation stage,

but we're in the final stages of arranging a new, it's called IFAR, the Institute for Advanced Research, in Indonesia where these scholars, together with other scholars that we want to recruit from all over Indonesia, to come together and to try to be a dynamic, supportive, intellectual habitat. And then the idea is let it go. Let it just become what it's going to become. Set it in motion and then step away. And that's the plan. And I'm so honored to be able to work with Indonesians and Americans here at Northwestern and elsewhere to try to make this happen. And it is an act of optimism to make an investment like this because there's no reason to do it if you don't believe in the future. And if you don't believe in what people can do in the power of ideas and the power of research and the power of data. So on that note, I do hope that the effort pans out.

And if it doesn't, I won't give up. I'll just say, well, that was a good effort and try again. But I'm hopeful something good will come of it. And I can't wait to see what these scholars become. I'm a big believer in stuff like this. And I do believe that it doesn't take all too, 170 million people to change all of them. It just takes a few to think the right manner. And if I may, I'd like to ask you, how would you differentiate this cohort or this group of people, 2021?

I think you were targeting 25 right earlier. How would you differentiate these guys with those that went to California in the late 50s or early 60s? Yeah, so I don't want to call these a Northwestern Mafia, certainly. I try to shy away from naming names. Yes, yes. But I guess here's how I would differentiate them. I would say that those folks were primarily policy-oriented people. And we've actually tried to pick people who certainly want to have some kind of policy impact,

but don't necessarily want to be policy makers. And the difference is this. One of the things about that California Berkeley Mafia was that whatever they succeeded in doing, what they kind of didn't do was leave multiple generations behind them to carry on. And so one of the designs of this program was to say, you start with 20, but they teach masters and PhD students in an educational,

environment and then their students multiply generation and they keep and it's so we've trained only the tip of the iceberg but this plan is a hundred years long and the number of people that would be the anabua the chuchu and the great-grandchildren of them intellectually we hope will carry on carry on their mindset of inquiry, carry on their mindset of the importance of ideas, and some of those people, maybe they'll become policymakers. Or maybe policymakers will listen to some of these scholars and their advice and their insights. But we actually made them promise they won't themselves become ministers. We want them.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. We want them to be lifelong scholars, truly committed to transforming higher education, so that higher education will produce those people. So it's really an investment in education, but we hope, of course, that it'll have ripple effects on policies and decisions. But by reading their scholarly books,

not by themselves being the policymakers. I know that's a limitation, but we saw that many other similar kinds of efforts ended with people becoming policy makers, and the educational lineage stopped. And this is just one approach. May a thousand flowers bloom. Others have other ways of doing it.

I know you yourself are engaged in education. And I know you want to produce policymakers. And that's important and that's needed. But we are trying to fill a need, which we think in the broader division of labor has a contribution to make. But it's not the same as the contribution everyone else is making. But they're complementary. They fit together. So that's what we're.

And we don't think our approach is. better. We just think our approach fills a need that's there. And we really hope that these folks will have an impact. At the school I teach, we're not necessarily producing or trying to produce policymaking personalities. We're trying to create optionalities so that they could go to social enterprise, public enterprise or private enterprise. That I think is the differentiation. But let me go back to your situation. I mean, given the fact that the educational budget within the Indonesian government is so massive, why not get them excited about producing not just 25, but thousands more that are going to be involved solely in research, academic pursuits as opposed to

policymaking pursuits? That I think is going to mean even more for Indonesia. So we view this program as not a one-off thing. We view it as an experiment, a model, and if it works well, and it really does produce what we hope it does, we believe that model will catch on, and it will attract the resources from the government. The government didn't pay for this. In fact, when the Ministry of Education found out this existed, they were genuinely shocked that any group had invested separately in this. And by the way, we invested in it,

not knowing whether anyone would pick it up and find it valuable. But our university partner, which is one of the leading universities in Indonesia, is excited about this, wants to see it really flourish, wants to see it have a ripple effect impact throughout the university itself, and wants to scale it up

in a really big way. So all those things you said a moment ago are exactly right. But I guess somebody, and it was this group of people that I and others work with, we decided let's try it. Let's and let's have a vision about what this is going to be. And we don't want to, if there are 3,000 institutes, but they're not quite getting to where we would hope they would be. Let's not be 3,001.

Let's be really different and see if it works. So that's the ethos, and we don't want to be arrogant and we don't want to be snobs. We just want to have pride in excellence, pride in merit, pride in achievement, and moranquil pull in as many people as want to be a part of that. And what I notice in Indonesian higher education is that too often, The institutions are disabling rather than enabling of their scholars. And so there are many, many Indonesians who are hungry for an environment that's really conducive to letting them become all they can be as scholars and academics.

And so I expect these scholars to inspire others as well and to pull in friends and to be transformative. The last thing we want them to do is sort of say, hey, we're the best place and everybody else is below us. No, no, no, no, no. That's a failure. That's a failure if that's their attitude. So that's the goal and may it flourish and may it scale up. Wow. I think you're going to realize 10 to 20 years from today that this has exponential impact on the future of Indonesia.

I'm actually, I want to salute you and I'm encouraged by what you've done and what you're doing. And I see Indonesia in a much more optimistic manner. Yeah, I do too. And I hope I'm around in 20 years to see what it becomes. You and I will be sipping coffee somewhere talking about all the achievements you've done. We're going to be two old men sitting there, you know, saying, you know, the younger generation. No, no, no, no.

We're going to be positive about it. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's good. This conversation, man, we've taught for a long time, just so you know. And I've been, like, warned by the cameraman that we've exceeded the time limit. But we started off on a not-so-positive note, but I think you've just finished off in a very positive manner, manner for Indonesia. Well, thank you. And, Gita, once again, it's been great. be your friend all these years and thank you for doing endgame thank you also for um you know

i've said this to you before but you are somebody who has no illusions about what how the sausage is made in the kitchen uh you know what government is like on the inside but what i what i truly admire uh is that uh you don't let cynicism uh take over and i and i really really uh hope that you can be an inspiration also for young Indonesians to move forward. Amen. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jeffrey. Thank you, Jeffrey Winters,

a friend of my, guru-besar from Northwestern University. Thank you. This is Endgame.