T

he change in tone from media around the world is now so noticeable. The days of economic Armageddon are over, with even the fence-sitters hedging their bets by saying the situation has stabilized.

But the same lessons that should have been learnt after the Internet bubble burst in 2000 seem to have escaped us again. Time and again, a small group of unscrupulous bankers unsupervised by incompetent regulators fail the rest of us.

The 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) was a tsunami that never really came to Indonesia. It wreaked havoc on the handful of people with investments in the stock market. Over half a million workers who lost their export-driven jobs acutely felt the collateral damage, many of whom have now rejoined the workforce.

For the rest of the country's mainstream, attention was devoted to battling a totally different kind of pain.

For the overwhelming majority, that pain is the everyday struggle to put food on the plate, exacerbated during 2008 by the skyrocketing prices of fuel and food, both globally and locally. As soon as that pressure eased, with reductions in prices late last year, the collective sigh of relief was almost audible around the country.

The people's reaction to Indonesia's crisis, virtually ignoring the "GFC", is mirrored in several indicators reflecting the behavior of the majority. Yet armchair marketers and politicians remain oblivious to these realities, using an alien global event as a convenient excuse for their own local failures.

A look at Roy Morgan's consumer confidence index and its unemployment rating research will reveal the truth. In stark contrast to much of the world, Indonesia was upbeat and downbeat at different points in time and at odds with the global environment.

A comparison with neighboring Australia is a graphic example of those differences. In recent years, unemployment in Indonesia has hovered below the 10 percent mark.

Unemployment is defined as the percentage of people in the workforce "looking for a job". The workforce is defined as the number of people who have a job, plus the number of people looking for one. By that token, Indonesia has been doing remarkably well.

Indonesia's socioeconomic indicators reflect the traditions and cultural mores of this developing economy. Two out of three women are housewives, even though wedding bells are ringing a little later in life than before.

After accounting for students and retired people, there are always about 6 percent of Indonesians who "do not work". That is approximately 8 million people. Many are high-school dropouts, a tiny fraction are disabled, but a large number are adults who live off the efforts of the rest of the extended family.

They do not work, are not looking for work and as such, are not members of the workforce, despite most Indonesian households having more than one income, as the main income earner is unable to pay the weekly bills by himself alone.

What a difference a year can make. Driven by the fundamental need to survive in the face of spiralling prices, Indonesia's workforce found some comfort in jobs. More jobs.

Unemployment raced downwards from 9 percent in March 2008, to 8 percent in the next quarter, to 6 percent at the end of September 2008.

As the GFC gripped the world at that time, real cutbacks from export orders alone saw some 500,000 jobs disappear almost immediately.

That toll was reflected in unemployment jumping back up to 8 percent in the last quarter of 2008. The turn of events was understandable.

What remains unforgivable is the convenient excuses CEOs trotted out to cover their own failures, and their preemptive cutbacks that inflicting pain on their own workers. Overall, the consumer economy chugged along, straining under the pressure of rocketing prices, but unaffected by the GFC.

As soon as the prices of those essential goods came down in the latter part of 2008, there was visible relief across Indonesia even as the GFC set in offshore. In stark contrast to the world at large, unemployment climbed down again in the first quarter of 2009.

That trend is expected to continue, running in tandem with buoyant consumer confidence.

The exception, for just a while longer, is high-end products and services. We should remember that cars, airlines, credit cards and the like are used only by a tiny fraction of the Indonesian society.

Unfortunately, many of the users of those products and services are the same people who cannot imagine what everyday life is like for the mainstream, the have-nots.

Unduly influenced by global events, the difficult times in the developed world, or losses in the IDX, they are unable to isolate extraneous elements and allow them to cloud their view of the local environment.

Or worse, they use them as convenient veils to mask the mistakes they made. The fortunate few, some of whom are the urban cowboys, both local and expatriate, often take decisions that adversely affect the lives of too many around the country.

The entrepreneur and the government, not just big business, are creating the hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Yet another positive economic indicator.

These opinions are based on Roy Morgan Single Source, a syndicated survey with over 25,000 Indonesians 14 years and older interviewed each year.

That national database is updated every quarter. Almost 90 percent of the population is covered, from the cities, towns and villages of Indonesia in the 16 densely populated provinces. An almost identical survey runs in Australia, used for comparison in the chart above.