TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsIndonesia must break out of a crumbling global order
In a fracturing global order ruled by tech giants and rising autocracies, Indonesia must abandon gradualism and execute a bold strategic breakout or else risk permanent economic subordination.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Chimneys belch emissions from a nickel smelter on July 7, 2024, at the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP) in Lelilef, North Maluku. (AFP/Azzam Risqullah)
F
or two generations, economic development followed a clear script: Open markets, abide by established rules and rely on the prevailing dominant power to underwrite global stability. History, it was widely assumed, moved inexorably toward democratic governance and deeper integration; developing nations simply had to find their niche and climb. That world no longer exists.
Power today is increasingly concentrated in non-state hands. A single chipmaker, Nvidia, commands a market valuation exceeding US$5 trillion. The seven largest American technology firms collectively hold a valuation greater than $20 trillion, surpassing the gross domestic product of nearly every nation on Earth. These corporations operate largely beyond electoral oversight and national borders.
Concurrently, the democratic model is under severe strain. Autocracies govern nearly three-quarters of humanity, with dozens of countries sliding toward authoritarian governance; a trend now reaching established Western democracies. Meanwhile, the postwar international institutions designed to manage trade and mediate conflict are paralyzed or ignored, leaving major wars in Europe and the Middle East to burn unchecked.
Supercharging this realignment is a wave of foundational technologies — artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced biotechnology — advancing faster and concentrating in fewer hands than any dynamic since the Industrial Revolution.
This transformation is not a temporary disruption; it is the emergence of a new global order. The forces driving it, monopolistic private tech power, democratic retreat and institutional breakdown, stack upon one another rather than balancing out. Consequently, traditional economic forecasting fails.
A century ago, economist Frank Knight drew a critical distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk applies to a known menu of outcomes with calculable odds; uncertainty describes conditions where the outcomes themselves are unknown, the odds incalculable and the baseline constantly shifting. Treating the coming decades as mere risk to be projected from past trends is a fundamental error. The future is not a metric to be forecast; it is a set of choices to be executed.
Faced with this volatility, an ambitious nation has two paths.
