Prolog
The "Future Arriving Early" article has placed itself as the magnum opus of my work, the standard that I've put in my writing has certainly be raised high (by myself). There's a problem with this, I am dabbling between pouring my thoughts and emotions while I know I need to put citations on my statements. I feel like I've been delaying the writing of this topic "Socio-Economic Prowess" by a while now, it's because I barely have the time and putting a citation for every passage simply takes time. We will cover this article by a method that I initially pour out my creative thoughts, problem-solving proposal, and the hardest part is problem introduction which requires the existence of facts and statistics, I will initially put as if it's a common-sense fact and put citations later when I have the time. I can't wait to express my frustration and also the solution to the systemic problem of Indonesia's Socio-Economic problem, to put it simply 'Why is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, in which the emphasis on the problem heavily relies on dissecting the condition 'Is it really that it has become increasingly hard for the poor to escape out of poverty level and what can be done/proposed as the solution and who are the actors that can pull the poor to escape out of poverty?'
The Condition
“The bottom 40% and middle class of society have slower spending growth than the top 20% group, resulting in inequality,” said Atqo, on July 17, 2023. BPS noted that Indonesia's richest population (20%) contributed at least 46.71% of total expenditure. This inequality occurs in almost all regions of Indonesia. [8]
It is now the sixth country of greatest wealth inequality in the world. Today, the four richest men in Indonesia have more wealth than the combined total of the poorest 100 million people. Growing inequality is undermining the fight against poverty, putting a brake on economic growth and threatening social cohesion. [9]
To discover why this gap emerged [Gap between rich and poor], the researchers broke wealth down into three key drivers: differences in saving rates; wages; and capital gains rates. During the decades surveyed, the research showed that house prices had gone up dramatically in both regions, as had financial asset prices. [10]
In the article, The Ripple, we've talked about
- The Presidential Debate and Vague Strategies for 'Better Welfare'
- GDP and Welfare of the Nation
- Welfare, Standard of Living, and Skewed Statistics
- Bets: Making Predictions for Better Welfare
In which it has served a great fundamental to study on how 'welfare' is defined by quantiative metrics and how it is the president's duty to make predictions and bold steps to increase its civilian better welfare. This article is to serve an even more bold steps on how I think there's a really big socio-economic problem that can be alleviated, if people are in consensus that what I assume to be a problem is indeed as big as I think it is.
Welfare is inevitably defined by 'money' in which value of 'money' is intricately tangled within the "economy's health". I will assume the readers have basic understanding on what makes the economy ticks and how recession happens as it is apparent through unemployments and tightening of budgets of companies. I will try to explain briefly by hopefully elaborating on why the bad things happen in order to see the good things.
Recession is a condition that is apparent in nature where one of the signs are massive enomployment rates, when that happens, people will be more wary of their expenditure (the action of spending funds), because now income has lessened but expenditure may be static at least per last month expenditure, think of it as the need to pay for fixed expenses like electricity, housing rent, food and water. If the company's budget has become tight, and so does the people, while assuming most people grow their income through jobs served by companies, they also will feel wary of their budget when the company is. When people can't or refuse to spend money, then 'businesses' that used to rely to those people income also feel wary (think of it as you used to buy food regularly, in which your spending is the food-seller livelihood), the moment you stopped/lessen shopping for groceries on the budget that you used to, those people will also feel wary of their expenditure, now those food-seller also have a budget constrain and may cut their employess as the effect. This is to be seen as a domino effect of high unemployment rates, where it eventually realized by the people that there are 'fear on the streets'. What happens after this? It depends on how strong the recession is correlating on how it effects the livelihood of the 'majority' of the people, think of a recession so strong that the budget constrain is constrained enough in a condition that people can't afford food for basic survival, now that person's morality is now to put his survival above anything else, thus the person does evil without the intention of evil, he seeks his primary needs above anything else and now he justifies criminal acts in order to gain food. The scale of this 'criminal acts' can truly scale to the point that it could become nation-wide, when it has reach nation-wide it is to be called a nation's turmoil. In which again, depending on the 'factor/proportion' of the people are affected by the budget constrain, realizes that they must put themselves lifelihood above anything else, and crime-rates increase for initially the intention for his survival to be a turnover of the government's rule.
This condition is to be seen as:
The Great Depression hit Germany harder than it did any other European country. [1] With a fragile economy that was financed primarily by foreign short term loans, the country endured a banking crisis when the 1929 stock market crash caused these loans to be called back. The crisis reached its trough at the close of 1931 when Herbert Hoover had to allow Germany a one year reparations holiday to avoid a total economic collapse. Three successive governments failed to stimulate employment before the Nazis came to power in January 1933. [2] The ensuing miraculous growth of the German economy, the quickest in history, causes one to ask how the government financed the recovery. [3]
The whole economic system was so strained that any one hold-up immediately caused another. These multiple shortages, which constituted a kind of negative multiplier effect, were the chief distinguishing mark of the situation just before the outbreak of war… it was a general economic crisis. [6]
Unexpectedly Germany plunged into World War I (1914–1918). It rapidly mobilized its civilian economy for the war effort. The economy suffered under the British blockade, which cut off supplies.[4] The impact of the blockade was gradual, with relatively little impact on German industry in the first couple of years.[4] Mobilization and armament caused a short-lived but dramatic economic shock at the beginning of the conflict: unemployment spiked from 2.7% in July 1914 to 22.7% in September. [5]
We can talk more about a civilization's downfall like the fall of the Roman Empire
Even as Rome was under attack from outside forces, it was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis. Constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers, and oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between rich and poor. [7]
Ok enough citations, I believe you get my point already, which is: the tendency towards destabilization is heavily reflected on the disparity and effect of the people's budget constrain to the point that it elevates the occurence of a nation meltdown out of sheer dissatisfaction of the majority of the populace's living standard. In which, the opposite is true, the tendency towards stabilization is heavily reflected on the parity and the effect of the people's prosperity to the point that it elevates growth out of sheer satisfaction/fulfillment of the majority of the populace's living standard.
Here's something that our current civilization and the Roman's Civilization or even any old civilization have in common, the need to fulfill one with at least 'living'
Unfinished, will continue later
Numbered Notes
[1] Albrecht Ritschl, “Deficit Spending in the Nazi Recovery, 1933–1938: A Critical Reassessment,” Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 16, no. 4 (December 2002): 561.
[2] Hans-Erich Volkmann, “The National Socialist Economy in Preparation for War,” in Germany and the Second World War, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 161–63.
[3] Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2006), xxv.
[4] Feldman, Gerald D. "The Political and Social Foundations of Germany's Economic Mobilization, 1914-1916", Armed Forces & Society (1976) 3#1 pp 121-145
[5] Ullmann, Hans-Peter (October 8, 2014). "Organization of War Economies (Germany)". International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Retrieved January 26, 2020.
[6] Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 116
[7] 8 Reasons Why Rome Fell, History, 2023
[9] Oxfam.org
[10] Imperial.ac.uk