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Kishore Mahbubani at the Presidential Palace, Jakarta.
On Thursday, the 31st of July 2008, Kishore Mahbubani – see the previous post- held a lecture at the presidential palace. His audience was the national ruling elite of Indonesia, the President himself, government members etc. And, as a courteous guest, he said some flattering things about ( and to) his host. But he also had several encouraging observations on recent developments in the country as well as some advice, worth to ponder upon, on how to do better.
He compared for instance what happened in South America and China. While thirty or twenty years ago every insider would have predicted Latin America would do much better economically than the People’s Republic of China, exactly the opposite has happened. In the opinion of Mahbubani both made the one and only right choice regarding the economical system: free market capitalism. So that did not make the difference.
“Asia is overcome by a tidal wave of common sense”
The quote is from Kishore Mahbubani, a learned and eminent Singapore citizen of Indian descent. He himself is making tidal waves in the media and universities by his books in which he castigates the West for arrogance, geo political incompetence and complacency, while at the same time he proclaims the ascent of Asian progress. While the US and Europe lack the capacity to understand the transformation the world is going through, Asia is marching to modernity with a huge, peace and stability loving middle class as result. In the process an ocean of new Asian brainpower – which always has been wasted- will become available and boost the developments.
As one might expect China is kind of a model to him. According to Mahbubani that country took two major beneficial decisions. One of them is that after the end of the cold war it didn’t copy the political system of the West (= liberal democracy), but only the economical one (free market economy). In that way it profited from the dynamics and vitality of the system, but could prevent the socio-political chaos the former USSR had and has to deal with. The other one is a geo strategic one: China offered a free trade agreement to the Asean and Asian countries and executed it. The outcome of that decision is that the Asian hemisphere as a whole benefits from a remarkable economic growth.
Newsflash: Asians live longer.
In case you don’t expect to get fed up with it all and kill yourself when you are forty, fifty or sixty, but would love to grow really, really old, you better be Asian.
At least this is what I read in The Guardian today:
“The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years”.
I should add this is valid for Asians living in the US. But you could do even better than that. You just have to watch out where you are gonna live:
“Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans”.
So, make your pick. But let me tell you that in 2078 my daughters in law probably will be a hundred years old widows and still be hale and hearty grannies.
PS: The picture by the way is of Albert Hofmann – 1906 – 2008. The man who was the first to synthesize LSD-25. Ironic isn’t it?
I love mankind, but we are heading for trouble. Big time.
Though I’m in a gloomy mood, I hereby declare I love mankind. But, lets be honest about it, the world would probably have been a better place without the human species.
I love believers. They are my fellow men and women after all. But don’t you think the lot of them wouldn’t be so fucked up, if they never ever had been in touch with their ideology?
Surrounded by friends and family members who are economists of a kind, I can’t but love economists. I do so also because they are part of mankind. And because, as professionals, they are believers. They usually believe economy is a science. The only science with an absolute unshakable truth: the free market. As you know in this ideology the invisible hand is God and Milton Friedman is his prophet. To them there is no economy, but free market economy. There is no alternative.
Indonesian Woman Artists
The Book
It’s size is 30 x 25 cm, 280 pages and it was published by ISRY, Galeri Nasional, August last year. 
It’s content is strikingly apt and beautiful: short biographies on 34 female artists, a general but quite complete review of the artists’ track records and a lot of well chosen photo’s by Oetomo and Devi. A beautiful tribute to Indonesian women artists – to be more precise: to 33 Indonesian woman and one Dutch woman. It had quite a lot of publicity in Indonesia but if you want to buy the book (Rp 600000, the equivalent of almost € 45.-) if you live in Europe, you have to put in some effort: Amazon does not provide it and the nearest bookshop that has it in stock happens to be in Singapore. But last week Lien (thank you Lien, you’re my heroine) returned from her stay in Jakarta with a copy and here it is.
The Art
Indonesian visual arts, Indonesian visual artists, are “hot”. According to an article in the Dutch daily NRC (April the 5th) modern Indonesian art is all of a sudden very much in demand at auctions by Sotheby’s, Singapore ( Putu Sutawijaya sold a painting for about USD 60.000) and at Christie’s, Honkong, where that amount of money has been topped recently. And in Indonesia itself a new generation of extremely rich upstarts has become collectors of art; last year an old painting by Hendra Gunawan for instance has been sold for approximately USD 500000.