Architect of Indonesia's post-independence development and father of President Prabowo Subianto and Hashim Djojohadikusumo. He served as a minister under both Sukarno and Suharto. He founded the economics faculty at the University of Indonesia.
He came of age as a socialist in Paris but his economic philosophy was pragmatic, not ideological, grounded in rigorous training and evidence. In 1942 he completed his PhD thesis on rural credit in Java while living in the German-occupied Netherlands. That research fuelled a lifelong belief that small traders throughout Indonesia would remain trapped in poverty unless the government invested in education, training and co-operatives. He argued as early as 1952 that the government should avoid direct economic intervention where there was little capacity to execute it well.
When Indonesia lacked trained economists, he persuaded the Ford Foundation to send students to the University of California, producing the "Berkeley Mafia" of technocrats who later drove Suharto's economic success.
At the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998 he diagnosed what he called Indonesia's "institutional disease": the corrosion of public policy by vested interests, as Suharto bent state power to serve his family's businesses. His son's critics argue that Prabowo's signature policies—free school lunches, uniform co-operatives and the Danantara sovereign-wealth fund—are precisely the kind of undisciplined state spending Sumitro spent his career warning against.
bozone, n.: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.