Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

These thoughts continued to disturb my sleep every night that I spent at the Hotel InterContinental Indonesia. In the end, my primary defense was a highly personal one: I had fought my way out of that New Hampshire town, the prep school, and the draft. Through a combination of coincidences and hard work, I had earned a place in the good life. I also took comfort in the fact that I was doing the right thing in the eyes of my culture. I was on my way to becoming a successful and respected economist. I was doing what business school had prepared me for. I was helping implement a development model that was sanctioned by the best minds at the world’s top think tanks.

Nonetheless, in the middle of the night I often had to console myself with a promise that someday I would expose the truth. Then I would read myself to sleep with Louis L’Amour novels about gun-fighters in the Old West.

CHAPTER 5. Selling My Soul

Our eleven-man team spent six days in Jakarta registering at the U.S. Embassy, meeting various officials, organizing ourselves, and relaxing around the pool. The number of Americans who lived at the Hotel InterContinental amazed me. I took great pleasure in watching the beautiful young women—wives of U.S. oil and construction company executives—who passed their days at the pool and their evenings in the half dozen posh restaurants in and around the hotel.

Then Charlie moved our team to the mountain city of Bandung. The climate was milder, the poverty less obvious, and the distractions fewer. We were given a government guesthouse known as the Wisma, complete with a manager, a cook, a gardener, and a staff of servants. Built during the Dutch colonial period, the Wisma was a haven. Its spacious veranda faced tea plantations that flowed across rolling hills and up the slopes of Java’s volcanic mountains. In addition to housing, we were provided with eleven Toyota off-road vehicles, each with a driver and translator. Finally, we were presented with memberships to the exclusive Bandung Golf and Racket Club, and we were housed in a suite of offices at the local headquarters of Perusahaan Umum Listrik Negara (PLN), the government-owned electric utility company.

For me, the first several days in Bandung involved a series of meetings with Charlie and Howard Parker. Howard was in his seventies and was the retired chief load forecaster for the New England Electric System. Now he was responsible for forecasting the amount of energy and generating capacity (the load) the island of Java would need over the next twenty-five years, as well as for breaking this down into city and regional forecasts. Since electric demand is highly correlated with economic growth, his forecasts depended on my economic projections. The rest of our team would develop the master plan around these forecasts, locating and designing power plants, transmission and distribution lines, and fuel transportation systems in a manner that would satisfy our projections as efficiently as possible. During our meetings, Charlie continually emphasized the importance of my job, and he badgered me about the need to be very optimistic in my forecasts. Claudine had been right; I was the key to the entire master plan.

“The first few weeks here,” Charlie explained, “are about data collection.”

He, Howard, and I were seated in big rattan chairs in Charlie’s plush private office. The walls were decorated with batik tapestries depicting epic tales from the ancient Hindu texts of the Ramayana. Charlie puffed on a fat cigar.

“The engineers will put together a detailed picture of the current electric system, port capacities, roads, railroads, all those sorts of things.” He pointed his cigar at me. “You gotta act fast. By the end of month one, Howard’ll need to get a pretty good idea about the full extent of the economic miracles that’ll happen when we get the new grid online. By the end of the second month, he’ll need more details—broken down into regions. The last month will be about filling in the gaps. That’ll be critical. All of us will put our heads together then. So, before we leave we gotta be absolutely certain we have all the information we’ll need. Home for Thanksgiving, that’s my motto. There’s no coming back.”

Howard appeared to be an amiable, grandfatherly type, but he was actually a bitter old man who felt cheated by life. He had never reached the pinnacle of the New England Electric System and he deeply resented it. “Passed over,” he told me repeatedly, “because I refused to buy the company line.” He had been forced into retirement and then, unable to tolerate staying at home with his wife, had accepted a consulting job with MAIN. This was his second assignment, and I had been warned by both Einar and Charlie to watch out for him. They described him with words like stubborn, mean, and vindictive.