The local economy's growth, he argues, lags well behind tourism's own growth — local manufacturing stays small next to what flows in from outside. The social cost, meanwhile, is easy to underestimate: real damage to culture, community, and environment that rarely shows up in the same headlines as the economic wins. Small-scale home industry remains, in his view, the one investment genuinely rooted in local people, and he'd like to see it deliberately cultivated into something bigger — a workshop culture that produces people who can think, plan, and evaluate for themselves, not just supply cheap labour.
Young Balinese have noticed the tourism boom too. His own informal polling suggests many finishing senior high school now head straight into tourism training rather than other paths. What that shift is quietly costing, though, is something like Sekaa Manyi — the traditional rice-harvesting work groups, part labour arrangement and part social-religious community. Shift work in hotels doesn't leave room for that kind of gathering, and the social contact it used to provide is eroding slowly, with no real replacement yet in sight.
Tourism's contribution steams out of Bali — to Jakarta, or overseas — in the value that matters most.
Macro-level growth numbers look healthy; look closer, he says, and the real value keeps leaving the island. His own cost of living keeps climbing faster than his income, and he suspects most people around him feel the same imbalance. Food prices specifically have risen on the assumption that everyone can pay tourist rates for it.
Some things genuinely have improved — healthcare, mainly. Others haven't moved: education, in his assessment, hasn't meaningfully changed at all, and qualified graduates with real, specific skills remain hard to find. Infrastructure is a mixed bag — electricity is easy to get in tourist areas and hard everywhere else; water is under real strain, with tourism dominating the supply; waste and rubbish collection remain poor; and new traffic infrastructure has gone in without any real planning behind it.
Land ownership has drifted out of local hands in the tourism zones, prices climbing well beyond what most Balinese families could pay, even as outsiders take up the more prominent positions in the tourism economy locally.
They have no education and skill, so they decide to do crime. With modern technology they get the power and the chance to steal.
Drug use, he says, has begun spreading into villages that never had to contend with it before; prostitution has grown alongside it. Sacred sites now serve double duty as tourism stops, not purely ritual ground, and he feels the essence of the tradition fading as a result. Casual attitudes toward sex among young people, once unthinkable, are now simply accepted. Parents, meanwhile, have less time for their children — tourism work eats into exactly the hours that family used to claim.
Long term, he sees the environment and the physical space of the island as the most urgent thing to fix — solve that, he believes, and the social and cultural fallout has a real chance of following behind it, given time.
“Criticising through the press, and offering an alternative solution — that's the only thing I can do,” he says. His ask of tourists is simple: buy from local people, and show more respect for Balinese norms.