C. Implications for the 4-Layer Asymmetric Economy Model
De Soto's insights emphasize that any inclusive economic model must go beyond legal/formal registration and instead:
Design interoperable documentation systems that recognize customary titles, oral contracts, or community-based enterprise records.
Ensure that AI systems and financial algorithms are trained on diversified, context-aware datasets---including proxies for informal economic activity.
Build "formalization bridges", such as cooperative credit unions, digital identity solutions for street vendors, or semi-formal clusters that enable soft entry into Layer 3 (digital platforms) without disrupting Layer 1 dynamics.
The 4-Layer Asymmetric Economy model gains conceptual strength by incorporating extralegal visibility mechanisms, ensuring that digital modernization and AI integration do not unintentionally deepen structural exclusion. Recognizing the extralegal does not mean avoiding modernization---it means building it on a foundation that includes the invisible majority.
5. Adaptive Stratification and the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a sudden and massive disruption to global economic systems, laying bare the flexibility and fragility of socioeconomic stratification---especially in developing economies like Indonesia. Rather than reinforcing a rigid class or layer-based economic order, the pandemic exposed how economic actors dynamically shifted across layers of the economy in response to changing constraints, opportunities, and technologies.
This phenomenon is best captured by the term "adaptive stratification"---a framework that highlights how individuals and enterprises do not exist in static economic categories (e.g., informal vs. formal), but rather exhibit contextual mobility across the multiple layers of the economy based on shocks, digital access, and livelihood strategies.
A. Core Insight: Economic Layers Are Not Fixed Classes
Traditional economic stratification often implies a linear hierarchy---from low-skilled informal work to high-skilled formal employment, from physical to digital economy, from analog to algorithmic. However, the COVID-19 crisis disrupted this view:
Many actors in the Layer 1 and 2 economies (traditional and industrial) adopted digital strategies not as a deliberate upgrade but as a survival mechanism.
The notion of "moving up the economic ladder" gave way to situational diversification and improvisation, where actors operate simultaneously across multiple layers.
This contrasts with theories that view economic modernization as a unidirectional or staged process. The pandemic revealed that actors often jump layers temporarily, or even expand laterally, without abandoning their original economic base.
B. Empirical Examples from the Indonesian Economy
Several real-world adaptations illustrate the concept of adaptive stratification during the pandemic:
