Column 2: evidence · the 2021 column
Open data, followed all the way down to one person inside it.
Every piece here starts with a public dataset and ends with a story. The numbers can be checked: any figure set in mono opens its own evidence in a column to the right, so you never have to leave the sentence you are reading to find out whether it is true.
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Three tests, none of which needs a source outside the file. Indonesian minimum wages are nominally non-decreasing, and in this file no province has a 2020 wage above its 2022 wage — so a 2021 value outside that bracket is not surprising, it is impossible.
test one · which year disagrees with its neighbours
2020 and 2022 agree almost perfectly with each other while both disagree with 2021. A real year cannot do that: to sit between two years that match, it would have to match them too.
test two and three · which rows, and whose numbers
| province | 2020 | 2021 in file | 2022 | the value belongs to | off by | row gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JAMBI | 2,630,162 | 2,788,826 | 2,698,941 | GORONTALO 2020 | exact | +24 |
| BENGKULU | 2,213,604 | 2,460,996 | 2,238,094 | BANTEN 2020 | Rp 1 | +9 |
| KEP. BANGKA BELITUNG | 3,230,024 | 3,000,804 | 3,264,884 | KALIMANTAN UTARA 2020 | exact | +15 |
| DKI JAKARTA | 4,276,350 | 1,765,000 | 4,641,854 | — matches nothing in the file | ||
| JAWA BARAT | 1,810,351 | 2,630,162 | 1,841,487 | JAMBI 2020 | exact | -7 |
| DI YOGYAKARTA | 1,704,608 | 2,215,000 | 1,840,916 | — matches nothing in the file | ||
| BANTEN | 2,460,997 | 3,230,023 | 2,501,203 | KEP. BANGKA BELITUNG 2020 | Rp 1 | -7 |
| KALIMANTAN BARAT | 2,399,699 | 1,868,777 | 2,434,328 | — matches nothing in the file | ||
| KALIMANTAN TENGAH | 2,903,145 | 2,877,448 | 2,922,516 | KALIMANTAN SELATAN 2020 | Rp 1 | +1 |
| KALIMANTAN SELATAN | 2,877,449 | 2,399,698 | 2,906,473 | KALIMANTAN BARAT 2020 | Rp 1 | -2 |
| KALIMANTAN TIMUR | 2,981,379 | 2,903,144 | 3,014,497 | KALIMANTAN TENGAH 2020 | Rp 1 | -2 |
| KALIMANTAN UTARA | 3,000,804 | 2,981,378 | 3,016,738 | KALIMANTAN TIMUR 2020 | Rp 1 | -1 |
| GORONTALO | 2,788,826 | 4,416,186 | 2,800,580 | — matches nothing in the file |
13 of 34 provinces break the bracket. 9 of them are holding another province’s wage, to within two rupiah.
the obvious explanation, and why it is wrong
A single column that slipped one row is the usual cause of this, and it is the first thing to test. Shifting the whole 2021 column back by one row and re-checking against 2020 makes the agreement worse, not better: +0.2101 against +0.6812 for the file as it stands. The row gaps in the table above are -7, -2, -1, 1, 9, 15, 24 — irregular. This is a scramble, not a shift, and the repair is not available from inside the file.
There is a fingerprint. Several displaced values sit exactly one rupiah from their source, and 2 provinces that otherwise froze their wage are off by exactly one rupiah too (LAMPUNG, SULAWESI TENGGARA). A one-rupiah error is not a typing mistake or a policy decision. It is what a number looks like after a round trip through a floating-point value, which suggests this column reached the file down a different path than the others.
what the year actually was
The pandemic freeze. 18 provinces did not move the minimum wage by one rupiah — visible in the file only once the corrupted rows are set aside.
what keeping it would have done
The median barely moves, which is why this is dangerous: an analysis that reported only medians would have published 2021 without noticing anything at all.