This is a fascinating article and I learned a lot. This is a small Substack now but I hope you keep writing. Any good books or articles you would recommend on Korean development?
I haven't read any books on Korean development specifically, but Joe Studwell's How Asia Works includes a section on South Korea along with the other Asian tiger economies. Part of the book is also about how Southeast Asia bungled development.
These articles are good overviews of the culture and economics of the Park period:
Articles like this are why I come to Substack! I spent over an hour reading this and thinking over everything I’ve ever heard, read, or learned about South Korea. All previous narratives I’ve read on the matter of South Korea’s birth rate, economy, and work place culture issues seemed incomplete. This article finally tied it all together for me. Grateful to have come across your Substack today.
Thanks for sharing! Given that SK has an overqualified workforce relative to the internal opportunities, why don't more foreign companies set up shop (eg do R&D in SK)? And why don't the young people who can't get chaebol jobs just emigrate? Are there a lot of highly-skilled young people who nevertheless have weak English skills? Or are there political or legal obstacles to outsourcing to SK and emigration from SK?
Yes, english skills partially, and money. You must not forget not everyone on the earth is in propertied class able to move whenever they want like westerners do.
But there are plenty of people outside the propertied class (eg from India, Pakistan, and the Middle East) who move to Europe and North America. If anything, one would expect a higher propensity to move among Koreans, who have technical skills that would allow them to succeed in Western labor markets. If anything, having property should make one less likely to move: for example, my family left The Philippines, knowing that our family land would be lost to squatters / corrupt officials.
Great look at the data! This is the type of the analysis that is likely to be missed if your expectations for an explanation are entirely driven by the culture war.
Your summary on Korea's economic development is mostly accurate but your comment on Park's assassination being unplanned is incorrect. Park's murderer conspired with the then Chief of Staff of the Army to enact a nationwide martial law. Under a nationwide martial law, the martial law commander is superior to even the president according to Korea's laws. It was customary for the Chief of Staff of the Army to act as martial law commander under martial law, hence the conspiral between the two men. Hours after Park's assassination, a cabinet meeting was held to discuss how to deal with Park's sudden death. At that time, the murderer of Park was not suspected for the crime and he importuned the members of cabinet to enact a nationwide martial law. Unfortunate for him, only a partial martial law was decreed and he was arrested for his suspicious behavior and blood stain on his shirt by the Defense Security Command officers. The Defense Security Command was an intelligence agency made by Park to investigate suspicious activities pertaining to the military, this agency was established mainly to oppose the KCIA which had the risk of providing Park unsound information.
The subject of whether Park's assassination was premediated and whether the intentions of Park's killer were to end tyranny or usurp power is a contentious one, for obvious poltical reasons. The Conservative party panders to old voters who are nostalgic of the vigor and rapid growth wrought by Park's rule, whereas the Liberal(or Leftist) party panders to the generation of student demonstrators who view themselves as the champion of 'Democracy'. Although the point about Park's assassination was not important regarding the main focuses of this substack, I wanted to make a slight correction for the historical inaccuracy. Since my correction might seem to be motivated by poltical biases, I want to make this clear. I think Park is an ambivalent figure who was definitely a brutal autocrat when judged by Western standards(although his brutality pales in comparison to the enormities of autocrats like Polpot, Mao, and Stalin), but who was also the chief architect behind Korea's relative economic success even to this day.
Thanks for posting this deep dive into South Korea. I really enjoyed it. I had no idea about the green onions thing. I taught there from 2009 to 2012. Always felt connected to the place since then. The Park Chung Hee era is fascinating.
The chaebol conglomerates will continue to amass wealth and power. While the population declines in aggregate, each noble family will have 4 to 10 children. The SME worker may choose to birth a child, although the child will not likely lead a prosperous life. This will weigh on the SME worker. Birth a child into a life of problems, or have no child at all? The child, when born, will spend a large percentage of their $73,000 birthright on what is the bare minimum of the current lifestyle.
The United States is not far behind in this race to hell.
The good news is that the above tale is prophesy. And we already have a good understanding of how to make progress towards fixing this problem.
I have read a lot about Korea and its fertility crisis, and I'm always left wondering why, if it is so obviously bad for everyone, no one in Korea seems to be trying to solve the problems of Seoul swallowing up the entire population and education taking over young people's lives. This answers it brilliantly, thanks.
Why hasn't Korea's over educated population created a bunch of start-ups and/or attracted foreign investment to balance out the power of the chebols? Is anti trust laws to break up the chebols a possible solution?
I’ve looked into this a bit. One problem is that a lot of VC funding is actually controlled by the government-owned development bank (40% of funding iirc), and some of the incubators plug directly into the chaebol model. Might write about this.
Malcolm Collins talked about this recently. He was employed in a venture capital firm in Seoul that identified high-potential entrepreneurs who had not attended the top-tier universities in Korea. Untapped potential, right?
The firm received continual harassment from the government, up to and including arrest and detention of its founder and CEO on made-up charges.
It seems in Korea there is an extremely strong culture of "get the credential that proves your superiority" before you are permitted to succeed. And from there the only permissible route to success is through the chaebols or government.
Malcolm said (paraphrasing somewhat) "imagine a firm investing in meth addicts and rapists in the US. The level of disgust that that firm would receive, is not even a tenth of the offence caused to Koreans by what his (the founder's) firm was doing."
That’s wild if true. My first thought in reading the article was to ask why not move out of Seoul, start a small business with the aid of SME subsidies, and have a family with more aid? I know of at least three people who left big corporate jobs and did just that. In Sokcho, Jirisan, and Jejudo. They all ran tourist related businesses. All told me they are much happier. Maybe the cultural derision is strongest in Seoul. Of course one would have to stand up to family expectations. But wouldn’t giving parents a grandchild help?
Does Japan have a similar problem? They also don't have much of a venture capital culture.
Taiwan and ironically China seems to have founder led companies. Taiwan managed to get rule based capitalism. On the other hand China has competitive cronyism.
No idea, sorry. I've never been to any of the countries (except transiting through Singapore) and have not heard anyone talk about these aspects of their cultures.
Loo like the Korean diaspora face much better prospects than Korea itself... Their extreme investment in education there pays much more, because when they are small minority they are enough upper middle class jobs for all of them. I see this phenomenon in my country, in the us, and Ji suspect that the same thing holds true with the Koreans in Kazakhstan.
Looks like the Korean diaspora face much better prospects than Korea itself... Their extreme investment in education there pays much more, because when they are small minority they are enough upper middle class jobs for all of them. I see that in my country, in the us, and i suspect that the same thing happen with the Koreans in Kazakhstan.
We need a response to this from Richard Hanania, whose interesting unified field theory 😜 of East Asian culture in terms of conformism, and being lost when there is no script available to which one can confirm, I read just yesterday. This account, which is richer in historical and economic specifics, sounds as if it must be right regarding some of, much of, or perhaps most of the causality involved. But leaves the low fertility which other East Asian countries share with SK unaddressed. Would their paths to low fertility be very different from the one in SK?
Great post! There must be data on fertility rate between the employees of these chaebols and SMEs. There would of-course be confounding factors like family wealth, residence location. but it shouldn't be insurmountable.
You have to choose career. If you want to survive you have to chose to make a paycheck. Unless you can rely on someone else to take care of you, you absolutely must take care of yourself. The alternative is to starve to death.
Could they consider some incentives for hiring married people and having kids. Just spitballing here, but could the govt require preferential hiring for married people at the large companies? Could they tax companies based upon the number of children that their employees have?
If the large companies are the centers of prestige, then they can tip the culture of elite status toward larger, earlier families.
I do think a preference for hiring married heterosexual couples would increase marriages and I think marriages increase the birthrate. You can risk losing your job if you have a spouse who can carry the financial burden of both of you. It would be highly controversial (in the west). I think it would also disadvantage young men. Increasing your status with employment is one of the ways men attract a mate. Saying "you have to have a mate before you can have a job" might introduce a different suboptimal dynamic.
Fits into the general pattern of the drivers of fertility collapse: secularisation, urbanisation, infant survival, mechanisation, universalism and tolerance for inequality, and credentialism. South Korea certainly maxed out on the credentialism, but it also scores very high on the others.
Fertility collapse is an example of what Iain Banks called "outside context problems", problems that cultures cannot grapple with in the slightest, let alone remedy. It's more than a dilemma or a black swan, it's something that governments are simply not equipped to understand.
Earlier today I scrolled through several hundred of the comments on a youtube video about Korea's fertility problem from a (western) female point of view. The comments were overwhelmingly of a "let it all burn" tenor. "Why create another drone for the patriarchy?", and similar. Après nous, le déluge.
This is a fascinating article and I learned a lot. This is a small Substack now but I hope you keep writing. Any good books or articles you would recommend on Korean development?
Thanks for the support! I intend to keep it up.
I haven't read any books on Korean development specifically, but Joe Studwell's How Asia Works includes a section on South Korea along with the other Asian tiger economies. Part of the book is also about how Southeast Asia bungled development.
These articles are good overviews of the culture and economics of the Park period:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3520100?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40022275?read-now=1&seq=6#page_scan_tab_contents
Just read it, thanks.
Articles like this are why I come to Substack! I spent over an hour reading this and thinking over everything I’ve ever heard, read, or learned about South Korea. All previous narratives I’ve read on the matter of South Korea’s birth rate, economy, and work place culture issues seemed incomplete. This article finally tied it all together for me. Grateful to have come across your Substack today.
Amen. It's nice to have a platform for offbeat, niche content like this. You learn so much more than you would otherwise.
Thanks for sharing! Given that SK has an overqualified workforce relative to the internal opportunities, why don't more foreign companies set up shop (eg do R&D in SK)? And why don't the young people who can't get chaebol jobs just emigrate? Are there a lot of highly-skilled young people who nevertheless have weak English skills? Or are there political or legal obstacles to outsourcing to SK and emigration from SK?
Yes, english skills partially, and money. You must not forget not everyone on the earth is in propertied class able to move whenever they want like westerners do.
But there are plenty of people outside the propertied class (eg from India, Pakistan, and the Middle East) who move to Europe and North America. If anything, one would expect a higher propensity to move among Koreans, who have technical skills that would allow them to succeed in Western labor markets. If anything, having property should make one less likely to move: for example, my family left The Philippines, knowing that our family land would be lost to squatters / corrupt officials.
Great look at the data! This is the type of the analysis that is likely to be missed if your expectations for an explanation are entirely driven by the culture war.
Your summary on Korea's economic development is mostly accurate but your comment on Park's assassination being unplanned is incorrect. Park's murderer conspired with the then Chief of Staff of the Army to enact a nationwide martial law. Under a nationwide martial law, the martial law commander is superior to even the president according to Korea's laws. It was customary for the Chief of Staff of the Army to act as martial law commander under martial law, hence the conspiral between the two men. Hours after Park's assassination, a cabinet meeting was held to discuss how to deal with Park's sudden death. At that time, the murderer of Park was not suspected for the crime and he importuned the members of cabinet to enact a nationwide martial law. Unfortunate for him, only a partial martial law was decreed and he was arrested for his suspicious behavior and blood stain on his shirt by the Defense Security Command officers. The Defense Security Command was an intelligence agency made by Park to investigate suspicious activities pertaining to the military, this agency was established mainly to oppose the KCIA which had the risk of providing Park unsound information.
The subject of whether Park's assassination was premediated and whether the intentions of Park's killer were to end tyranny or usurp power is a contentious one, for obvious poltical reasons. The Conservative party panders to old voters who are nostalgic of the vigor and rapid growth wrought by Park's rule, whereas the Liberal(or Leftist) party panders to the generation of student demonstrators who view themselves as the champion of 'Democracy'. Although the point about Park's assassination was not important regarding the main focuses of this substack, I wanted to make a slight correction for the historical inaccuracy. Since my correction might seem to be motivated by poltical biases, I want to make this clear. I think Park is an ambivalent figure who was definitely a brutal autocrat when judged by Western standards(although his brutality pales in comparison to the enormities of autocrats like Polpot, Mao, and Stalin), but who was also the chief architect behind Korea's relative economic success even to this day.
Thanks for posting this deep dive into South Korea. I really enjoyed it. I had no idea about the green onions thing. I taught there from 2009 to 2012. Always felt connected to the place since then. The Park Chung Hee era is fascinating.
The chaebol conglomerates will continue to amass wealth and power. While the population declines in aggregate, each noble family will have 4 to 10 children. The SME worker may choose to birth a child, although the child will not likely lead a prosperous life. This will weigh on the SME worker. Birth a child into a life of problems, or have no child at all? The child, when born, will spend a large percentage of their $73,000 birthright on what is the bare minimum of the current lifestyle.
The United States is not far behind in this race to hell.
The good news is that the above tale is prophesy. And we already have a good understanding of how to make progress towards fixing this problem.
Great article.
I have read a lot about Korea and its fertility crisis, and I'm always left wondering why, if it is so obviously bad for everyone, no one in Korea seems to be trying to solve the problems of Seoul swallowing up the entire population and education taking over young people's lives. This answers it brilliantly, thanks.
Why hasn't Korea's over educated population created a bunch of start-ups and/or attracted foreign investment to balance out the power of the chebols? Is anti trust laws to break up the chebols a possible solution?
I’ve looked into this a bit. One problem is that a lot of VC funding is actually controlled by the government-owned development bank (40% of funding iirc), and some of the incubators plug directly into the chaebol model. Might write about this.
Does the rest of East Asia have the same problem but at different degrees?
Malcolm Collins talked about this recently. He was employed in a venture capital firm in Seoul that identified high-potential entrepreneurs who had not attended the top-tier universities in Korea. Untapped potential, right?
The firm received continual harassment from the government, up to and including arrest and detention of its founder and CEO on made-up charges.
It seems in Korea there is an extremely strong culture of "get the credential that proves your superiority" before you are permitted to succeed. And from there the only permissible route to success is through the chaebols or government.
Malcolm said (paraphrasing somewhat) "imagine a firm investing in meth addicts and rapists in the US. The level of disgust that that firm would receive, is not even a tenth of the offence caused to Koreans by what his (the founder's) firm was doing."
That’s wild if true. My first thought in reading the article was to ask why not move out of Seoul, start a small business with the aid of SME subsidies, and have a family with more aid? I know of at least three people who left big corporate jobs and did just that. In Sokcho, Jirisan, and Jejudo. They all ran tourist related businesses. All told me they are much happier. Maybe the cultural derision is strongest in Seoul. Of course one would have to stand up to family expectations. But wouldn’t giving parents a grandchild help?
The fact that they know and talk to a Westerner makes them atypical for Koreans, though. And clearly they are not members of the "establishment".
Does Japan have a similar problem? They also don't have much of a venture capital culture.
Taiwan and ironically China seems to have founder led companies. Taiwan managed to get rule based capitalism. On the other hand China has competitive cronyism.
How does Singapore stack up?
No idea, sorry. I've never been to any of the countries (except transiting through Singapore) and have not heard anyone talk about these aspects of their cultures.
Yeah. Korea just sounds like a industrialised society with feudal characteristics.
Loo like the Korean diaspora face much better prospects than Korea itself... Their extreme investment in education there pays much more, because when they are small minority they are enough upper middle class jobs for all of them. I see this phenomenon in my country, in the us, and Ji suspect that the same thing holds true with the Koreans in Kazakhstan.
Looks like the Korean diaspora face much better prospects than Korea itself... Their extreme investment in education there pays much more, because when they are small minority they are enough upper middle class jobs for all of them. I see that in my country, in the us, and i suspect that the same thing happen with the Koreans in Kazakhstan.
We need a response to this from Richard Hanania, whose interesting unified field theory 😜 of East Asian culture in terms of conformism, and being lost when there is no script available to which one can confirm, I read just yesterday. This account, which is richer in historical and economic specifics, sounds as if it must be right regarding some of, much of, or perhaps most of the causality involved. But leaves the low fertility which other East Asian countries share with SK unaddressed. Would their paths to low fertility be very different from the one in SK?
Do women working for large MNCs actually have higher fertility rates?
Great post! There must be data on fertility rate between the employees of these chaebols and SMEs. There would of-course be confounding factors like family wealth, residence location. but it shouldn't be insurmountable.
You have to choose career. If you want to survive you have to chose to make a paycheck. Unless you can rely on someone else to take care of you, you absolutely must take care of yourself. The alternative is to starve to death.
Could they consider some incentives for hiring married people and having kids. Just spitballing here, but could the govt require preferential hiring for married people at the large companies? Could they tax companies based upon the number of children that their employees have?
If the large companies are the centers of prestige, then they can tip the culture of elite status toward larger, earlier families.
I do think a preference for hiring married heterosexual couples would increase marriages and I think marriages increase the birthrate. You can risk losing your job if you have a spouse who can carry the financial burden of both of you. It would be highly controversial (in the west). I think it would also disadvantage young men. Increasing your status with employment is one of the ways men attract a mate. Saying "you have to have a mate before you can have a job" might introduce a different suboptimal dynamic.
Yes, it is definitely uncertain how it would play out…
Fits into the general pattern of the drivers of fertility collapse: secularisation, urbanisation, infant survival, mechanisation, universalism and tolerance for inequality, and credentialism. South Korea certainly maxed out on the credentialism, but it also scores very high on the others.
Fertility collapse is an example of what Iain Banks called "outside context problems", problems that cultures cannot grapple with in the slightest, let alone remedy. It's more than a dilemma or a black swan, it's something that governments are simply not equipped to understand.
Earlier today I scrolled through several hundred of the comments on a youtube video about Korea's fertility problem from a (western) female point of view. The comments were overwhelmingly of a "let it all burn" tenor. "Why create another drone for the patriarchy?", and similar. Après nous, le déluge.