I think people should be allowed to comment on other countries as they please. I’m from the US and enjoy reading what people have to say about it even if I disagree. External observers see things that we don’t always notice.
Of course you’re free to just ignore it if you don’t think I’m qualified to opine.
BTW my gf is Jewish, so not quite central casting.
While the benefits of low-wage working immigrants for the economy as a whole are basically indisputable, the idea that wage competition benefits the specific class where competition exists, is not. Even the CATO study everyone loves to trot out concedes that mass immigration did not have clear benefits for low-wage born Americans, and if anything probably suppresses their wages a bit.
America is itself a weird example since there are a thousand things (geography/density/corporate competition/etc) that differ from South Korea. However, I've lived in upper-middle striver neighborhoods basically my entire life, diverse with a strong Asian bias, a fair number of Hispanics, and a few Black children of NBA/NFL/etc athletes. The exposure of those Japanese, Korean, and Chinese American children to non-East Asian Americas has done nothing to encourage their distribution into lower-status work, as all studies of their median incomes within America indicate. In non-striver American neighborhoods, segregation of demographics is even more apparent, without any central authority telling them to do so; Blacks, Hispanics, Whites have sharp ethnic lines drawn in just about any large urban area in the country.
On a national level, Singapore would seemingly be a fairer comparison as a much smaller and city-dense Asian country; extremely diverse and stratified with ethnic Chinese and Anglo Singaporeans on top, and poorer Malays doing menial labor. Those same Malays are also majority Muslim, which is in and of itself a massive advantage in terms of reducing suicide. South Korea could import people from cultures which do not prioritize their extreme study ethic, and accordingly bring down averages of suicide, wages not commensurate with over-qualified degrees, etc for the *national average*, but I don't see any evidence that such values would be transmitted from the lower classes to the higher classes in the aggregate.
This is fair but I think it might be a question of how many generations. In Canada and the US, Japanese-Americans seem to have culturally converged closer to generic non-Asian Americans in having a wider array of preferred paths, which could maybe point not so much a quantitative lessening of the status drive but a qualitative broadening.
I think geographic diversity can provide a pressure valve. China has many regional centres of power, Beijing, Dong Bei, Shanghai, Shenzhen/HK, Sichuan, etc. Similarly, like you said, America has many different regions of power: DC, NYC, Chicago, SF, Miami, Texas, etc. South Korea is not very big, but they should at least move the govt out of Seoul and to another city, to at least create another alternative to Seoul.
There are too many underemployed people in SK. They’re highly educated but can’t afford a good life. I think an easy way to address this is to move the population into higher paying jobs, advanced manufacturing and skilled service jobs. I think the best system is Singapore. There’s a vast underclass in construction and as maids/nannies and other low paid jobs, but there is almost no path to citizenship. It’s cruel, but it’s still a win-win for both sides.
Finally, there has to be a focus on entrepreneurship and trust-busting of the Chaebols, which will reduce the pressure valve of having to go to university. The Chaebol’s can still be allowed to be highly profitable so they can continue to invest in R&D and become international champions, but many of their non-core functions should be sold off and handled by small and medium businesses, which would create way more jobs for the middle class.
So you're a white American male english teacher. And you have a Korean girlfriend no doubt. And you're writing a article on how South Korea to have more immigrants? You people are really shameless you know that? Just zero self-awareness. Its bad enough people like you steal english teaching jobs from more qualified people from the Korean diaspora you want to lecture to Koreans on how they should run their country. You are literally out of central casting. Like a stereotype come to life.
This may be a nitpick, but while I understand Evanston, IL is the home of Northwestern University, Evanston is probably not the example I would have chosen if you were going for extreme differences in Chicagoland. Evanston Township High School has 35% of its students "eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, live in substitute care, or whose families receive public aid" while the neighboring New Trier Township High School District has just 4% or the further from The Loop, Lake Forest at 5%.
Great essay. I'd love to see Korea just have more immigration in general. Socially, I get the impression that Korea is still relatively xenophobic, but more accepting of Americans and Western Europeans above all other "cultures". And Korea's narrow high-status obsession will make it challenging for low-skilled non-white immigrants. My pseudo-utilitarian libertarian position would be to dramatically increase immigration for US and EU passport holders first with favorable regulatory policies (housing and capital investments) to reside OUTSIDE Seoul and slowly ramp-up immigration from other neighboring countries.
I could also imagine that if Korea moved the federal offices South, that would naturally diffuse the cultural strength of Seoul as well. It also would seem to be a no-brainer for national security reasons.
Wouldn't this lead to racial ghettos where the low income, low status immigrants fester and breed resentment? Do you see a permanent underclass based on race? It might work for a while but they would end up following the the West down the path of DIEicide.
1. "permanent" starts to look too much like Sparta with its Helots. there should some degree of mobility, just like in the US, but in broad strokes you want people don't think going to Seoul National University is life or death. you could actually have people who are smart enough to attend university, but generally disinterested and content with "non-prestigious" work. the us decided in the past decades that anyone with above average intelligence needs to go to college, which was a big mistake. south korea is in a worse position given its Confucian obsession with education.
a language and cultural barrier helps quell resentment. think about hispanic immigrants in the us whose social circle is largely people back home. by the standards of a prep school kid in dc, they're doing poorly by being janitors and landscapers, but by the standards the other hispanic people they actually communicate with, they're living very well. (people also forget how lucrative blue collar businesses can be for owners--Harvard Business School grads are trying to buy out landscape businesses these day.) i don't see lots of resentment from hispanics in the us about working blue collar jobs.
2. the us already has lots of working class neighborhoods that are not slums. YMMV, but i would trust South Korea more than Europe to exercise enough discretion and oversight to avoid having no-go zones. there's less individualism more generally, so if people start throwing their trash in the street, it won't go over well.
I’d argue that “the US decided in the past decades that everyone with average intelligence needs to go to college” - and that was at least as big a mistake as “everyone with above average intelligence needs to go to college.” The first-order reason this was a silly mistake is pretty obvious, pop(G= 100 +/-10) >> pop(G= 120+). And that lines up exactly with your argument about everybody being in a scrum for the same very few positions of status.
There’s also of course, the individual effects of needlessly inflating a bubble of expectations in the mind of hundreds of millions of Americans, that misdirected and continues to misdirect a whole lot of people away from solidly paying working like skilled trades. Ie the Mike Rowe argument.
I’m not sure that the presence of a relatively large number of low skilled foreigners will have the effect that you anticipate.
I’ve been living in Taiwan during a period when quotas for Southeast Asians has opened up a fair amount. There are about 0.7M “ overseas foreign workers” here now, along with another 0.xM overstayers. Contrast with ~15k Americans residing here. There is precisely zero path to citizenship, university admittance, or even schooling for kids of Filipinas, Indonesians, Malaysians, etc. I found this to be frustratingly awful for the helper that my family recruited, employed and lived with for 12 years, with her young son stuck living away from her, with zero option for him to join her in Taiwan and go to a local school.
It is true that there were very few Taiwanese folks who were willing to be helpers (esp for laowei like us), and that percentage has probably dropped by a factor of three since then. And the wonderful woman who lived with us, said that she made about 4X the income from us that she could’ve made saying in the Philippines. The flipside, however, is that almost all of the Filipinas she knows, and that we know with other families are basically stuck living in 2.5m x 1.5m closets working 360-ish hours per month. I don’t think that her economic presence in Taipei created anything close to a total of ~1 FTE worth of jobs for Taiwanese people....maybe 0.1 FTE or less, and not directly.
yes, i would emphasize that the tides are turning a little bit in the US.. you're starting to see MBAs from Harvard and Stanford try to buyout small HVAC/landscaping businesses. the economics of running your own small business can be very favorable, especially with generous debt financing from SBA loans. more risk but also in fact much more upside than working at a consulting or finance firm. this is not to mention that being your own boss generally beats being the grunt in the office until 2 am every night.
major downside to these paths is that no one will be impressed by you on linkedin.. you also need to know how to communicate with regular people.
I think people should be allowed to comment on other countries as they please. I’m from the US and enjoy reading what people have to say about it even if I disagree. External observers see things that we don’t always notice.
Of course you’re free to just ignore it if you don’t think I’m qualified to opine.
BTW my gf is Jewish, so not quite central casting.
While the benefits of low-wage working immigrants for the economy as a whole are basically indisputable, the idea that wage competition benefits the specific class where competition exists, is not. Even the CATO study everyone loves to trot out concedes that mass immigration did not have clear benefits for low-wage born Americans, and if anything probably suppresses their wages a bit.
America is itself a weird example since there are a thousand things (geography/density/corporate competition/etc) that differ from South Korea. However, I've lived in upper-middle striver neighborhoods basically my entire life, diverse with a strong Asian bias, a fair number of Hispanics, and a few Black children of NBA/NFL/etc athletes. The exposure of those Japanese, Korean, and Chinese American children to non-East Asian Americas has done nothing to encourage their distribution into lower-status work, as all studies of their median incomes within America indicate. In non-striver American neighborhoods, segregation of demographics is even more apparent, without any central authority telling them to do so; Blacks, Hispanics, Whites have sharp ethnic lines drawn in just about any large urban area in the country.
On a national level, Singapore would seemingly be a fairer comparison as a much smaller and city-dense Asian country; extremely diverse and stratified with ethnic Chinese and Anglo Singaporeans on top, and poorer Malays doing menial labor. Those same Malays are also majority Muslim, which is in and of itself a massive advantage in terms of reducing suicide. South Korea could import people from cultures which do not prioritize their extreme study ethic, and accordingly bring down averages of suicide, wages not commensurate with over-qualified degrees, etc for the *national average*, but I don't see any evidence that such values would be transmitted from the lower classes to the higher classes in the aggregate.
This is fair but I think it might be a question of how many generations. In Canada and the US, Japanese-Americans seem to have culturally converged closer to generic non-Asian Americans in having a wider array of preferred paths, which could maybe point not so much a quantitative lessening of the status drive but a qualitative broadening.
I came across your substack through Hanania. I think you’re absolutely right about the excessive status competition. I came to the same conclusion as well: https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/why-asians-dont-breed?utm_source=direct&r=1ui6i&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=57819151
I think geographic diversity can provide a pressure valve. China has many regional centres of power, Beijing, Dong Bei, Shanghai, Shenzhen/HK, Sichuan, etc. Similarly, like you said, America has many different regions of power: DC, NYC, Chicago, SF, Miami, Texas, etc. South Korea is not very big, but they should at least move the govt out of Seoul and to another city, to at least create another alternative to Seoul.
There are too many underemployed people in SK. They’re highly educated but can’t afford a good life. I think an easy way to address this is to move the population into higher paying jobs, advanced manufacturing and skilled service jobs. I think the best system is Singapore. There’s a vast underclass in construction and as maids/nannies and other low paid jobs, but there is almost no path to citizenship. It’s cruel, but it’s still a win-win for both sides.
Finally, there has to be a focus on entrepreneurship and trust-busting of the Chaebols, which will reduce the pressure valve of having to go to university. The Chaebol’s can still be allowed to be highly profitable so they can continue to invest in R&D and become international champions, but many of their non-core functions should be sold off and handled by small and medium businesses, which would create way more jobs for the middle class.
So you're a white American male english teacher. And you have a Korean girlfriend no doubt. And you're writing a article on how South Korea to have more immigrants? You people are really shameless you know that? Just zero self-awareness. Its bad enough people like you steal english teaching jobs from more qualified people from the Korean diaspora you want to lecture to Koreans on how they should run their country. You are literally out of central casting. Like a stereotype come to life.
This may be a nitpick, but while I understand Evanston, IL is the home of Northwestern University, Evanston is probably not the example I would have chosen if you were going for extreme differences in Chicagoland. Evanston Township High School has 35% of its students "eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, live in substitute care, or whose families receive public aid" while the neighboring New Trier Township High School District has just 4% or the further from The Loop, Lake Forest at 5%.
https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/School.aspx?source=studentcharacteristics&source2=lowincome&Schoolid=050162020170001
https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=studentcharacteristics&Districtid=05016203017
https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/District.aspx?source=studentcharacteristics&source2=lowincome&Districtid=34049115016
Great essay. I'd love to see Korea just have more immigration in general. Socially, I get the impression that Korea is still relatively xenophobic, but more accepting of Americans and Western Europeans above all other "cultures". And Korea's narrow high-status obsession will make it challenging for low-skilled non-white immigrants. My pseudo-utilitarian libertarian position would be to dramatically increase immigration for US and EU passport holders first with favorable regulatory policies (housing and capital investments) to reside OUTSIDE Seoul and slowly ramp-up immigration from other neighboring countries.
I could also imagine that if Korea moved the federal offices South, that would naturally diffuse the cultural strength of Seoul as well. It also would seem to be a no-brainer for national security reasons.
Wouldn't this lead to racial ghettos where the low income, low status immigrants fester and breed resentment? Do you see a permanent underclass based on race? It might work for a while but they would end up following the the West down the path of DIEicide.
1. "permanent" starts to look too much like Sparta with its Helots. there should some degree of mobility, just like in the US, but in broad strokes you want people don't think going to Seoul National University is life or death. you could actually have people who are smart enough to attend university, but generally disinterested and content with "non-prestigious" work. the us decided in the past decades that anyone with above average intelligence needs to go to college, which was a big mistake. south korea is in a worse position given its Confucian obsession with education.
a language and cultural barrier helps quell resentment. think about hispanic immigrants in the us whose social circle is largely people back home. by the standards of a prep school kid in dc, they're doing poorly by being janitors and landscapers, but by the standards the other hispanic people they actually communicate with, they're living very well. (people also forget how lucrative blue collar businesses can be for owners--Harvard Business School grads are trying to buy out landscape businesses these day.) i don't see lots of resentment from hispanics in the us about working blue collar jobs.
2. the us already has lots of working class neighborhoods that are not slums. YMMV, but i would trust South Korea more than Europe to exercise enough discretion and oversight to avoid having no-go zones. there's less individualism more generally, so if people start throwing their trash in the street, it won't go over well.
I’d argue that “the US decided in the past decades that everyone with average intelligence needs to go to college” - and that was at least as big a mistake as “everyone with above average intelligence needs to go to college.” The first-order reason this was a silly mistake is pretty obvious, pop(G= 100 +/-10) >> pop(G= 120+). And that lines up exactly with your argument about everybody being in a scrum for the same very few positions of status.
There’s also of course, the individual effects of needlessly inflating a bubble of expectations in the mind of hundreds of millions of Americans, that misdirected and continues to misdirect a whole lot of people away from solidly paying working like skilled trades. Ie the Mike Rowe argument.
I’m not sure that the presence of a relatively large number of low skilled foreigners will have the effect that you anticipate.
I’ve been living in Taiwan during a period when quotas for Southeast Asians has opened up a fair amount. There are about 0.7M “ overseas foreign workers” here now, along with another 0.xM overstayers. Contrast with ~15k Americans residing here. There is precisely zero path to citizenship, university admittance, or even schooling for kids of Filipinas, Indonesians, Malaysians, etc. I found this to be frustratingly awful for the helper that my family recruited, employed and lived with for 12 years, with her young son stuck living away from her, with zero option for him to join her in Taiwan and go to a local school.
It is true that there were very few Taiwanese folks who were willing to be helpers (esp for laowei like us), and that percentage has probably dropped by a factor of three since then. And the wonderful woman who lived with us, said that she made about 4X the income from us that she could’ve made saying in the Philippines. The flipside, however, is that almost all of the Filipinas she knows, and that we know with other families are basically stuck living in 2.5m x 1.5m closets working 360-ish hours per month. I don’t think that her economic presence in Taipei created anything close to a total of ~1 FTE worth of jobs for Taiwanese people....maybe 0.1 FTE or less, and not directly.
yes, i would emphasize that the tides are turning a little bit in the US.. you're starting to see MBAs from Harvard and Stanford try to buyout small HVAC/landscaping businesses. the economics of running your own small business can be very favorable, especially with generous debt financing from SBA loans. more risk but also in fact much more upside than working at a consulting or finance firm. this is not to mention that being your own boss generally beats being the grunt in the office until 2 am every night.
major downside to these paths is that no one will be impressed by you on linkedin.. you also need to know how to communicate with regular people.
> their suicide rate here is less than half than in South Korea, and their fertility rate is higher as well
You just posted the same suicide link twice rather than having any link about fertility.
Good catch, just updated.