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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27568 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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So a bit of a time ago there was a discussion here about the gender war, demographic implosion and political male-female divide in South Korea. @rokmonster stated that "Seoul is the only city worth living in [there]" as self-evident fact, apparently.

As someone who knows little about Korea, I find this puzzling. Aren't there other large cities there? I'm sure there are. Are they really that bad? And if yes, what is "that"?

Seoul and its surrounding regions contain half the population of Korea despite being 12% of the country, the income and prospects are much higher in Seoul. Seoul itself has around 10 million people, so about 20% of the country's total population.

South Korea does have other big cities, if you sort by size you have Busan, Incheon, and Daegu with over 2 million people each, and 6 more with over 1 million people. (Incheon is right next to Seoul and is considered part of the greater Seoul area).

But all the biggest companies are headquartered in Seoul, and I'm pretty sure most if not all the major entertainment and culture also come from Seoul. If you're a young person and you probably want to move to Seoul over any other city. In a culture where status is an extremely important component of one's identity, of course, most people would want to be in Seoul. The companies being in Seoul is a significant factor too, Korea has these things called chaebols which are big family-owned conglomerates (e.g. Samsung, LG, Hyundai) that basically run all the major companies and business and politics in the country. If you get hired into these companies you are considered successful, if you can't then you're a loser. If you want to work in these companies, go to Seoul.

There is an interesting fact and reality to consider for South Korea, which is its antagonistic neighbor to the North. Seoul is basically right next to North Korea, so in the unlikely event there is a war occurs again South Korea would be extremely vulnerable to an attack. There is an incentive to try to diversify economic, political, and cultural activity across multiple areas. South Korea actually did try to plan and began the development of a new capital city, Sejong in 2007, although it has not actually become the new capital city of South Korea. It's also located in the center of the country and outside the range of artillery strikes from North Korea. Part of the desired goal was to divest people away from Seoul into Sejong. But rather than pulling population from Seoul as desired, Sejong seems to have just pulled growth in population from its surrounding areas, and both cities saw growth in their population since 2007.

Sejong

Christ, what a bleak pic on Wikipedia. A six lane arterial, two parking lots, and the world's saddest park. I can understand why existing cities become ugly. Why do people do this when designing new cities?

Sejong

Despite the aesthetic shortcomings, it has the highest TFR of any of the 17 South Korean cities and provinces, .97. In 2021 an article lauding the cities then same relative fertility rank was written, with one possible explantion childcare leave given to high level state bureaucrats who work in the city.

It depends on what you want out of life, really.

I lived in Iksan, Jeollabuk-do for a while, and played on an amateur soccer team. The other players were all middle-aged guys who worked in various trades or for small manufacturing companies.

They seemed happy with their lives. Iksan has plenty of places to like... have a grillout and drink soju, or whatever you want to do. It's not a high-status place, and I'm sure strivers would find it miserable. But the world is not made up entirely of strivers. Some people just want to raise their kids, and play soccer with the boys on the weekend. I guess the user you mentioned would not be satisfied with that life.

I also spent time in other large cities there: Daejeon, Jeonju, Busan, Incheon and some others. But not enough to grasp the differences. They were all, you know... large. If you need to be surrounded by a million people, those are places you can do that.

But the world is not made up entirely of strivers. Some people just want to raise their kids, and play soccer with the boys on the weekend.

So what do strivers do on the weekends?

This is Korea, so the answer is probably "work overtime".

I think they all move out of Iksan as soon as they can, and never return. As for what they get up to in Seoul, I can only imagine.

Train for an ironman, work on side projects, play golf with executives.

I really liked Busan the two times I visited- nicer climate than Seoul, although in summer it becomes overrun with a spring break type atmosphere. Beaches, near to more historic/rural parts of the country as well. The night life felt more relaxed and the food was more varied. In terms of opportunities, its the centre of the main industrial zone (with Ulsan/Daegu). It's also a bit different politically. For the number 2 city to be 3m/7.5m metro in a country of 50m sounds pretty large to me!

I can't speak for Korea, but one-major-city countries are pretty common. England is famously lopsided: London is 7/8x the size of the next largest city, and contains almost all of the seriously high-paying jobs. With a few principled holdouts, if someone lives in a city that isn't London it's usually because they can't afford it there.

Singapore is basically a city state. I'm sure there are others.

The term you are looking for is 'Primate City'. My running theory is in addition to obvious geographic and economic factors, the sharpness of this phenomenon is proxied by how status-conscious a place is..

You know the whole "make it big in the city" schtik.

I do sometimes get the impression London is full of monkeys...

Thanks, I didn't know that term.

the sharpness of this phenomenon is proxied by how status-conscious a place is

I think you're probably right. Bit of a feedback loop, too: the more absolute the hierarchy, the more people care about their place on it.

This feels though similar to Americans do not travel to other countries but everyone in Europe does therefore everyone in America are uneducated proles.

The one big city countries all seem to be NOT continent size countries. All of Europe seems to have outsized capital countries, but the countries are probably more comparable to regions of the U.S.

The only of the big Euro countries that might be less capital dominant is maybe Italy? Rome is still dominant for tourists because of history but Milan is only half the size and perhaps more economically important and Naples list a higher population.

Italy and Germany contain multiple roughly equivalent population centers due to their relatively late unification, with each of those cities once having been the capital of an independent nation. This is also true of Spain, which has Barcelona to counterbalance Madrid.

I wonder how much of the relative smallness of Berlin is due to late German unification, and hoe much is due to being damaged in WW2, followed by being split in two during the cold war and dragged down by being located in communist East Germany.

It does seem that “when unification happened” is the key predictor for biggest city versus rest for most of Europe. Or maybe it’s just random geographic factors. China of course has mostly been unified forever (and I believe more ethnically pure than any European country) but has multiple equivalent cities. Mexico and America settled around same time but Mexico City seems dominant while America is spread out (and there are geographical factors for Mexico of course).

I get the impression it's something else. When I lived in London, one thing I especially noticed was that many of the parks are arguably more beautiful than any german cities' I've been to, and if you look up the financing of restorations or new developments, it's not strictly London-specific, it's often from diverse sources. Same goes for the London museums in particular. Meanwhile, cheap neighbourhoods are worse dumps than anything I've ever seen in Germany. Trash in the streets, barbed wire everywhere, junkies, the housing quality would literally be illegal. Small towns are the same or worse; When I visited Hastings as a teen it looked pretty dead, lots of obvious junkies as well, and the english teachers who lived there also complained constantly about how awful Hastings has become (as a teen I didn't mind it much, actually found it fascinating). Other small towns I've visited as an adult also just look terrible, except for a minority of historically relevant cities such as Oxbridge, that often are disproportionally rich. I can't help get away with the impression that the UK is actively pooling its money extremely non-equitably into very few places (which is funny, given that the UK elite likes to talk about equity much more than the german elite does).

On the other hand in (western) Germany, it's not rare that I drive through a rural area and just stumble into a really nice, well maintained playground, or a park, or a nice-looking town centre. I only know the funding for my tiny home town, ~5k people, but I don't think it's unusual: large parts are actually from greater german/european sources, the town itself couldn't afford it. On the other hand, even the nicest centres of large cities don't really compare to central London. Eastern Germany is a different beast though, the countryside looks as awful as UKs, and the youth is fleeing in droves. On both sides, small cities often offer the best of both worlds and are correspondingly popular; Large enough to support most kinds of jobs, hobbies and locations, small enough to be somewhat affordable , with accessible nature & farms, and it still profits from certain funding sources explicitly targeted away from the large cities. I don't see something similar to UK/London happening any time soon.

Maybe it's just a feedback loop; once a critical mass of power is concentrated into a center it feeds itself until nothing else is left, the social equivalent of a black hole. In the past, countries didn't really care or even actively worked toward centralisation, so early unification countries are especially liable. Modern countries seem to care though, so late unification countries can stave it off successfully much more easily.

Germany has multiple major cities and holland seems to have at least two.

Germany is the obvious counter-example.

This feels though similar to Americans do not travel to other countries but everyone in Europe does therefore everyone in America are uneducated proles.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I follow.

All of Europe seems to have outsized capital countries, but the countries are probably more comparable to regions of the U.S.

Bear in mind the language problem. In America, everyone speaks the same language everywhere (more or less). In Europe, lots of people speak English but realistically only about 10% have more than a few phrases they remember from school, so moving is hard. In Asia there's basically no overlap at all.

Russia is continent-sized and very Moscow-concentrated.

How distant a runner-up is St. Petersburg?

Moscow’s metro area is about 13 million. Saint Petersburg’s metro area is around half that, about 6 million. Then there are about 14 other cities with a population of a million or more. Then about 20 cities with half a million or more. Then about 130 cities with a hundred thousand people or more. The population gets thinner the further East you go. Only about 8 million people live in the eastern geographic third of the country.

That's Moscow proper alone. The whole metro area is probably closer to 20 million or more.

Britain is really lopsided in that London might as well be a different country economically speaking, with vastly higher wages, economic opportunity and so on, but by any reasonable definition London is only 3-4x larger than Manchester. It's just a boundaries definition, a bit like when Paris gets reported as having a population of 3m. Greater Manchester is ~3m people and Greater London is 9-12m depending on the source. There's a case to be made that the Liverpool-Manchester urban region is a Ruhr equivalent conurbation, with bad transport holding back the economic integration.

I take your point. I was going by https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/cities/united-kingdom which records London as 7.5m and Manchester as 400k but I accept that different boundaries can produce very different numbers.

That said, I was trying to get across that the UK isn't like, say, Germany, where AFAIK you can choose from a number of roughly equivalent top-tier cities depending on personal preference. You either make it to London and reap the rewards (and all the crap that goes with them) or you don't. And it's been that way since at least the reign of Elizabeth I. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_England_by_historical_population is the best I can do, I am assuming the link between population and prosperity).

Absolutely, the main point does stand. I'm unfamiliar with the French case, but London's role as a central capital of a single polity probably contributes to this phenomenon. London's been an immigrant city (internal migrants) for 600 years, the closest thing to "standard" English is based on the London prestige dialect, which itself was just a variety of that spoken in the East Midlands- the population churn was constant. Prior to 1750 there was basically London, a few market towns, the other national capitals (Dublin really) and that was it for cities. Places like Rome, Milan, Naples, Munich, Cologne etc. were all independent city states, or capitals of smaller polities which later unified, which must have encouraged the decentralised growth.

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