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Not compared to Singapore, Britain, or Germany. My thought about Korea (and Japan, which has a somewhat similar system) is it just isn't dynamic enough to accept more people at higher levels. If Samsung/LG/Daewoo/Hyundai can only use N such people each year, persons N+1 on through infinity are going to be sweeping floors.
It just doesn’t track with lower inequality levels compared to most Western countries in Korea and Japan though. There isn’t a tiny elite who pass the meritocracy test and go to elite colleges who are making tons of money while everyone else is poor (like in India with the IIT system), that’s not the distribution in these places.
No, South Korea has a tiny elite which makes lots of money (without passing any test), then a small group which passes the meritocracy test to make upper-ish middle-class income. Inequality levels are lower than the US because there are fewer and poorer rich, not a larger middle class. A Tesla software engineer in the US is proportionally poorer than Elon Musk than a Samsung software engineer in S. Korea is than Lee Jae-yong, but the Tesla software engineer is far better off.
There are no percentiles here so I feel like this is a hard thing to challenge. My point is that there are plenty of people in the 40-80th percentile in South Korea who make enough money to live a comfortable-enough first-world lifestyle that is materially not significantly less comfortable than the middle class in peer nations. It’s not some Slumdog Millionaire thing where you get once chance or you live a life of miserable, grinding poverty digging ditches.
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Uh, isn’t South Korea at basically-western-European levels of prosperity? Like there’s no reason life can’t be perfectly decent for people who aren’t 90th percentile.
They have the same GDP per capita as Spain, or 66% of the UK.
In PPP terms they're about equal to the UK though, so I guess it depends on what you think about nominal GDP Vs PPP, as well as maybe GDP per capita per hours worked.
So they’re about at the EU average, which means that barring extreme inequality they’re probably a pretty nice place for the average person to live. They don’t have to have the rat race.
If we only look at PPP terms, yes. Its unclear to me how much their much higher working hours actully contributes to GDP, but still, becoming Spain wouldn't be the end of the world if it meant not working yourself to death and not having a tfr of 0.55.
I'm also wondering how accurate the PPP numbers really are, given that things like the big Mac index puts them about on par of Sweden. Surely McDonald's couldn't survive if they were twice as expensive as everything else. Also, they are a small country and will inevitably have to import quite a bit of things.
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