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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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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.