I ran across an interesting little factoid in Korea Times about a seemingly unrelated matter “When asked whether it is better to live in equality though being a little worse off, 43.7 percent [of students] said yes while 34 percent said no.” Food for thought for anybody thinking an FTA is a simple as explaining the benefits to the Korean populace.
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8 Comments
I think that says more about naiveity on economic matters than personal conviction. Wait, that’s sort of what the article says….
Guys, this is what’s got them all excited:
“When asked to choose between economic growth and environmental protection, more students chose environmental protection.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d say the textbooks are doing something right.
Since 70.2% of some type of housewife prefer to pay 6 times more for beef they have a more charitable definition of “being a little worse off”.
I wonder how the kiddies would answer this question: Do you prefer Korea’s economic growth of 8% and Japan’s 10% to Japan’s economic growth of 2% and Korea’s 4%?
Of course, it does bear remembering that these are students, and presumably, most of them, in voting for economic equality at the cost of societal prosperity, are actually thinking that they’d be getting the better end of the deal. After all, students have little to no money other than what they get from their parents and their (crappy) minimum-wage jobs - economic equality would for most of them mean massive pay hikes.
Looks like they are creating good little socialists here. Victory to the teachers’ union.
I think there is survey of Harvard MBA students made a while ago where the mba students said they would rather make a $50,000 salary, while their peers make 25,000 than they would want to make a 100,000, while their peers make 100,000 (or was it 200,000, I forget).
The kids opinions will change when they get a few years older. Wanting to be better than your neighbor is a large part of any society.
BTW, my comment also refers to other anti-market opinions in the article.
Well… I guess this is one of the big reasons why ROK is still a developing country. Farmers have successively played the chauvinism issue so that Han-oo has some sort of magical medicinal property, rice is better than wheat, Korean bean is better than etc etc. But it’s not just farmers.
Being a good uncle, I bought a Nintendo DS lite and shipped it to my little nephew in Korea. Being a civic but naive person, I listed on Fedex what I was shipping and how much it cost. Needless to say, once it got into Korea, Korean government decided to make this into a beaureucratic nightmare. My gift became an “import” item and had to sit through a pile of paper work and they put a nice fat tax on top of it. It would have been substantially cheaper just to buy the thing online. (In retrospect, I probably could have put in weapons grade uranium and just marked it as “$20 box of chocolates” and it would have gone through with less hassle)
This sort of retardation definitely reduces quality of life.
The biggest loser is South Korean consumers, but the ones who make money always make them feel good by waving flags. What can you do when stupidity is fashionable? I don’t know how many times i heard people say, “this is a dirty american trick to jam carcinogenic preservative filled american beef down our throats.” If American beef industry people were really smart, they would launch a marketing campaign in Korea siting how rice consumption makes people short and have poor eyesight, and how beef makes people tall and strong. Korean people are willing to pay hundres on placebos, so doing this is probably a smarter way to play the game. The obvious connection should be Americans are tall because of American beef. Simple trade wars does the opposite. Hanchongryun kids just assume that something nefarious is at work when the trade US trade representatives demand fair treatment. And when the US trade representatvies give up and just go home without FTA, then the Hanchongryun kids thinks they “beat the Man.”