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And most students studying like industrially farmed animals to get into one of these 12 firms.

I wonder if this isn't the chaebols' real secret sauce: everybody wants to work for the mega-corps, even as they hate them. Samsung gets the best students simply because it's Samsung. Parents will rail against the chaebols with their fists in the air and in the next breath insist that their children do everything to secure positions at them.

> I was born in a hospital run by Hyundai with equipments manufactured by Hyundai. The apartment block was built by Hyundai. Every morning, a bustling crowd of dads get into a Hyundai car, driving on roads paved by Hyundai, spend the next 14+ hours in Hyundai offices, factories, shipyards. If you were not of conscription age you were attending a school built by Hyundai reading a textbook funded by Hyundai justifying the sacrifice of millions of Korean labourers, now cast aside and shunned into a life of poverty. If you were due for military service the next 2+ years would be spent working in Hyundai built facilities and Hyundai Rotem (also built the Canada Line Skytrain in Vancouver) manufactured tanks. When you are finished you would return to your post-secondary studies sponsored by Hyundai with campus built by Hyundai subsidiaries. We called it, Republic of Hyundai, 7th largest city in South Korea. If you lived in Seoul, it was Samsung Empire.

Reminds me the book Jennifer Government [1] by Max Barry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

I am sympathetic to your point - and would be inclined to agree.

BUT - Of course you know Korea was decimated during a war, and it was pretty messy before. From 1950-2000 it makes sense that 'responsible leaders' were orchestrating the nations rise from the rubble.

Clearly - that model is not sustainable, but it's maybe a better solution than 'hyper fragmented society' after something so decimating wherein institutions, governance, sense of identity, schools etc. are all missing.

A 'somewhat authoritarian but nevertheless benevolent' society made up of responsible managers, and 'reasonably loyal workers who have the spirit to believe in what they are doing' ... is probably a good way to build a civilization, instantly, out of nothing.

I guess the challenge would be reform: how to get these neo-feudal entities to loosen their grip and allow for more liberalism once the roots have been well planted.

Given the high profile nature of this case, maybe that is happening on some level.

I'd suggest there's probably some deep cultural factors as well, though I wouldn't suggest to know enough to go there.

If you wrote a blog article about it, I'd be the first to read it :)

> When your business makes up over a quarter of South Korea's GDP

The definition of too big to fail.

That didn't help Daewoo. They were the second largest corporation in Korea, two places ahead of Samsung, at the time they collapsed with debts of $84 Bn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daewoo

As someone who has never been to Korea, I don't understand why this chaebol structure is bad.

Korea has one of the best R&D stories worldwide, one of the most innovative places in the world, one of the best life expectancies worldwide, and amazing tech everywhere. All while having few natural resources and having gone through an extremely destructive war relatively recently. Korean middle class is much larger than that of U.S. and lower class much smaller.

Whenever I come across Korean engineers, they're always very knowledgeable and hard working.

Korean manhwa is arguably more innovative than the Japanese counterpart.

So guess my question is: what is not to like?

Even if it were a Monarchy, if the results are pretty good why not just leave it the way it is?

One korean shipping company went bankrupt. You could then no longer ship things to Europe for several weeks.

So now your economy has single points of failure. Samsung failing would cause massive failures. Markets are not rational, and crises of confidence will kill.

From a corporate governance standpoint, being the son of the CEO does not make you the right future CEO.

Having huge conglomerates might help with coordination, but not for competition. Samsung the smartphone company will feel obligated to use Samsung the construction company , even if Hyundai might meet the requirements better.

Having only large corporations that can throw their weight around is basically a planned economy. That works well when the people running them are good. Sometimes planning works!

But you now are placing your bets on the skills of a couple dozen people not being bad at their job.

If these companies were split up, then suddenly an economic crisis requires a much larger amount of people being stupid.

This isn't impossible (2008 is a good example of interests not being aligned), but personally I prefer that to a quasi monarchy.

> Whenever I come across Korean engineers, they're always very knowledgeable and hard working.

Emphasis on "hard working". Like, "come six days a week at 7 am, go home at 11 pm" hard working. There's a large variation, but such a condition can still be found in many places.

> Korean manhwa is arguably more innovative than the Japanese counterpart.

And Korean comic artists probably make 1/10 of what Japanese ones make.

Of course if you just consume the products and culture of Korea, it seems great. (And cheap!) Not so great when you are the one working in these conditions.

* Yes, these brutal conditions played a role in rapid industrialization, so one might argue that they were a "necessary" sacrifice to escape poverty, but those days are gone and now such a condition actively harms the country. South Korea's firtility rate is 1.24 as of 2015, because many people don't have time to love, get married, and raise kids. (I'm serious.) At this rate, soon the country will be filled with 70+ year olds, and then the economy won't sustain itself: the whole country will collapse like a deck of cards.