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Comment by throwaway122916 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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.

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