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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

imho, Nobody does capitalism better than the Americans the South Koreans, and the Japanese(I guess because of the lack of natural resource in their geographies for KR/JP?). I've been privileged enough to build in those countries for an extended period of time, and work with builders in many other countries. I strongly believe nobody bruit forces ideas into existence better than them, they make the resources happen in the right way. Even if you're not much into capitalism, how deeply it's been embraced by the culture still fascinating, especially as a Canadian where I believe we do capitalism particularly poorly.

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South Korean society and government are deeply co-opted by an oligopoly of wealthy families. While that leads to a great environment for safe investment, I'll gladly give it up for a more egalitarian society.

You doubtlessly know more about life in South Korea than I do, but i found this video [0] and its sequel [1] very enlightening.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74&t=1050s 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A&t=589s

or the film 'Parasite' by Korean director Bong Joon-ho (2020 Oscars Best Picture winner)

To be fair the situation isn't that much better in most Western countries.

Murdoch family for example has huge influence in US, UK and Australia.

Right and in most of those countries even the capitalists want better educated and/or skilled people but in the USA there are some states where there are billionaires (Tim Dunn, et.al.) actively trying to retard public education efforts and force tax payers to pay for private religious schools and have the highest officials in the state trying to push the agenda. Texas for example. So the past isn't always a good predictor of the future.

This is an aggressively bad-faith interpretation of what school-choice advocates are doing.

All school choice does is give poor parents the same kind of school choice that rich parents have.

If you're rich and the schools around you suck, you just move to a neighborhood with good schools! That means you pay taxes in that school district, which fund your kids schools.

If you're poor and the schools around you suck, you have no choices. You send your kids to the sucky school.

School choice would mean allowing the same choice for poor folks. They would be able to choose where their kids go to school, and their tax money (in the form of a voucher) would follow them to that school.

How could such a scheme "retard public education efforts"? The point of public education is not to prop up failing state-run schools, the point is educating the public. Undermining shitty schools is a feature, not a bug.

Go read up a bit up on Dunn and his fellows and what his objectives are for pushing religion in school and tell me that I'm exaggerating. What he's pitching will do nothing to help inner city or poor rural districts. Public schools work as there are many great examples of them, but they need good teachers, good policies, and public support from parents.

I don’t know anything about this but have heard interesting theories about the govt, military recruiting and education in the US

That simply is not true, you do not understand the amount of influence the Chaebols have over Korea.

I agree, the skill inherent apparently in the US culture of using capital to scale things up compared to the rest of the west feels unappreciated. You give a US capitalist money, labour pool, and a goal, they will organize them to a system to deliver miracles. This is not obviously how things go! It is an underappreciated virtue.

I wonder if there is research on the topic - I mean Adam Smith is translated to all languages so it’s not about the ideas or non-tacit knowledge. Must be something institutional or otherwise cultural.

It's just a that competition is a core cultural value in these nations, and that competitive spirit lands itself really well to capitalism.

I live in Canada and have found many Canadians lacking drive, curiosity and will. Also far from being straight in business to the point they feel like politicians. In average dealing with USians was much more to my liking (I am originally from the USSR). There are of course exceptions on either side.

I felt this way in Europe too, excluding perhaps London.

A lot of people just seemed content and satisfied with their lot in life, without much ambition or drive to improve their position. Is that a good or bad thing? I honestly don’t know. In this point in my life, I don’t particularly like it. I love visiting Europe but would not want to live (and work) there. Maybe I’ll think differently when I’m older and or retired.

Versus the US and Asia where many people are trying to claw their way to the top. Obviously most will not get to the top, but many do end up improving their socioeconomic status to varying degrees.

I don't completely disagree, but Korean and Japanese corporations are renowned for being bureaucratic and inefficient, at least at the white collar level. Having worked for a Korean conglomerate, I've written off ever working for one again because of this kind of stuff. (disclaimer - I am Korean)

Then again, it's hard to deny the progress and products these countries have made. So what gives? To be honest, I don't know.

Yah, I worked at Samsung for a while and my (korean) wife worked at a 재벌 too. Here's what I think it is: Bureaucratic and inefficient till someone important (and usually thoughtful) says jump. Then absolutely everyone says "how high?" and then they all jump. I think this is conducive to risk taking, and if you're generally directionally correct in your bets, the bureaucracy and inefficiency matter less because big bets take time anyway and lots businesses suck so it's ok to be a bit slow. I don't see them getting into much analysis paralysis at the top of the companies, they move on the big bets, and that's half the battle.

South Korea is a bit different in some interesting ways. The South Korean economy is dominated by a small number of "chaebols", which are massive corporate conglomerates that tend to be owned and controlled by an oligarchic family. Samsung, for instance, is owned by the Lee family. These families also tend to have a ton of political influence. The government has, for decades, embraced an explicit policy of developing the chaebols via industrial policy. So, as you can imagine, you end up with a situation where the chaebols and their owners have lots of political power. Not exactly the kind of free market capitalism that someone like Milton Friedman would endorse, but it seems to be effective in its own way.

There's a flip side to South Korea's chaebol-centric economy, however. South Korea's national security situation is extremely dangerous, so in fact one of the reasons for the industrial policy has been to maintain a domestic defense industrial base so that they aren't dependent on arms imports from Western countries. Accordingly, most of the South Korean chaebols have a significant presence in the arms industry. In recent years, this sector has expanded, with South Korea becoming one of the world's leading arms exporters.

Japan, the country whose GDP hasn't grown in 30 years, has 0 major tech companies, still uses fax machines for everything, and has numerous stagnant, conglomerates/trusts/monopolies, does capitalism really well? I feel like this comment comes from another planet.

How are you thinking about the application of capitalism and capitalism more generally?

Here is the definition I'm working from: "private ownership of capital and means of production meets market competition, driving resource efficiency, innovation, and maximizing profit while respond to consumer demand resulting in GDP growth."

If you take that definition then look at the last 100 years, only 4 names come up:

Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. No countries in the world in the last 100 years have applied capitalism, then grown, the way those countries have.

I'd be curious how you define capitalism, and then the countries you think have applied it better than the ones I've mentioned in my posts on this subject.

...and Hong Kong, until it was returned to communist China.

UK, (West) Germany, Canada.

These graphs don't go back 100 years, but they do show fairly similar growth.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=canada%20gdp%20per%20ca...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=uk%20gdp%20per%20capita...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=germany%20gdp%20per%20c...

Compared with Japan:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan%20gdp%20per%20cap...

Only South Korea is the stand-out here:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=south%20korea%20gdp%20p...

Nintendo is a tech company and hugely culturally relevant

> Nobody does capitalism better than the Americans the South Koreans, and the Japanese(I guess because of the lack of natural resource in their geographies for KR/JP?)

China is not far behind, despite an authoritarian govt.

KR & JP, as well as CH, clearly learned well from Americans.

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