South Korea's seedy underbelly

Ah, South Korea—picture of success, right?

The video is short, so it doesn't have the length to deal with any of the issues bedeviling South Korea in depth, but it's a decent summation of South Korea's current problems. The video is right to note that one of the major flaws of the so-called "work ethic" here is that people work harder, but they don't work smarter. Despite all the man-hours invested every week, the ROK's productivity level is, globally speaking, astonishingly low. In South Korea, it's better to look busy than to actually be busy—to look productive, but not to be productive. Until this dynamic changes, Korean society will only become unhappier. Until Korea puts more emphasis—as is starting to happen in the US—on blue-collar work, which is the bulwark of any economy, the entire Korean edifice will begin to crumble. It's crumbling already.