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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 14 Jul \ parent \ on: The Squid Game stock market | Acadian Asset Management econ
My Korean grad school friend never went into that much detail, but he was always glad to be back in America after a visit home and he had no intention of taking a job in Korea.
I hope you all can get yourselves sorted out. What's one change that you think could relieve a lot of the pressure?
Give people time off work. Now many jobs require overtime at any moment of the day or weekend, precluding people from having uninterrupted personal or family time. How to achieve it? It's hard. Pres Moon Jae In tried to limit number of working hours to 52h/week, but companies found ways around it. It's sad, but probably the only way to change it is to wait for the old generation to die. Like most societal changes: you don't change people, coz people don't change... you just wait for the new generation to do it differently. But if the new generation is broken too, even that's not necessarily a winning strategy.
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How consumeristic would you say Koreans are?
Is there a lot of room for people to scale back on their spending, in order to spend less time at work?
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Extremely consumeristic.
Buying stuff is perceived as being successful.
Anecdotical, but designer brands know that Koreans are some of their most loyal customers. The more expensive, the better.
So many fancy cars, here, too. Even in neighborhoods where people live in crappy houses.
If they spend less on stuff, they will spend more on traveling, kids, etc.
There are so many reasons to spend your money, and people don't feel free to decide for themselves that there are other ways to live and spend money. The ingrained sense of community and the fear of going against what is considered normal make that many people just believe one has to buy the fancy water gun when going to the waterpark, one has to go to the Swiss Alps for traveling rather than cheaper nearby France, one has to eat expensive Korean beef rather than import Australian or American beef, etc.
Things are changing, but it takes time and some brave people who are ready to be ostracized for being different than the norm, at the risk of ending up taking their own life.
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