It’s kind of like saying a 5 year old kid is growing the third fastest in his class — he’s still very short by any measure, and when you’re running races with teenagers who are also still growing, the stats lose a lot of their significance.

Gotta add, I’ve been raising some of these issues in discussions with my more occasional conversation/debate classes — immigration, women’s status, and so on. People are SO not ready for a massive influx of immigrants, and I suspect many are hoping for a magical solution. (Maybe we can outsource everything, or have robots clean the toilets and collect trash?)

However, I should say that my fiancee did once raise “expenses” in general as one reason she sometimes feels reticent about having kids. Not hakwon expenses, of course — she actually never went to one herself, and agrees with me they’re basically a big ugly scam. But general expense is a concern. (And of course, she needs to complete her residency and get her career going first.)

In terms of time and education, there was the very interesting study cited by John Taylor Gatto that argued everything [academic] learned in 12 years of school can actually be learned in 50 hours of serious, self-motivated study. And that’s in the West, where school hours are way less than here, in schools that Koreans quite often look upon with envy, or make efforts to send their kids abroad to attend. Classroom learning is just a highly inefficient method in terms of most learners (though very efficient in terms of scalable service-offerings and administration and profits). But on top of that, the pattern learned in school — especially high school — of come here, stay here all day, go home and sleep, come back tomorrow, that quite surely must affect the kinds of workplace demands on time that workers themselves are willing to put up with.

In fact, the pattern of authority in a Korean classroom seem to be rather comparable to what Gatto and others have argued in terms of education systems “dumbing down” future workers — profs are generally quite strongly invested in the role of an authority figure in the classroom here, to a degree I haven’t observed in profs of the same age back in North America. It seems even to affect theoretical responses Korean scholars have to notions like student-centered learning, at least in papers I’ve read or even edited: they’re generally more leery about it and want to clarify the importance of the teacher’s role, and often in ways I agree, but with an apparent anxiety that seems more keen. When future workers are conditioned to expect an authority figure in the room who can be contradicted in public only riskily, that expectation naturally maps onto the workplaces most young Korean graduates seek to enter as quickly as possible after matriculation.

Which makes the whole notion that high school is so important more and more interesting. I’m actually beginning to think that while the Blank Slate idea — that educational structures and whatever can really change human nature — is absolute hogwash, that educational institutions can certainly reinforce the kinds of social structures we’re willing to reconcile ourselves to.

Today, I ended up filling in for some students who hadn’t turned up for a debate today, and my argument, claiming that high school isn’t (or shouldn’t) be anywhere near as important as university, and that gender-segregated schooling is bad for women for a whole host of reasons (it defers real competition with male peers until University; screws up socialization in the workplace and daily business of learning; traditional has served to allow female students some semblance of education, but only as an ill-funded, ill-equipped, less-crucial afterthought; and even can reinforce the gender roles they’re so quick to claim it abolishes, by preventing students from seeing the range of diverse dispositions within the opposite gender on a daily basis. This mostly seemed like a message beamed in from a totally different planet.

So I’m curious about how gender roles are going to change, in relation to economics over the next thirty years or so. Totally fascinating topic for Korean study. And I really MUST let you take a look at a story I have currently on hold somewhere, set in a post-”reunification” chaebolized North Korea about a generation in the future. So much of this stuff floating around in it — immigration, race, gender, reproduction, aging population…

Fire me an email if you’re interested, James!

Firstly, I’d like to see research.

Secondly, capital input could just as likely account for that growth. Again, pump-priming and inflation are inefficient.

Thirdly, net growth has little connection to gross. Obviously, some states are totally screwed (like Chad, always my example for terminally unfortunate states and bad cartography), but geographical and demographic factors are not determinant. Don’t turn that canard into a monocause, like many South Koreans do. I’m not talking about aggregate numbers, but maximizing every man hour. It’s similar to the debate whether the US or the EU vacation more. These US-EU comparisons never seem to extend to Asia. perhaps there’s a lack of transparency or just interest, but the ROK is an OECD member, so the numbers should there. The last time I tried my prof squashed my research project because I cued my interest on South Korea too early and he worried about the project degenerating into a case study.

new industrializing states also sometimes have advantages over the so-called old guard. For instance, what state needs to put up telephone lines now with mobile technology? both Japan and South Korea industrialized faster than Britain and America, and had more models to compare. The old guard have to upgrade the hard way, but new economies can buy on the cheap from the old gueard shedding outdated technology and start outright further up the tech chain.

Anyway, if you are an Econ major or grad, I’d love to see your research.

Given what you said, in hindsight it definately would be quite easy to start implementing things like flexitime without a drop in productivity. Also, I think the article I link to in my first post on the blog indicates the beginning of the end for regular late night drinking sessions for the sake of workplace bonding. In my own experience, virtually every student of mine who had to attend them didn’t actually want to at all, but no-one ever said anything to their bosses. Instead they complained to ME about it hungover in class the next morning.

I could say that on the other hand, however, I’ve heard numerous stories of teachers working in public schools and universities here who’ve had to sit in front of their computers for 8 hours a day on holidays because their anally-retentive directors insisted that they had to physically be in the building, so its tempting to say that Korean bosses are strangely myopic about the superficial aspects of clocking in so to speak. But then I’d hesitate to extend what appears to be the norm for Korean bosses treatment of E2 Visa slaves to Korean workplaces as a whole - My Korean friends say ordinary Korean workplaces are much more ‘normal’.

OK, here’s a topic for research. I believe many readers have seen office workers playing computer games and napping, as well as the long breaks. I lived in a yeohgwan for the first six months of my first teaching contract, and I can say that my floor at least was rocking during lunchtime and early evenings. If there was work going on, it was the social kind. But then, there were notable lulls where I assume sleeping (or sex) occurred.

Long hours mean nothing to me, economically, as someone who worked as a waiter and oftentimes paid my rent and gas (and ate my meals) well before my shift was over. It’s the efficiency. So, I would request a comparative study of efficiency. From there, if my assumption is right, it’s easier to reform the system when it’s clear less hours are better than more. The benefits of less hours at work are so much more optimal for societal progress.