That's why basically any large project basically NEED to be within X minutes of a major city. The saving in land cost setting it up in a rural area is nothing compared to having no staff, no services, no infrastructure, local political problems etc.
Over half of South Koreans live in the Seoul Capital Area. That’s a much higher proportion than countries other people often accuse of being overcentralized and neglecting the regions, like the UK with London or France with Paris.
And to some degree what you describe is a self fulfilling prophecy; big cities hollowing out the smaller ones, shrinking their economies and leaving their governments in deficit and the services worse, rinse and repeat.
Bigger cities are just more efficient and effective.
I will say that you might have the cart before the horse, cities are a product of the efficiencies / benefits.
Seoul is extremely large, at 26M. Reversing even some of the flow would largely still be aiming at million plus cities in South Korea, of which there are five outside the Seoul Capital Area.
Making people move, to a place that already has well documented housing and transportation shortages, is not really fair. Unequal GDP per capita is not fair either, particularly since that means less ability to pay for services, which are generally lower quality and much further away from homes.
SK government had probably one last chance to reverse its course, when it tried to move the administrative capital to Sejong in 2003, but it was met with hard backlashes including a very creative constitutional decision. Keep in mind that Sejong is not very far from Seoul anyway, and yet it failed; Sejong does host many administrative facilities, but is short from being the capital in any sense.
Cities in this size range in East Asia all have massive fertility issues (Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing)
This is the kind of radical bat shit craziness, from posters who are so intelligent they can rationalize anything, craziness that I love to find on HN.
I went to high school in a specialized class in Sweden anyway and I didnt have any internship because if you study all your waking hours to get max grades you don't have time for interning.
Germany famously lacks a dominant city and has a pretty good economy. So does the US. Decentralization is also diversification; if one region is falling behind it does not take the whole country with them.
Side note but isn't water a critical input for a fab? Arizona's water problems are going to continue to get worse so this seems like a bad move by Intel.
I'm never sure when it comes to water. I think a lot of places in the west chose to have shortages by refusing to build infrastructure and wasting supply on subsidizing things like (export orientated, unnecessarily high water use forms of) agriculture. But I am no expert...