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Comment by Bahamut | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand, the quality of life sucks in Korea. For example, I am told secondhand of some terrible working conditions in Samsung, and the reason why employees put up with it is because there are many Koreans willing to put up with awful conditions just to be able to say that they worked at Samsung & have a stable job.

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> From what I understand, the quality of life sucks in Korea.

I don't see any point in arguing about secondhand anecdotal data about working conditions at one specific company (I could regale you with a dozen such anecdotes heard from friends about working conditions at American companies), but South Korea's HDI is now 0.891, above countries like Japan, France, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Italy, and Spain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Deve...

>Where do data for HDI computation come from? Life expectancy at birth is provided by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs – the UN Population Division; mean years of schooling are based on UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) educational attainment data and Barro and Lee (2013) methodology; expected years of schooling are provided by UIS; and GNI per capita in 2011 PPP by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

To me it sounds like a recipe for a miserable work life. The Japanese/Korean schooling systems are very tough and strict compared to other wealthy countries. Maybe this is why they became so wealthy? Also, this statistic claims to not be based on economic output, but it basically is. And in order get the highest economic output, that is going to require really hard work and a lot of rich people/companies/countries investing in you. Of course some countries have unfair advantages and don't need to work so hard.

Yeah the system is basically optimized for "spend as much time at the office as possible" as a measure of productivity. Over a long period of time, with a lot of people, things do get done, but it's horribly inefficient. Meanwhile in a lot of other countries, hardly anyone even has an office to go to at all. Globally, the bar for productivity of human labor is really quite low.

I grew up in South Korea. Believe me, South Korean working condition sucks. As of 2013, South Koreans work 2163 hours per year on average, topped only by Mexico (2237) among OECD countries [1].

For comparison, Japan has 1735 hours, US has 1788, and Germany has 1388 hours.

As for the "success", well, somehow South Korea has experienced near-miraculous economic development during the 70s. Unfortunately, somehow we forgot to understand that economic development is a means of attaining better life: it became an end in itself. We can still find lots of people saying "Vacation? What vacation? How can we become a developed country (like the US or Japan) when we get all the same vacation as they do?"

Argh.

Edit: For extra craziness, replace "vacation" by "weekend". (Not unheard of.)

[1] http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

Yeah I think that attitude partly comes from the cultural idea that once you have children, you're supposed to sacrifice everything for their future (financial) prosperity. So there's an extremely high emphasis on education. The idea seems to be, work as much as possible and make your kids study as much as possible so that they can get into the best schools, and so that you can afford to pay for it. But the result is that the adults are so busy working and the kids so busy studying, that they don't spend nearly enough time together. There is no time left to enjoy each other's company, or enjoy life itself. It's just an endless grind.

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