It’s Difficult to Know Where to Start
This news article appeared in Yonhap today, which makes Korea seem like Planet Backwards. School-age children study 10 hours a day from elementary school through secondary school. They compete like crazy (sometimes to insanity) to obtain admission to Korea’s elite universities, and then to Korean corporations. You would have thought that once a person found a job, he/she would expect to do his/her best on the job, and be compensated based upon performance. You would be wrong in certain cases.

Do We Really Have Nothing Better to Do?
The cost of living is high, the rate of inflation is increasing, households are struggling: the demonstrators have nothing better to do? Instead, they leave another, ugly example of why foreigner investors can find Korea a troubling place to allocate capital. It would be almost impossible for a foreign investor to accept this attitude by employees, unless the price of investment were ridiculously attractive. If the price of investment were “ridiculously attractive,” then of course, there would be another demonstration against the purchase price. Now, Korea is a highly developed economy, but one can only wonder how much more developed it would be if meritocracy truly reigned, and if people didn’t waste their time demonstrating needlessly.