Korea

I returned a few days ago from two weeks in South Korea, a country I first visited in 1993. I've noticed many changes in multiple trips over the last two decades, but on this visit these changes came together in a new way.

• Unlike the United States, Korea has invested in a high-speed rail system (KTX). I rode KTX several times from Seoul to the station near Musangsa at speeds of 300 kilometers/180 miles per hour. The train condensed a 2.5-3 hour car trip into 1 hour, 10 minutes. The United States has one segment of "high-speed" rail, the Acela system, running between Boston and Washington D.C. at a whopping 84 miles per hour.

• Unlike the United States, Korea has invested in high-speed Internet access - 1 gigabit per second. This is approximately 200 times faster than the speed in most American households. And Koreans pay an average of $27 per month for this service, about half the cost paid by most American households. As far as I know, the U.S. lacks a national policy on Internet access, an incredible infrastructure failure.

• To an American, the Korean "interstate" highway system is astonishing. The roads are remarkably well-maintained. Rest areas (more like shopping malls) are placed about every 30 miles along the routes (when I drove across the U.S. last February on I-80, my aging bladder sometimes had to wait for 100 miles or more). Signs are marked in both Korean and English.

• The center of Seoul is remarkably clean, something that can hardly be said about any American city. Legions of uniformed workers walk the streets picking up the tiniest bits of trash. Of course, Seoul has its problems, like any other city of its size. But it invests heavily in quality of life and visitors notice.

• Korea provides all citizens with inexpensive, complete health insurance through a single-payer model. Even Obamacare will not match the Korean system for service, price and convenience. Still, large segments of the American public cannot stomach the thought of something as simple as universal healthcare.

Eventually I started wondering how Korea could afford these investments.

With a little noodling, I discovered that the United States spends 4.8% of its Gross Domestic Product on the military. On the other hand, South Korea (a country still at war with North Korea) spends 2.7% of its Gross Domestic Product on the military (World Bank data).

Have the Korean people simply decided to invest in themselves rather than in war? This would certainly explain how South Korea has grown from total devastation to the world's 13th largest economy in sixty years.

I truly don't know how Korea has paid for its investments. But the country's rapid growth makes me curious about the hidden costs of spending 50% of American tax revenue on the preparation for and fighting of wars.

Photo inside a KTX car on the way to Musangsa.

Comments

[Ben]

Sounds like a fascinating trip! The comparison between infrastructure spending in the U.S. and South Korea isn't really a fair one. It all comes back to scale. Think about how much smaller and closer together everything is. High speed rail between most U.S. cities would be exponentially more expensive. Likewise for Internet infrastructure: running fiber optic cable throughout the U.S. would be a job of unimaginable difficulty. Finally, the reason Korea can afford to spend relatively less of its income on their military is that they have a big, powerful ally in the U.S. In fact, our military spending "subsidizes" most of Europe in the same way.

[Emma]

Ben:
Korea is a developped country because tyhey worked hard AND are not against the idea of developpment shared by each and every one. Not because of the US military presence... A country cannot develop that well because of the presence of military bases.
Which stand for Europe too. Most European countries do well without the American Occupation (as nicely said by an US Marine I knew...) As far as I know it'S not the US soldiers who build the German highway or the French hidhspeed railways.
Please stop thinking that other countries have no value without the US.

[Genju]

Welcome back! Ben beat me to the punch about the military spending. At the same time, I think the vastness of our countries is an obstacle of perception. If we thought in "Korean-sized" chunks of communities I wonder what would be possible.

[Joseph]

Just a quick note to Emma, South Korea is not yet considered a "developed" nation, despite everything Barry listed here. It still boggles me that it isn't, but when you go out to the countryside, it's like a whole different country. Some places still use oxen to plough fields.

Otherwise, I think population density is a factor, and very cheap labour. A lot of people work for $3-5 dollars an hour.

[Marcus]

Ben is completely right; the reason Korea can spend so little (relatively) on military defence is because it is heavily, massively, subsidized by the US.

(But the fact Korea doesn't pay for it's own defence didn't stop the Korean President last month visiting an unihabited island jointly claimed with Japan and saying that keeping it Korean would be "worth sacrificing lives for". Whose lives one has to wonder?)

Another reason for the apparant success of the Korean economy might be the hours put in. An office worker in Korea would find it quite normal, at least until recently, to spend 10 or 12 hours a day at work. That is changing now, but it was a common experience for a generation or two of workers.

And yes, the centre of Seoul is glorious. Clean and beautiful and wonderful. I agree 100%. But go just a few stops from the centre and the cleanliness declines radidly as the spitting (and vomitting) increases!

Having said all that, I agree that Seoul (and Korea) is a wonderful place. I first visited in 2001. Have spent three years living there since then, and last went back for a short visit just last month. Every time I go I have the same experience as you - of a place that is becoming more and more pleasant to visit.

And it remains the very place place in the world to study the Dharma, in my opinion:

http://wakeupandlaugh.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/seoul-city-of-dharma/

[Barry Briggs]

Thanks, everyone, for your comments and for expanding my view of the matters discussed in the post.

I'll make two additional comments:

1. While I agree that South Korea has flourished under the protection of the U.S. military, the country has invested heavily in its own military - it ranks #5 in the world in military spending as a percentage of GDP. The 4 countries above it, in percentage ranking, are China, Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Russia. So it's not as though South Korea is shirking in its military spending.

2. Korea could not have developed this kind of infrastructure without a country-wide consensus or buy-in on its strategic important. Roads, trains, Internet backbone, healthcare - first-world countries prioritize these things because they pay off in productivity and development. The U.S. has just barely developed its first national healthcare program (setting aside Medicare and Medicaid) and, of course, began developing an interstate highway system in the 1950s. However, our train system is a joke, even in the heavily traveled northeastern corridor. And Internet access is even more laughable (in my humble opinion, of course). Republicans would say that the money isn't there for those kinds of programs - and that they should be developed by private industry. A neat solution, except that it isn't a solution. Democrats seem to have punted. So were left with 84 mph high-speed rail and 20 megabits/s Internet.