Comments by "Razear" (@Razear) on "How Do Young Koreans Feel About the Wealth Gap in Korea | Street Interview" video.
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Since SK is such a looks-oriented society, it's no wonder the country gets glamorized under a certain light. There's an obsession with how one is perceived and saving face. This is tied to how the education system is structured as well. When life success is construed as getting a degree from a SKY university, everyone else who doesn't make the cut gets left behind.
"It feels relatively easier to make money with money." In other words, the Matthew principle.
The definition of "well-off" used to be having a car and a house under your name, but now it's turned into having enough to pay all basic expenses without swimming in debt... How times have changed.
Hard work is only one ingredient to becoming wealthy. People are born into different life circumstances, hold different abilities, and work different jobs. It's better than sheer laziness, but hard work = success would only be true if we were all interchangeable and started on an equal playing field.
It's obviously an advantage to be born into old money, but it can also be a detriment if used incorrectly. A lot of trust fund babies end up burning through their inheritance because it's easy to justify spending someone else's money that you yourself didn't earn. Those who are self-made are typically more financially prudent because they understand what it took to become rich.
Following the conventional path of getting a corporate 9-5 won't make you rich in terms of getting to the top 1%, but it's a much more predictable and secure way of achieving financial success than going the entrepreneurship route, which is the only true way of making it big. But that's obviously a lot riskier and not something most people should or can do.
Location is everything in the real estate market. If you want a big home in an urban area, you'll have to pay significantly more for the convenience of being closer to local amenities than if you were to get a similar-sized home in the middle of nowhere.
Being resentful of the top 1% is kind of pointless considering that literally 99% of the population won't be able to experience that type of lifestyle. It's one thing to have lofty dreams, but to think it's unfair that you aren't in the upper echelon of society is just juvenile.
The girl's response at the end is spot on. This isn't a problem that needs to be solved because it's not a problem; it's an innate byproduct of capitalism. Wealth will always flow to the hands of a few in a capitalist system, no matter the degree of redistribution.
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