Nathan Nunn: belief

Transcript context

…Obvious lessons, but above and beyond those, what really struck you? I think the importance of culture, actually, living in South Korea. The culture in South Korea is very different. Obviously, South Korea is a dramatic success story, and I think a lot of that has to do with what South Koreans viewed as important: education, working hard, allegiance to the company. Those things are all hugely important. I have a lot of very close friends in South Korea. Until recently, they would never take vacations. You would get vacation, but it would be very shameful or against the norms if you actually took them. Same with Saturdays — you would always work on Saturdays. And then the drive for education was amazing. There’s a saying in Korea — I might not get it exactly right, but “If a high school student sleeps five hours a night, they’ll fail.” They need to work so hard, they’re only sleeping four hours a night. And I think these are all just motivations. They’ve internally motivated their norms, their values. So South Korea has these values of individual achievement, but then overlaid with values of collectivism, like wanting to have individual success go towards the greater good, which was the success of the country. And so that, I think, again, coming from an individualistic background, was eye-opening to me. But why was South Korea then so poor for so long? Maybe it was somewhat well off under Joseon Dynasty, but if you look at 1960, 1900, 1800, as far as I know — we don’t have good data, but it had a reputation for being a place of extreme poverty, right?…

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