The Korean juggernaut

South Korea’s rising investment tide in the CNMI is exciting. What’s near is also far, and Saipan is just one small element in Korea’s global juggernaut. I love seeing it, given that South Korea has long been my favorite economy (bet you didn’t know that people can have favorite economies. Why not? People have favorite football teams. So, I have favorite economies.)

You can’t go to Seoul and come away anything but extremely impressed. Back when I could indulge such whims, I used to hop aboard Asiana for weekend jaunts from Saipan to Seoul, just to enjoy that city. Over the years I’ve filed a number of Saipan Tribune columns from Korea.

Meanwhile, a pal of mine, who noticed that Korean investments are flowing all over Asia and even Africa, recently said, “The Koreans are taking over the world.”

My response? “We should be so lucky.”

My first economics professor was Korean. I encountered him in an introduction to macroeconomics course. I was a mathematics major at the time, but economics not only appealed to my love of math, but also to my interest in business, writing, and my wry appreciation of the absurd. I still remember that professor’s wit and erudition.

Adam Smith has been a known quantity for over 200 years, but much of the world still prefers to steer itself into poverty, 14th-century style. Like I say, a wry sense of the absurd really fits in this field. But you don’t need it in South Korea. It’s amazing that South Korea, having been steamrollered by so many forces in recent history, managed to grasp free market economics the minute it saw some daylight. Clinging to a barren peninsula in a dangerous geopolitical neighborhood, somehow, against great odds, the South Koreans have not only endured, but, in many ways, are prevailing.

When I actually caught my first glimpse of Korea I was on my way to Saipan on a one-way ticket. The tropical rainbow express, on KAL: LA to Seoul to Saipan. When I first spied Seoul, it looked, from the air, like a cheerless expanse of big concrete dominoes. My first impression was sure wrong. Seoul is one great place.

Back in those days, I quickly noticed that for all its charm, Saipan had a lot of big talkers, grandiose schemes, and professional pipe dreamers, funded, for whatever reason, by the local government. But when it came to getting any actual work done, it was often the quiet competence of the Korean community at work.

I’ve been in a few venues where the high achievements of Koreans have triggered the absolute worst in envy from the handout crowd. Worldwide, it will be interesting to see if the investments that the Koreans are making in some undeveloped places are greeted with long term goodwill, or with eventual looting and expropriation.

Meanwhile, on Saipan, the Koreans are rushing in where the Japanese fear to tread. Somebody, then, has miscalculated.

South Korea is one of the few, very few, economies I know of that is actually constrained by its lack of basic natural resources. Japan, of course, would be another. What an odd quirk of fate that such industrious people should be allocated such resource-poor venues. Meanwhile, I’ve worked in so many places richly endowed with gold, silver, lush land, and other blessings, that are determined to live in poverty. Economics really is the hidden plot line behind the human drama. Some plots are heroic. Most are farce and slapstick. What a fun world it is.

Although Korea’s per capita-production is less than half of U.S. levels, I won’t be surprised at all if, in a generation or two, South Korea surpasses the U.S. in that regard.

Anyone in the Commonwealth who wants to learn how to operate a business can learn a lot from the Koreans. They’ve been some of the best teachers I’ve ever had, starting in my college days, and continuing all the way up to the present.