I ran across a pretty interesting article at Quartz. Quarz is an annoyingly-formatted spin-off of The Atlantic – perhaps I'm just too old-school to appreciate the smartphonesque stylings at Quartz. Regardless…
The article is about South Korea's demographic problems, which are even worse than I'd been thinking. The article includes the graph below, which the article reproduces from KNSO (Korean National Statistics Organization, I think), which covers the range from 1960 projected out to 2050. The proportions between youth, working-age and elderly is striking.
The article goes on to talk about the youth problem. The idea that a country with 22% youth unemployment has a shortage of workers is something I'd already sort of realized. The article attributes this to the country's over-obsession with college education, which leads to a vastly over-qualified workforce relative to the types of jobs available, but I'd like to suggest a different reading.
South Korean society has changed so much, and so fast, that there is a kind of "culture-gap" between the youth and the older members of the society. This was observed in the recent elections, for example. In a country where personal relationships – those built between peers, especially, but then between one's family and one's peers' families, too – are so important in finding jobs and building careers, the fact that youth and older workers essentially pertain to different cultures means that they no longer have a space in common where they can build those critical relationships.
If, for example, the young people are no longer interested in working until 10 pm and then going out drinking with their older work-mates in an appropriately deferential way, then those older work-mates are going to begin to view those younger workers as "bad workers" and begin to exclude them from the social circles where jobs are retained and careers are built.
This is just speculation, on my part. But I think there's more going on that just an "education gap" in Korea's weirdly astronomical youth unemployment rate.
