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Conservative candidate squeaks to victory in South Korean election: Yoon Suk-yeol declares victory in presidential election after liberal opponent concedes defeat with 98% of ballots counted
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- Title
- Yoon Suk-yeol wins South Korean presidential election
- Authors
- Justin McCurry
- Published
- Mar 9 2022
- Word count
- 449 words
One thing worth noting about this election is that Yoon won by about 0.8% of the vote, but a Third party leftist (socdem according to wiki) won about 2.3% of the vote, implying he may have pulled a Ralph Nader on the less conservative Lee Jae-myung.
How can we stop people from thinking screwing over the least powerful people will benefit the middle class?
Does it not?
Cutting the minimum wage and increasing the hours those people work makes goods and services to the middle class cheaper. It's not the right thing to do, but it certainly doesn't hurt the middle class, just the poorer ones.
Well the removal of limits on working hours is very much fucking over the middle class, since they're more likely to be salaried, and to be overworked than underworked, particularly in South Korean business culture, and of course it'd potentially reduce the number of middle class jobs available and put downward pressure on wages.
Long run though, keeping the poor poor hurts both the middle and upper classes, it's bad policy that reduces velocity of money, hampers efficient use of human resources, fosters the growth of parasite industries, and just overall mars the economy.
While I'm personally a socialist and do view poverty as a moral issue, I also don't think we talk nearly enough about how it's just straight up bad for the economy, even within a market capitalist framework.
Possibly. Middle class workers have the most power in the scenario to say 'no' they won't work additional hours without additional pay. People fight tooth and nail to not give up "luxuries" like working fewer hours and Korea's reduction from a 68 hour max to 52 is certainly one of them.
Have any sources to confirm that? I've gone looking for articles and at the CBO's findings of raising the minimum wage to $15 and its affect on the middle class and there are about an even number of takes on both sides. With the overall consensus that I've found to be it lifting the poor out of poverty and a lesser but still overall increase on the lowest end of the middle class, but overall reduction to what we'll call the actual middle and above.
Make no mistake, I have no personal problem with my life being more expensive to lift millions of others out of the poverty I grew up in, but still want data to back up claims that keeping the poor poor hurts those in the middle class and above.
I'm not sure how sources would come into it, I'm not talking hard facts about specific policy choices, I'm expressing an original thought about how in broad structural terms, the continued existence of poverty prevents a market economy from reaching its full growth and efficiency potential. Mainly the fact that poor people are unable to invest in themselves and their communities, their money is instead being funneled upwards by parasite industries like payday loan and rent to own places (whose existence is also sapping labor from the labor pool while creating nothing of value), and reducing its velocity every step of the way.
In terms of how you'd achieve the elimination of poverty, especially within the context of a market economy that's an open question, my point is just that I find it odd nobody really frames it as an economic opportunity rather than an economic cost.
If it does or not I wish for a world where people don’t think it’s an option. We don’t consider slavery a viable economic model. We don’t consider killing your coworker a great way to guarantee you get that promotion. There are some things that should be ethically completely off limits.
Wasn't really the question, but who doesn't think slavery is a viable economic model? If it wasn't there wouldn't be prison labor or have been a US Civil War. Slavery is an incredibly viable economic model, just not a moral/ethical one.
Should lowering the minimum being paid to the most vulnerable be off limits? Absolutely, no question there.
I think that's a semantic argument over viability.
Sure, but we're still trying to get to some concrete data over the actual question:
Does lowering the wages of the poorest benefit the middle class or not?
I don't know if it has data to back it up one way or the other. My plea is about eliminating the idea rather than proving or disproving it. I don't think people vote conservative based on data so it wouldn't matter.
I would be careful about generalizing US election trends to other countries. For instance, this election had a very different demographic split than US elections; Seoul, the dense city where the largest age group is 25-29, voted heavily conservatively while the outward rural regions voted heavily for the leftward party.
That's very different from the US, where the urban/rural split is perhaps the single strongest dividing line in voting trends. Not to mention young/old!
I don't know enough about South Korean politics to know exactly why, but in general politics are complicated and not generalizable, especially across very disparate cultures.
US here, bit jealous of this, good job South Koreans!