Reunification?

Here is an interesting op-ed on the possibility of Korean reunification in the current political climate. Writing as if looking back from the future, the author claims that the event

that signaled the change of historical tide in the Korean Peninsula came on July 22 from Shenyang, China [when] The Chinese government made an extraordinary decision that it would recognize the North Korean defectors who snuck into the U.S. Consulate General in Shenyang and demanded political asylum as refugees, and allowed their departure to the United States.

This leads, the author imagines, to the dissolution of the N. Korean regime, "as a small hole in a dike leads to the demolition of the whole embankment". It was an interesting piece.

Also, here is a really good novella outlining the various positions on the matter. It is interesting to note that the best things I have read so far on reunificaiton are fictional. Perhaps the issue is too dear to the Korean heart to be treated strictly analytically.

Seoul: first impressions

Seoul was a heady mix of Chicago, L.A. and Washington, with a large dose of East Asia thrown in. I rode the bus in today, and we made it to the middle of Namdaemun Market before the torrential rains set in again. As we stumbled, in heavy rains with broken umbrellas, trough the alleyways, tunnels, escalators, and teeming stalls selling every imaginable low-end consumable, I finally felt like I was in Asia. No system of rationality with which I am familiar governs this place. So, Alex and I launched a counter offensive, braving the Oriental streets until we made it to the high-end Shinsegae department store and the Attic embassy of a Starbucks on the 11^th floor.

Besides the Market, whose majesty is not photographable, we saw Seoul Station [pictured above]. Built in 1900 by the Japanese, modeled on the European Beaux Arts, the station added a hip new glass-and-steel addition in 2004 without tampering with the colonial original—neatly paralleling, I think, Korea’s economic and political development in the twentieth century.

10 million people live in Seoul, with another 10 million in the metropolitan area (including me!). By most measures, this is bigger than New York. But, let me tell you, New York feels bigger. Maybe Seoul sprawls more, but New York is certainly taller and just as busy. Anyway, I haven’t been around much yet. Let’s see how the nightlife is…

[Note, these are not my pictures--I found them online. I'll try to start taking my own soon.]

Typhoon Glenda

I already got my first typhoon! Well, not really--we are just getting the "vapors" of it as it hits mainland China. I guess it was pretty bad in Manila.

It has been raining heavy here for the past two days. I got wet, but this is nothing worse than the hurricanes that periodically ravage New York.

Wage Floors

Check it out. Chicago decides to raise minimum wage for retail workers:

The City Council brushed aside warnings from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to approve an ordinance that makes Chicago the biggest city in the nation to require big-box retailers to pay a ''living wage.''

The ordinance, which passed 35-14 Wednesday after three hours of impassioned debate, requires mega-retailers to pay wages of at least $10 an hour plus $3 in fringe benefits by mid-2010. It would only apply to companies with more than $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet.

I think this is another small step towards fair pay for retail workers. The minimum wage has long ceased being a living wage, especially in big cities, in part because retail workers do not form a coherent constituency or lobbying group. Factory workers, who tend to be unionized--and so also politicized, generally make more than minimum wage. If minimum wage fails to keep pace with inflation, it is only those workers in service industiries--an increasingly large sector of the economy--that suffer.

Well, and also the general public, since the taxpayers, by means of welfare and medicaid, have to step in and make up the difference. We must pay for what retail employers are unwilling to provide for their workers. I think that in order to reduce our dependance on welfare, the burden should be on employers to ensure that every full-time employee earns enough to live on.

So, what is the other side of the argument? Jerry Roper, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, has this to say, "The aldermen who voted in support of this ... helped put the sign up really big that development in Chicago is dead."

But this doesn't seem likely. For one thing, the article also notes that "Other cities with living-wage laws include Santa Fe and Albuquerque in New Mexico; San Francisco; and Washington." But, Wal-Mart, for instance, has stores in two of these cities: one in Santa Fe; eight in Albuquerque.

Moreover, look back to this article in the Times Magazine, and we get a different picture:

The tenor of this debate began to change in the mid-1990's following some work done by two Princeton economists, David Card (now at the University of California at Berkeley) and Alan B. Krueger. In 1992, New Jersey increased the state minimum wage to $5.05 an hour (applicable to both the public and private sectors), which gave the two young professors an opportunity to study the comparative effects of that raise on fast-food restaurants and low-wage employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained at the federal level of $4.25 an hour. Card and Krueger agreed that the hypothesis that a rise in wages would destroy jobs was "one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics." Both told me they believed, at the start, that their work would reinforce that hypothesis. But in 1995, and again in 2000, the two academics effectively shredded the conventional wisdom. Their data demonstrated that a modest increase in wages did not appear to cause any significant harm to employment; in some cases, a rise in the minimum wage even resulted in a slight increase in employment.

The theory that a rise in the wage floor will result in fewer jobs only holds if a company employs exactly as many people as it can, while still remaining profitable. Now, this is a reasonable assumption if the economy is growing and if we are talking about factory work. That is, a factory’s output is directly proportional to the number of people it employs if it can sell everything it produces. Roughly, and other things equal, each additional body in a factory increases the net output, the net production.

Of course, there is a law of marginal returns, e.g. as the physical capacity of the factory is stretched. But, compare this now to a retail store. Up to a point, an increase in personnel will not result in an increase in productivity/output. For, suppose one employee can handle up to 20 customers an hour. The effect is quantized and customer dependent. If the store commonly serves 30 customers an hour, it will employ two people. What then is the result of adding one more employee? Nothing! There is no increase in output, since there are still only 30 customers an hour. Thus, retail stores are staffed according to customer trends, not according to marginal returns with respect to productivity and space constraints, etc. So, retail stores are by no means at capacity with respect to employees, in fact they are at their absolute minimum. In order to stay open, they will be forced to retain all of their current employees, even in the event of a wage floor increase. Now, it is possible that some stores will be unable to remain open, but this is not particularly likely for major chain stores like Wal-Mart.

Finally, the increase in employment found by the above economists could be due to increased spending by the now richer minimum wage earners – lets call this ‘demand-side economics’.In the same article, we get this:

"Our current average hourly wage for workers is $9.68," Lee Culpepper, a Wal-Mart spokesman, told me. "So I would think raising the wage would have minimal impact on our workers. But we think it would have a beneficial effect on our customers."

So, returning to Chicago, let's watch and see what happens. But, if I am right, this could be another instance of cities and states taking the lead on the curcial social issues that the Federal Government is increasingly unwilling to tackle--a trend I will return to.

of date-stamping

My previous post, and no doubt this one as well, says "Wednesday, July 26" despite the fact that it is already Thursday from my point of view. Keep this in mind. And if anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know.

Observations on the first day

[This post has been delayed a bit due to lack of internet connection. It should be dated July 25.]

Koreans are very lovable, and, for the most part, very western. Maybe I should say specifically American, since I have a co-teacher who is English, and some things, I think, make her feel slightly out of place (e.g. they drive on the right and they speak—and expect to be taught—American English). On the first day, I was met at the airport by Vicki (all Koreans I have met so far have English names in addition to their Korean names—some of the students like to change their English name daily) a high ranking teacher, 30 years old, wearing baggy jeans and a blue tank top and looking about 17. We drove into Bucheon—Vicki, Alex (another American teacher who arrived at the same time), and I, and we turned off the expressway onto a bustling neon-plated square that looked like Tokyo from an eighties movie. “Here is your apartment!” Vicki said. I live in a corner room with big windows that are filled all night with flashing lights and that do not at all keep out the music coming from the Jonathan Jazz Bar across the street. A quick catalogue of recognizable signs seen from my window: “G-zone PC”, a PC room; “Human & Nature Patio Hair”, which, I believe is a salon (n.b. there are swirling barbershop signs on every building); “Photo Studio”; “Q Bar”; two more PC rooms; “Samsung Billiards”; “Edu One Korean Combination Consulting” (I have no idea what that is); and a neon Christian cross.

But, when I woke up on my first morning and went outside for a bottle of water (I was told not to drink from the tap), the streets were deserted. Even now at 11:30am, there are only one or two pedestrians, one or two cars. The lights belie the fact that this is no bursting, bustling Seoul. Walking around midday, the streets feel more like downtown Racine than downtown New York. But go out at night after work, and the streets are filled with revelers. There are wide alleyways off the main streets in Bucheon that are open only to pedestrians and that create a sort of town-square, Roman-forum feeling. At night, all of the bars and restaurants set up tables in these alleys, and each night they are filled. Both nights so far I ate and drank in the pedestrian alleyway behind my school. And both nights I have been compelled to drink more than I might have wanted. Social drinking is a big deal here. Last night, we all went out with the boss. He is a small man, 5’4’’ and skinny, and he doesn’t know much English, but when he speaks you listen. For one thing, he is about as funny as they come, always joking about something, and always always challenging you to down your whole drink. “One shot” they chant. You do what he says: he’s the boss. It is your duty to get drunk if your boss demands it, but it is his duty to pay the bill. They call this the Land of the Morning Calm and now I understand why: everyone is hungover.

I’ll write on other things, including my job, soon. Stay tuned.

A few facts about recent Korean history

Korea has never, at least in modern history, been both independent and whole. In the nineteenth century and before, Korea was a fiercely isolated “hermit kingdom”. But, because of its small stature, it owed its economic stability and military protection to China, in exchange for which a tribute was regularly paid. Unlike Japan who, having first tasted Western modernity, embraced and mastered it, Korea had to be dragged into the twentieth century by a succession of invaders racing up and down the peninsula. In 1900, Russia invaded Korea from the north and swept down to the sea before they were pushed back by Japan who invaded from the south and sent Russia back to Russia. The Japanese managed to hold on for a while. Although Koreans look on this time with revulsion, already-modernizing Japan took the opportunity to build critical infrastructure that certainly helped when Korea finally decided to pull itself into the modern era. Then, in 1945, after Japan’s surrender, Russia and the U.S. divided up Korea in much the haphazard, geographically determined, self-interested way that they divided up Germany and the rest of Europe: Russia took the top half, above the 38^th parallel, and the U.S. took the bottom half. Although this set up was supposed to be temporary, both superpowers set up (puppet) governments—competitors for legitimacy in the event of a reconciliation. The two-capital system, different from the German setup, still hinders, obviously, any plans for unification.

In 1950, after it became clear that the North and the South would never merge peacefully, Stalin okayed Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the South. This would be the first hot proxy war of the cold war. The communists pushed all the way down to the coast before MacArthur arrived at Pusan. He then launched a daring assault on Incheon, surprising the North and pushing them back to the Chinese border. But China, riled by the U.S. troops so dangerously close, sent possibly a million men into Korea from the north, and pushed the U.S. back down the peninsula until they agreed to stop at, you guessed it, the 38^th parallel. A cease-fire was called in 1953, and that is, more or less, what we are left with today.

You might say that both sides are now finally independent. With the end of the imperial era and the cold war, no countries seek to claim Korea for their own. But Korea couldn’t be more divided. With the coming of economic prosperity in the ‘80s, and the establishment of a democratic government in 1988 (the same year that Seoul hosted the Olympics), the South is now vastly different—economically, politically—than the North. Although both sides now ostensibly favor reconciliation, one can’t help thinking that the problems that are still plaguing German unification would be rehashed here many fold. If unification ever did happen, the North would have to leech off of the South for many years before any sort of stability and equality could be reached. Perhaps this is a project for our generation.

Hello World!

Dear reader:

This blog will be an attempt to keep track of my own thoughts--but I will not post anything that I do not think will be of general interest. Also, since I will be moving to Bucheon, Korea (outside of Seoul) in two weeks, and since a blog is de rigeur for the expat community, I thought I should have one. I will record my views on politics, literature, and philosophy, as well as link to or point out sites and articles that I find interesting or worthwhile.

Responses are always welcome. I'll write more soon...