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There is more than one city in South Korea. Over half of South Koreans live in the Seoul Capital Area. That’s a much higher proportion than countries other peo
by bobthepanda 4y ago
There is more than one city in South Korea.
Over half of South Koreans live in the Seoul Capital Area. That’s a much higher proportion than countries other people often accuse of being overcentralized and neglecting the regions, like the UK with London or France with Paris.
And to some degree what you describe is a self fulfilling prophecy; big cities hollowing out the smaller ones, shrinking their economies and leaving their governments in deficit and the services worse, rinse and repeat.
- LatteLazy 4y agoIt's not a value judgement, it's just life. Villages should shrink to feed towns which should shrink to feed cities which should shrink to feed the largest regional conurbation. Trying to force the flow backwards like the UK does just makes everyone poorer and leads to worse outcomes in social terms. Bigger cities are just more efficient and effective.
- bilekas 4y agoReally not sure why this is being downvoted so much. I will say that you might have the cart before the horse, cities are a product of the efficiencies / benefits.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThere isn’t any good reason why the outlying regions of the UK should have lower GDP per capita than Eastern Europe. Seoul is extremely large, at 26M. Reversing even some of the flow would largely still be aiming at million plus cities in South Korea, of which there are five outside the Seoul Capital Area.
- LatteLazy 4y agoHow does moving people from high productivity jobs in high productivity regions to low/low ones help anyone? That's the question here. There is no reason one area should have a higher or lower GDP (GDR) than any other. And if they do, that is not a moral judgement on that region. It's just a fact. People seem to want to reduce everything to the lowest level to make it "fair", but regions are not people, regions should NOT be treated fairly. People should be treated fairly. Regions (and countries) are just made up...
- bobthepanda 4y agoWho says it’s high/high and low/low rather than high/high and high/low? Making people move, to a place that already has well documented housing and transportation shortages, is not really fair. Unequal GDP per capita is not fair either, particularly since that means less ability to pay for services, which are generally lower quality and much further away from homes.
- lifthrasiir 4y agoYou are completely right that this doesn't have a good outlook, but a self-fulfilling prophecy works in practice because of the societal friction. SK government had probably one last chance to reverse its course, when it tried to move the administrative capital to Sejong in 2003, but it was met with hard backlashes including a very creative constitutional decision. Keep in mind that Sejong is not very far from Seoul anyway, and yet it failed; Sejong does host many administrative facilities, but is short from being the capital in any sense.
- user_7832 4y agoFwiw in a country with a big city much larger than any other city, the city is called a primate city. Seoul, London and Paris are all primate cities.
- JCharante 4y agoIt's a nice self fulfilling prophecy. Smaller cities shouldn't exist. Imagine the internship opportunities available to high school students that kids can get in a big city vs small ones. My peers had tech companies in their hometowns whereas I didn't. Small cities put children in a disadvantage and should not exist. Big cities also have the scale to have specialized schools that match students with their interests while small cities just have a classroom for the whole grade.
- ren_engineer 4y agodecentralization provides certain benefits at the cost of pure efficiency. People with your mindset are why our supply chains are still fucked up years after the Covid lockdowns. Maximizing efficiency kills durability and reliability
- njarboe 4y agoBig cities are way more expensive. People who live there have almost no kids. Rural and small cities have kept the US population from crashing completely. Big cities are currently dismantling their specialty high schools. I don't think the facts on the ground support that big cities are better for kids.
- kredd 4y ago“People who live there have almost no kids” - that’s just not true and super North America specific. Some personal data points - my entire family was born and raised in city of >3M population, everyone whom I know in Europe with kids live in fairly big cities.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe European big cities are much smaller than Seoul, which is 26M. Cities in this size range in East Asia all have massive fertility issues (Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing)
- raspberry1337 4y ago> Small cities put children in a disadvantage and should not exist This is the kind of radical bat shit craziness, from posters who are so intelligent they can rationalize anything, craziness that I love to find on HN. I went to high school in a specialized class in Sweden anyway and I didnt have any internship because if you study all your waking hours to get max grades you don't have time for interning.