75% of young want to escape South Korean ‘Hell’ — Andrew Solomon

Some say it is far from unique to Korea. “I think there is a middle class crisis in all wealthy countries,” Pae Hee-kyung, who runs an educational institute near Seoul, told Asia Times.

Across the developed, post-industrial world, middle classes are under perceived siege from falling living standards, evaporating opportunities and rising wealth inequality. These trends have arisen against the backdrop of a globalizing world that distributes capital and jobs away from customary centers of investment, manufacturing and related prosperities.

Some pundits posit that these issues explain Brexit in the UK, the election of Donald Trump in the US and the protests of young Hong Kongers.

The dream turns into a nightmare for many as capital flows to where it is most "productive" (read profitable). A big reason for profitability is the ability to socialize negative externality. In addition, economic value does not take social value into consideration. Is this one of the factors undermining the appeal of capitalism as a socio-economic subsystem of the larger social and ecological system?

Asia Times
75% of young want to escape South Korean ‘Hell’
Andrew Solomon

Arms race ratchets up

Sputnik International
Analysts Explain How China May Respond to US Push to Militarize Asia-Pacific

Deutsche Welle
NATO to beef up in face of 'assertive' Russia

The Cipher Brief
Securing Orbit: Countdown to a Space Corps?

Russia Feed
Crimea has a shipyard ready to build a new fleet of Russian aircraft carriers

USNI
UPDATED: 7 U.S. Aircraft Carriers Are Now Simultaneously Underway
Sam LaGrone

GPA News — Putin Offers Joint Projects to Unite Russia, North and South Korea

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed a conciliatory solution toward resolving the crisis on the Korean peninsula, noting that the incorporation of North Korea into joint development projects across the region could soothe the frayed nerves caused by the region’s militarization and the ratcheting-up of tensions.

Such a move would not only serve mutually-beneficial economic interests of the divided Korean peninsula and Russia, Putin noted, but would help build trust and strengthen stability in the region.... 

Geopolitics Alert

Putin Offers Joint Projects to Unite Russia, North and South Korea
GPA News

William R. Polk — MAYDAY KOREA!

Part one of backgrounder on Korea. It's a must-read for understanding the situation today.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
MAYDAY KOREA!
William R. Polk

Federico Pieraccini — Major Developments Strongly Suggest the End of Unipolar World Order

Recent years have seen a mounting showdown between the old world order configuration based on chaos and destruction and led by Washington, and the new multipolar order that focuses on win-win opportunities, dialogue and sincere cooperation. If Washington decides not to accept the new rules of the game, where it can no longer dictate the law, it will end up producing more damage against itself than any foreign country could actually do, in actual fact accelerating the formation of the multipolar world and putting to bed the unipolar world order for good....

Strategic Culture Foundation
Major Developments Strongly Suggest the End of Unipolar World Order

Federico Pieraccini

John Ross — 'Made in China 2025' key to China's development

I've hit the main points and omitted the data to shorten the article. China is following the highly successful South Korean development model.

"Made in China 2025," the program launched by China's government to establish the country as a global high-tech manufacturing economy, is the strategic key to China's development. An analysis of why this is the case also highlights the key overall challenges facing China's economy.

The specific aims of "Made in China 2025" are to emphasize innovation-driven, high-quality manufacturing and to raise the domestically-produced proportion of key manufacturing components to 70 percent by 2025. The program highlights 10 key manufacturing sectors for radical upgrading, including information technology, mechanized tools and robotics, aerospace, railways, power equipment, biotechnology and high-end medical products. But the program's most crucial aim of all is to create an advanced manufacturing industry to support China's overall development.

The most fundamental development issue facing China is simple. China is now either the world's second-largest economy as measured at current dollar exchange rates, or the world's largest economy as measured by purchasing power parity, or PPP. But China's per capita GDP still lags far behind that of developed economies, particularly the United States, the world's most advanced economy.…

As living standards are approximately proportional to per capita GDP, and as the latter also reflects productivity, China's key task in ensuring its prosperity is to reduce the gap in per capita GDP between itself and the world's most advanced economies.…

To summarize, the truly outstanding successes in development strategy over the past three decades have been in South Korea and China, while the development strategies of most advanced economies during this period have largely been a failure.

Turning from the data to its explanation, the feature that distinguishes China and South Korea from the world's other economies is clear: Both focused on the development of the manufacturing industry. China has become the world's largest industrial producer, overtaking the U.S., while key South Korean manufacturing companies such as Samsung and Hyundai have become major global brands. International data shows that large companies have higher productivity on average than small companies….

It is also striking that the two advanced economies that have lost the least ground relative to the U.S. (with the exception of the U.K.) are Germany and Japan, both of which are dominated by the manufacturing industry. More recently, the U.S. itself has been the only major advanced economy in which manufacturing output has exceeded levels seen before the international financial crisis.

This data clearly shows why "Made in China 2025" is the decisive strategic initiative for China. It also corrects a frequent misunderstanding of the process of global economic development. The data clearly shows that the decreasing prevalence of manufacturing and the rise of service industries in most advanced economies has been a sign of economic failure, not success.…

Globally, the two economies that have concentrated the most on developing their manufacturing industries - South Korea and China - have been the most successful in terms of relative economic development. India's recent shift toward emphasizing manufacturing with its "Make in India" campaign follows the same logic. Manufacturing is clearly key to the most successful economic development. This is the context of "Made in China 2025."

But while manufacturing will be strategically decisive for China for an entire era, the type of manufacturing which has to be undertaken needs to radically change. Numerous studies confirm economic theory's prediction that industries dependent on low wages - various types of textile or toy production, for example - or dependent solely on assembly cannot provide a strategic way forward for China at its present level of development.…

Global trends clearly show that increasingly advanced manufacturing will be the key to the overall success of China's economic development. This is why "Made in China 2025" is so crucial.

China.org.cn

'Made in China 2025' key to China's development

John Ross

James Fallows — How the World Works

Weekend reading

Americans persist in thinking that Adam Smith's rules for free trade are the only legitimate ones. But today's fastest-growing economies are using a very different set of rules.

Friedrich List, Alexander Hamilton, and the American system.

Today's Anglo-American world view rests on the shoulders of three men. One is Isaac Newton, the father of modern science. One is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of liberal political theory. (If we want to keep this purely Anglo-American, John Locke can serve in his place.) And one is Adam Smith, the father of laissez-faire economics. From these founding titans come the principles by which advanced society, in the Anglo-American view, is supposed to work. A society is supposed to understand the laws of nature as Newton outlined them. It is supposed to recognize the paramount dignity of the individual, thanks to Rousseau, Locke, and their followers. And it is supposed to recognize that the most prosperous future for the greatest number of people comes from the free workings of the market. So Adam Smith taught, with axioms that were enriched by David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, and the other giants of neoclassical economics.

The most important thing about this summary is the moral equivalence of the various principles. Isaac Newton worked in the realm of fundamental science. Without saying so explicitly, today's British and American economists act as if the economic principles they follow had a similar hard, provable, undebatable basis. If you don't believe in the laws of physics—actions create reactions, the universe tends toward greater entropy—you are by definition irrational. And so with economics. If you don't accept the views derived from Adam Smith—that free competition is ultimately best for all participants, that protection and interference are inherently wrong—then you are a flat-earther.

Outside the United States and Britain the matter looks quite different. About science there is no dispute. "Western" physics is the physics of the world. About politics there is more debate: with the rise of Asian economies some Asian political leaders, notably Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, and several cautious figures in Japan, have in effect been saying that Rousseau's political philosophy is not necessarily the world's philosophy. Societies may work best, Lee and others have said, if they pay less attention to the individual and more to the welfare of the group.

The Atlantic (1993)
How the World Works

James Fallows | national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly

Steven Denney — South Korea’s Changing Attitudes on Inequality and Capitalism

Are Koreans becoming disenchanted with the local brand of capitalism?

The South Korean National Assembly (which has been uncharacteristically productive as of late) recently passed welfare reform legislation (three bills in total) to fix holes in the social safety net. Korean media identifies the impetus for the reform as coming from a particularly tragic triple suicide that occurred earlier this year, in which a mother and her two daughters took their own lives because of physical and financial hardships. As one illustration at the Hankyoreh suggests: The welfare system is broken and little is being done to help those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. One might reasonably expect that social dislocations in the era of neo-liberal capitalism in South Korea might negatively affect how Koreans view the capitalism economic system. Indeed, the structure of South Korea’s economy and how Koreans view it has been the focus of more recent work on South Korean political culture.

The Diplomat

South Korea’s Changing Attitudes on Inequality and Capitalism
Steven Denney

Al Jazeera — China draws 'red line' on North Korea

China has declared a "red line" on North Korea, saying it will not permit chaos or war on the Korean peninsula, and that denuclearisation is the only way to achieve peace....

"The Korean peninsula is right on China's doorstep. We have a red line, that is, we will not allow war or instability on the Korean peninsula," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters on Saturday, on the sidelines of China's annual largely toothless parliament.

Al Jazeera
China draws 'red line' on North Korea
via Reuters

John Upton — Japan and other nations say no to U.S. wheat, worried about GMOs

Japan cancelled a bid on 27,500 tons of Pacific Northwest wheat on Thursday....

Other international buyers also reacted negatively to the news, with South Korea suspending its tenders to import U.S. wheat and European Union countries being urged to step up genetic testing of American imports. Taiwan said it may seek assurances that all imported wheat from the U.S. is GMO-free, the Wall Street Journal‘s MarketWatch reports.

Grist
Japan and other nations say no to U.S. wheat, worried about GMOs
John Upton