South Koreans half as productive as Americans?

That's what the latest figures say. Back in May Forbes magazine ranked South Koreans as the hardest working people in the world, and we all had fun chuckling about the flexible definitions of "busy" and "work" around here. I still remember life at my first hagwon, when we were required to come into work at 3, prep for an hour, then take an hour off for dinner, prep some more, and finally teach from 5:30 to 11. When we had meetings they weren't held during these two-and-a-half hours, but were scheduled earlier in the afternoon. The Korean teachers would come in even earlier, often around lunch time, but would pass a lot of their evenings napping or updating their Cyworld pages or doing some online shoppping, because there's really only so much work to be done during an eleven-hour day.

But productive is such a loaded word, and I'm pretty sure the KT editors were aware of it. Some Koreans have a flair for feigned self-depracation when it gives them the opportunity to both call attention to their acknowledged disadvantages and reaffirm their strengths when they respond to perceived slights. On that self-depracation theme is this line:

The institute suggested that Korea make all-out efforts to strengthen the competitiveness of its services sector in order to join the ranks of advanced countries.

Now, as we know South Korea ranking near the top 10 largest economies in the world is usually a great source of local pride, as it should be. But you'll notice that South Koreans sometimes refer to themselves as citizens of a developing nation, or one aspiring to the company of acknowledged powers like Japan and Western Europe, in order to backpeddle and save some face. See point number eleven of Roboseyo's post last month for a little more. Then, when people focus on South Korea's size, or provide what's considered dated information about the country, BAM, out comes the talk about its cutting-edge technology and its awe-inspiring economic development.

Likewise, focusing on quote-unquote productivity, and comparing South Korea's to the United States' will give people who are particularly defensive a chance to point out all of America's flaws, this time by criticizing the article's fixation on quote-unquote productivity from a Western perspective. As a citizen of a reportedly productive nation, I'll gladly save them the trouble. Like I said productive is a very loaded word, and quote-unquote productivity comes at an enormous social cost. I included the following except in a May post about Forbes ranking South Koreans as the longest quote-unquote hardest workers in the world. From the book Confucius Lives Next Door, which deals mainly with Japan and which was talking about how statistics on productivity and diligence are limiting, and cannot be simply examined out of the context of their respective societies:

A more significant explanation for the low rate of unemployment, even in recession, is that the Japanese have made a national calculation of comparative costs. They have decided that the social costs associated with large-scale unemployment would be greater than the costs required to keep people at work. "There are always costs involved in unemployment," the economist Takeuchi Hiroshi, the chief forecaster for the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, explained to me once. "The only question is who bears the expense. In your country, it's usually the worker first, and then the government, and then the society as a whole because you have all those people on the street without a job. In Japan, the company is expected to bear the costs, because that's better for society as a whole."

This policy explains why Japan, despite its emergence as a global financial and industrial power, always rates fairly low on global comparisons of productivity. My economics text defines "productivity" as "the relative efficiency of economic activity---that is, the amount of products or services produced compared to the amount of goods and labor used to produce it." This means that a company or country that turns out a lot of product with few people working on any given job than you would see in another country. In purely industrial terms, low productivity is a Bad Thing; it increases direct costs. But for Japan, low productivity is the secret weapon. It's a key reason why the socieity remains civil, stable, and safe. Other countries have to spend far more money, time, and energy combating crime, drugs, and family decay than Japan spends. So economists may find, when measuring the direct costs of producing a new car, case of beer, microchip, or whatever, that Japan has low productivity. But Japan has also reduced the indirect costs that stem from the rigors of high-productivity societies.