Hangseob

About the seeming degradation of younger generation

  1. Human has the tendency of overvaluing their kind and undervaluing other kind: One of the acient Greek book says about young generation are so deplorable.
  2. Older workers think younger ones are less smart, think shallow, underperforming, which is unfair since older ones have a lot more experience which naturally leads to smart work and deep understanding.
  3. They work less hard because they are less desperate, which makes sense. Older generation lived in fear of starvation and losing shelter. When the risk is so dangerous it is natural to break work-life balance in favor of work. But otherwise it is less optimal to maximum happiness , which is natural goal of life.

About seeming less creativity of Asians

  1. It is unfair to compare citizens at the lower level of development and those in the developed one directly: In 2000s Chineses are less hygienic than Koreans but as hygienic as 1980s’ Koreans are.
  2. In 2000s, Koean college students are less creative then Western ones because Korea could only afford 1 teacher for 50 students throughout most of their education and instruction-memorization was the most efficient way in such an environment,
  3. The lack of business strategy consultants in the US compared to other area of consulting such as marketing and IT partly comes from the above, but most of it comes from glass ceiling since strategy consulting is the most prestigious area.

About far lower birth rate of Korea compared to Westerners,.

  1. Happiness gap between us and them, which seems to be the main cause of different birth rate exists not because living here is harsher in terms of economy and wealth. People below poverty line is scarer here (see number of the homeless and beggers)

    It is because Korean and other similar low-birth-rate Asian countries (Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore) have a uniform way to measure people’s social status. Under which, it is hard to optimal-bias one’s social position. For the sake of simpler explanation allow me to use simplistic numbers here. Average Asians (at top 50% social position) regard themselves as at top 40%, while average Westerners regard themselves as at top 30% since they have more diverse lifestyles. So on average we are less happy.

About possible harm of smart phone use at early age.

  1. 70% of my useful and essential lessons comes from comics, which was our generations’ smartphone when we are growing-up: It was unanimoously judged as harmful by parents then.

    I think the quality and quantity of lesson comes from intensity of your attention. Every media has its own up and down side which, I think, is marginal after netting the positive and negative effects. But your attention intensity varies a lot. For me, the strong attration toward comics made me strongly absorbing the best details of information and think deeply about the emotional effect and philosophy of the story not to mention the enhancement of visualization capacity which lead to high score on geometry. (or it may be the other way around. My keen sense of geometry may lead me to the enjoyment of comics drawing)

  2. On ethical ground, I can not limit my children’s screen time. My comics reading was 100% Okay with my mon when I was at my kids’ ages. Isn’t it unfair that I was allowed all the liberty of doing socially rennounced entertainment then I disallow my kids?