11–20 of 150 posts
I didn’t get the sense it was class strife. The main family was a bunch of scumbags. They lied and cheated constantly. I didn’t get the sense that they represented the lower class because the others around them weren’t like that. It makes it harder to argue this represents class struggle when the main family is so deceitful and undeserving of benefits.
We have free and universal health care, free schools, and free universities. There are many things to improve, but it is there for the rush and poor alike. Some schools and pregnant mothers receive rations, and there is always some sort of social benefits in place.
Sure, the poverty exists, but one of the reasons why it is still working is because majority of the population does not live in urban areas. There is a trend of good schools, hospitals, and government offices being located to the capital, where land prices skyrocketed and poor neighborhoods exist. But I think our governments strategy in spreading the resources throughout the island is a great one.
Countries like South Korea, India, Japan, Phillipines, and China has a relatively higher amount of homeless or near-homeless population because of the high urbanization. They systematically bring the costs high for everyone.
6 of the top 10 Forbes list in Korea are self-made; the other 4 inherited their wealth. In contrast, 10 out of top 10 are self-made in the US. There are better metrics to compare social mobility (this one was convenient!), but scanning down the Korea list, it's clear the tech boom provided opportunities for entrepreneurs to build wealth in Korea, but most of the wealth is still held by descendants of the big conglomerates (Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Lotte, etc.).
While Parasite is hit in the US, the perspective that it's impossible for basement dwellers to make it to nice mansions may be true in Korea, but it doesn't seem to be the case in the US.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/korea-billionaires/list/#tab:overall
I didn’t get the sense it was class strife. The main family was a bunch of scumbags. They lied and cheated constantly. I didn’t get the sense that they represented the lower class because the others around them weren’t like that. It makes it harder to argue this represents class struggle when the main family is so deceitful and undeserving of benefits.
They lied and cheated constantly because they were forced to due their poverty. It is absolutely a movie about class inequality and resentment.
If all four of them worked 40hrs/wk doing a minimum wage job ($7/hr in S.Korea), it puts them around $59k/yr, which is above the median household income.
ITT: Exactly the people the movie was making fun of
As much as it pointed out the serious inequality issues facing South Korea, the movie also highlighted the fact that the poor in South Korea have access to healthcare free at the point of service. It also depicted young people who, despite their poverty, had enough access to schooling that they could serve as English tutors to the wealthy (yes, I'm aware that SK's education system has other issues related to it being…
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Fo...
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2011/7/11/saupload_t...
They did this by opening up and adopting a more modern market oriented approach, mixed with limited state run organizations.
They had some rational social programs in place where externalities in the market weren't being appropriately accounted for, or where market forces were simply immoral (high costs for sick people). But notably didn't over commit to some intense socialist movements like a lot South American countries - who went well beyond public health insurance buying into the Bolivar nonsense - countries in the early/mid 2000s who are only now recovering from yrs of "post-capitalist" experiments which only resulted in mass needless poverty for their citizens in countries which should have been the wealthiest in the region. With people lining up for food rations like its the 1930s Russia and having severely reduced variety of products to select from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarianism
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Economy_of_Venezuela [note they were having food shortages and starvation before the oil crisis, the entire system was always unsustainable mirage stirred up with anti-western conspiracy theories of non-existent direct intervention].
The most famous moment on the Ruskies abandoning communism in the late 1980s was that Russians leader visiting an American grocery store and seeing the massive options available, at good prices, to regular middle class citizens. Also note the first thing Venezuela did was claim "access to food was a right" and nationalized a bunch of food industries, quickly resulting in mass starvation and shortages within a few short years.
It would streamline the whole system to just admit Medicare for all is the solution and pushing burderns placed on employers, or worse deterring entrepreneurship by making it super expensive for self-employed people to turn into net job creators - there's tons of pro-market benefits to a state run public insurance policy - especially when the alternative is the current pseudo-private mess they currently have.
Having public health insurance, with some occasional private options, like what we have in Canada is far far more limited than some of the socialist experiments the Bolivars promoted and destroyed multiple countries around them, including Ecuador. So even calling it socialist is probably doing it a disservice. It is state-capitalism, where the state part is the exception to the rule.
Nor did Canada adopt the more heavy-handed approach of the NIH in the UK which nationalized hospitals and a bunch of other pieces of the puzzle which were running perfectly fine independently.
The simplest solutions that are properly tied into incentives is always what works best here.
Even today there are plenty of arguments where the US system is essentially already borerline "socialist" healthcare system but with far fewer of the benefits of either markets or altruistic public run insurance. So 'staying the course' doesn't sound like much of a solution either, besides letting political friends in medicare fleece the government through cronyism.
It won't stop because with the constant local, congressional, and executive meddling to create these "pseudo-markets" which provide few benefits of actual competitive markets nor the central negotiation power of a centralized public insurance program.
And I say that as someone who in most other cases I would learn fiscally conservative.
As much as it pointed out the serious inequality issues facing South Korea, the movie also highlighted the fact that the poor in South Korea have access to healthcare free at the point of service. It also depicted young people who, despite their poverty, had enough access to schooling that they could serve as English tutors to the wealthy (yes, I'm aware that SK's education system has other issues related to it being…
“ Mr. Kim owns his place in the building, bought for $30,000 after he sold his house in a better neighborhood 20 years ago to help pay for his late wife’s cancer bills.” How does that fit into universal health care?
My mother got full cancer treatment for free*, but the wards were always full, and she stayed at home so someone from out of town could have a place to stay. The hospitals didn't have the right to force patients to go home though; they just asked nicely if they wouldn't mind staying elsewhere.
One unrealistic part about the poor family in the movie is that, there is no way a family of four healthy adults can be that poor in S.Korea (unless they have a large debt payment). If all four of them worked 40hrs/wk doing a minimum wage job ($7/hr in S.Korea), it puts them around $59k/yr, which is above the median household income.
I am not sure what the actual job situation in S. Korea is. Perhaps someone that lives there can enlighten us.
