A business article entitled "One Out of Every Five Households Makes More Than W5 Million a Month" was published online on Sunday. Newswire service Yonhap wrote the article based on data from the National Statistical Office. It generated a tremendous amount of critical response from readers.
Some lambasted the reporter who wrote the article, while others voiced skepticism over the validity of the government data. Others said the article was meant to make rich people feel less guilty, while others said the remaining four households probably made less than W2 million a month. Statistics aren't just created from scratch.
Yet public sentiment has become so sensitive that even "objective" statistical data can draw angry responses and skepticism. In retrospect, the late 1980s and early 1990s can be characterized as a period of "middle-class inflation," when we were all looking forward to the dreams offered by a middle-class lifestyle. We were happy with the "my car, my home" lifestyle of the middle class, contentedly driving our compact passenger cars on family trips to amusement parks on Sundays. But we have been witnessing "middle-class deflation" since the Asian financial crisis. More and more "middle-class stragglers" have emerged as jobs disappear as a result of corporate bankruptcies.
And a tremendous split has taken place within the ranks of the middle class. Reasons cited include rifts in wealth and income caused by factors such as whether one works for a major business conglomerate or a small company, whether one's job is in Seoul or outside of the capital, whether one lives in the affluent Gangnam area south of the Han River or north of it, or whether one is a full-time or contract worker. The sense of being a part of the middle class has crumbled more than an actual drop in the numbers of Koreans who qualify as middle class. Former president Roh Moo-hyun used this change in social status to stir up antagonism between the rich and poor for political purposes.
The average monthly wage of Koreans is W3.46 million (US$1=W1,448) for the third quarter of 2008. A pre-tax income of W5 million a month is what Koreans falling into the uppermost ranks of the middle class earn a month. The typical profile of such a wage earner is an executive in his 40s at a large business conglomerate or a dual-income couple in their 30s living in Seoul. But when asked whether they feel like they are "middle class," most people falling into the highest ranks of the middle class say they are not sure. They face the same hardships posed by sky-high real estate and consumer prices in Seoul and the cost of private crammers for their children, while being gripped by fears of potential redundancy due to the global economic crisis.
In the past, 70 to 80 percent of Koreans said they were middle class. But some surveys show just one in four Koreans feel they are middle class. David Brooks, a journalist famous for his book "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There," which analyzed the new elite class of American society, recently wrote a column in the New York Times entitled "The Formerly Middle Class." He forecast that a large number of Americans will lose their homes and jobs due to the economic crisis and be excluded from the middle class. He also predicted that these middle-class stragglers will form a new social force and could spearhead movements due to their discontent. A similar shock may await Korean society due to the impact of the global economic crisis a decade after the Asian financial crisis. According to the National Statistical Office, the relatively poor class (those who earn less than half the wage of middle-class Koreans) accounted for 17.5 percent of the population, which was far higher than the OECD average (10.8 percent). There are still too many poor people in our society.
The conservative Lee Myung-bak administration was elected into office by a public that had grown weary of 10 years of rule by liberal governments. But the Lee administration must pay much more attention than previous liberal governments to so-called "left-leaning social welfare policies" such as reducing inequality between the rich and the poor and rescuing the poor in order to reduce social tensions. The administration must not give the impression that it is only interested in backing the top 20 percent of the wage pyramid. By focusing on "social cohesion" and a sense of "solidarity," the Lee administration must engender a top 20 percent that embraces a responsible attitude toward the other 80 percent. Unless we tend to troubled public sentiment as soon as possible, our society may end up paying dearly.
By Kang Kyung-hee from the Chosun Ilbo's News Desk