The idea for “Squid Game” didn’t come out of thin air. “South Korea can be very unforgiving,” Greg Scarlatoiu, the executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea who lived in Seoul for 20 years with his South Korean wife, told The Post. So many people, many of them young, have committed suicide on Seoul’s Mapo Bridge in the past decade that city officials placed suicide prevention messages on the handrails, some reading, “You are a good person.” Suicide has been the number one cause of death for young people since 2007, according to a 2020 report from Statistics Korea. South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Credit cards with enormous limits are easy to obtain - and the impulse to use them is made worse by the intense competitiveness of South Korean society, Kwon and others said. The average Seoul household is $44,000 in debt, according to a 2018 study from the Seoul Institute. It’s now almost double the US average, according to statistics from Nodutdol, a New York-based Korean diaspora organization. Household debt in South Korea, where an average house can now cost upward of a million dollars, has skyrocketed in recent years and is now the highest in Asia. Kwon routinely went to school at 8am, not returning home until 11pm.īut, despite all those years of study and hard work, South Koreans under 40 face daunting economic challenges. Kwon said the education system in particular - especially since the 1970s - was very tough on Korea’s kids.
But all that compressed capitalism made everything a little crazy.” “That eagerness to have a better life led them to do everything they could. “South Koreans were so eager to have better times because we had to go through such hard times,” Jinah Kwon, a lecturer at the Graduate School of International Studies at Korea University told The Post. But by the end of 1996, the country had become the 29th member country of the OECD, which is made up of advanced countries.īut South Koreans, especially millennials and the even younger generation, paid a price for such rapid growth in such a short amount of time, experts say. In 1953, more than half the population of South Korea lived in abject poverty and more than half were illiterate.
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Analysts of both South and North Korea told The Post the series illustrates the flip side of the so-called “Miracle on the Han River” – the astonishing rise of the South Korean economy since the end of the Korean War. “Squid Game” didn’t come out of thin air. The desperation of debt in Korea was drawn on by “Squid Game” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk (left). Earlier this month “Squid Game” creator Hwang Dong-hyuk confirmed he will make a second season. Unfortunately for Angela, the wildly popular and violent series about 456 desperate, debt-ridden South Koreans playing a series of children’s games to see who will survive and win a $38 million prize - and who will be shot in the head at point-blank range - is not going away. “There may be some truth to it but it also makes us (South Koreans) look bad” 1 show on Netflix and a cultural juggernaut that shines a hard, if metaphorical, light on South Korea’s high cost of living and the massive credit card debt and shame that goes along with it. “I don’t ask but I tell him ‘no more money.’”Īngela said she hasn’t seen “ Squid Game,” the No. She said she doesn’t know if he has credit card debt. She was less forthcoming about her son but said he lived above his means in a way that was foreign to her. She’s hesitant to give details - and even asks that an alias be used rather than the American name she’s known as in the salon - but told The Post she disapproved of the expensive handbags, makeup and clothes she found out her married daughter was buying. She still sends money to her older sister - but stopped giving funds to her son and daughter, both in their early 30s, about three years ago. ‘Squid Game’ fans mad at Chrissy Teigen’s theme party: ‘So beyond tone-deaf’Īngela, a 62-year-old owner of a Midtown nail salon, used to send some of her earnings back to some of her relatives in Seoul. ‘Squid Game’ knocked from top Netflix slot by new horror series ‘Hellbound’ ‘Squid Game’ smuggler set to die by firing squad in North Korea: report Red light, green light: YouTuber recreates ‘Squid Game’ with enormous cash prize
