South Korea

“What you get back everywhere in the world is, like, I'm doing great. Everyone's anxiety is based on their understanding of everyone else. Which everyone else literally disagrees with. Like, so, we all think everyone else is doing bad, and everything else is ge…”

“He and other major Korean business leaders had been making regular payments to Korean presidents as a matter of routine, For decades. Under Park Chung-hee, it was roughly five hundred million won twice a year.”

“At nine hundred and thirty-one million dollars, it was roughly half the Korean government's entire annual budget. It was the single largest construction contract ever awarded to any company in the history of the world.”

“Hyundai alone spent over eight million dollars to buy 1900 pieces of heavy equipment for the project. The entire nation of Korea at the time owned only 1400 such machines.”

“Korea then spent close to six billion dollars on the games themselves, and you could see the country's ambition in every line item.”

“When they ranked the Asian countries most likely to industrialize, Burma and the Philippines were near the top. Korea was near the bottom.”

“Chung did not build that alone. Millions of Korean workers, dozens of other entrepreneurs, and several presidents all contributed. But no single private individual had a larger hand in what happened.”

“When he died in 2001, South Korea was the world's 11 largest economy. Per capita GDP was roughly 11,000 dollars. That is a hundred and forty-fold increase in a single human lifetime.”

“He was the first South Korean civilian to cross the border since the country was split in half.”

“By behaving this way, Chung was making Hyundai regime-proof. Other Korean companies won contracts through political relationships. They prospered as long as their patrons held office. But the moment the political ones shifted, and in Korea they shifted constan…”

“While many people think of Hyundai as a car company, at its peak, it accounted for 16% of South Korea's entire economic output.”