South Korea's Fast-Growing Inequality

Thomas Piketty took the world tour for his blockbuster bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century to South Korea earlier this month. But one local power suit didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet. Center for Free Enterprise chief Hyun Jin-kwon complained just before Piketty’s arrival that the French economist “provokes our natural feelings of envy for other people’s success and contends that we can resolve this envy by raising taxes on a small number of people.”

If Piketty’s perspective gains any traction, Hyun Jin-kwon added, “the Korean legend of economic growth will end with our generation.”
Some feel that legend may have already ended. South Korea’s bottom 90 percent accounted for 70.8 percent of national income in 1995, but take only 55.1 percent today.

from here