Long hours, and a book pointed at Korea

The notes open not with a list of twenty-three lessons but with a worry close to home. Korea, they write, still holds among OECD countries a record for the longest working hours, and even so, in the period they are writing about, nearly four million people are drifting without a real job. They ask where the cause of recurring crises, including the foreign-exchange crisis of 1997, might lie, and whether there is a decent remedy for a labour market they call abnormal for an unprecedented share of irregular work. Those counts stay in the window the notes give, not recast as a later official total.

Into that worry they place a book in which Professor Ha-Joon Chang, they say, gathered his views on the live questions of Korean society and the economy. The English title the book is known by is 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism; the notes discuss it under the Korean name 그들이 말하지 않는 23가지.

A family sketch, Cambridge, and a president in Ecuador

The biographical lines are dense, and they are left as the notes write them, not silently tidied into a later official life. Ha-Joon Chang is introduced as the son of former lawmaker Jang Jae-sik, whom the notes also describe as a Bank of Korea governor and, in the Kim Dae-jung government, minister of commerce and industry, and as the elder brother of Jang Ha-sok, whom they call one of Korea’s representative philosophers of science. Chang, they add, has advised the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank as a member of Oxfam, and is also known for a decisive influence on the economic policy of Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa. They even point to a piece by Correa dated 20 May 2006, titled El sofisma del libre comercio.

The career dates are equally the notes’ own. After graduating from the economics department of Seoul National University in 1986, they write, he took a diploma at Cambridge, then finished a master’s and a doctorate each in a year, and in 1990, only four years after leaving for Britain, became a full professor at Cambridge. That compressed timeline stays as they record it.

A round-table, the past, and what to leave the next generation

The report itself is built in sections. After the opening comes a part titled “What on earth is this identity?”, then a harsh critique staged as a round-table, then a walk into the book. Part 1 asks how to judge “our past,” and under that heading the notes flag an irony they phrase as stronger reform meaning deeper dependence, and the name of Park Chung-hee and developmental dictatorship. Part 2 asks what we should do for later generations, and sets down the nature of neoliberalism and a distinction between the chaebol question and the labour movement. The writer of the notes, in short, is less listing twenty-three theses than trying the book against a Korean present. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things, with the labour-market figures and the biographical claims left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026