And So It Will Be

And so it will be.

Korea's arrangement of power and wealth is likely, in the end, to be overturned in a major way. This is not a claim that Koreans are inferior; it is a claim that there is a structural mismatch in how Korean society has connected people's ability to authority and capital. In the OECD's 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, Korean adults averaged 238 points in adaptive problem solving — below the OECD average — with 37% of Korean adults at Level 1 or below in this domain, and only about 1% reaching Level 4, the highest level. Adaptive problem solving, as the OECD defines it, is the ability to define a problem in a dynamic situation where no answer is immediately given, to search for information, to apply solutions, and to revise one's strategy as conditions change. It is not a mere test score; it is a fairly close proxy for the ability to handle uncertain, real-world problems.

More important is the fact that Korea is not simply an under-educated country. In Korea, more highly educated people do show higher adult skills — but even among adults with tertiary education, the average adaptive problem-solving score was 248, low by international comparison, ranking 28th among the 31 participating countries. Korea's problem, in other words, cannot be explained by the single sentence “we did not educate people enough.” The core question is rather how efficiently the country's enormous investment in education and its credential competition convert into actual problem-solving ability and economic productivity.

The OECD's economic analysis of Korea points at this gap even more directly. In Korea, an excessive focus on formal degrees and credentials has produced a race to enter top universities and land good jobs — the so-called “golden ticket syndrome” — and the OECD judges that Korea has little room left to raise productivity much further by adding more education and inputs, as it did in the past. It also notes that competition for university admission leads some people to choose majors that do not match their interests and abilities, so that talent may not be put to its best use.

From here, the problem shifts from “individual ability” to “the allocation of talent.” The OECD's 2025 analysis found that countries with higher adult skills have higher industry productivity, estimating that differences in adult skill levels can explain roughly a quarter of the productivity differences between countries. At the same time, where high-skilled workers are placed — in which firms and which roles — also mattered: countries with less labor-market mismatch, where high-skilled people are allocated to larger and more dynamic firms, were more productive, and these allocation differences could explain more than about 12% of cross-country productivity gaps. How capable people are matters; where that ability is placed, and whether it is actually used, decides a nation's wealth just as much.

In Korea, this problem appears at a substantial scale in practice. According to the OECD's regional labor-market analysis, 44% of Korean workers were in jobs whose typical education level did not match their own, against an OECD regional average of 35%. Producing talent in large quantities and allocating that talent to its most productive positions, it turns out, are separate problems.

And this is where the problem of authority arises. If a person repeatedly works on problems below their ability, or is placed where their expertise and judgment cannot be fully used, their potential productivity never converts into actual productivity. This is not a matter of individual dissatisfaction; it is a problem of economic resource allocation. The OECD likewise points out that in Korea, credentialism, seniority-based careers, and labor-market structures combine to create a real possibility of misallocated human capital and substantial productivity loss — and it finds that objectively measured literacy and tertiary education are more weakly linked to employability in Korea than in other OECD countries.

The structure of authority and reward can work in the same direction. According to the OECD, Korea is the country where seniority has the largest effect on wages among OECD members, and under seniority-based pay, younger workers can be paid below their marginal productivity while long-tenured workers are paid above it. The OECD recommends that Korea shift toward compensating for performance, job content, and required skills.

It is therefore wrong to define Korea's problem simply as “a shortage of good talent.” What matters is how well the chain works: a person's ability → job placement → decision-making authority → responsibility → reward → access to capital. This is exactly what the OECD's productivity research shows. Alongside ability itself, it is the structure that places high-skilled people into productive firms and roles that creates productivity differences. A society that possesses high-skilled talent but fails to give them sufficient authority, adequate capital, and room to grow will hold talent's potential without ever converting it into productivity.

The same problem shows up in corporate structure. The OECD has long noted that Korea's productivity gap by firm size is very large: labor productivity in service SMEs was 40% below that of large manufacturers, and manufacturing SMEs fell to less than a third of large firms' productivity. At the same time, Korea has many startups and young firms, but few small firms become growth firms — in market services, only 2.5% of firms that started with fewer than 10 employees grew, below the roughly 6% average of other OECD countries. Having an idea, and having that idea attract the capital and organization to scale, are entirely different problems.

So the important change ahead is not a simple “swap of the rich and the poor.” More fundamentally, it is a change in the criteria: who is judged worthy of receiving capital, who gets to make an organization's decisions, who can turn their own judgment into real action. If productive talent can reach larger organizations and larger capital, and the results are then evaluated back in capital markets, capital starts to move along new sources of productivity rather than along existing status. This is the OECD's finding on high-skill allocation and productivity, extended into the question of how a whole society allocates capital.

AI may make this shift even larger. The OECD's 2025 report on the Korean labor market explains that AI can be used in organizations for task allocation, evaluation, and monitoring — and that in hierarchical organizations AI can become an “algorithmic cage” that restricts workers' autonomy, while in organizations that leave room for professional judgment it can become an “algorithmic colleague” that supports human decisions. The same technology strengthens control in organizations that push authority top-down, and amplifies individual productivity in organizations that push expertise and judgment downward.

The competition ahead, then, is not a competition over who received more education. It is a competition over who defines problems more precisely, who finds the more important bottleneck, who experiments faster, who takes responsibility for results, and who can connect those results back into the expansion of capital and organization. Given that the OECD's adaptive problem solving covers precisely problem definition, information search, and the adaptation of strategy, it is a capability quite close to what I call “seeing reality at high resolution.”

If so, the direction of change is clear. The more we move from a structure where status creates authority and authority attracts capital, toward one where problem-solving ability and results create authority and results attract capital, the more the existing arrangement of power and wealth is shaken. This is not a change produced by attacking any particular group; it is an economic reallocation that occurs when talent and capital connect in more productive ways. And if the monopoly value of pedigree, seniority, title, and legacy networks falls relative to actual problem-solving and execution, it becomes progressively easier for new firms, new capital, and new talent to route around the existing power structure. That sentence is an inference about the future — but its starting points, the links between skills, talent allocation, productivity, firm growth, and organizational autonomy, rest on the OECD's empirical evidence.

What gets overturned, in the end, is not merely the list of the rich. It is the way authority and capital connect to the people who can create wealth. If the system moves toward valuing where ability is used over how much education was received, which problems were solved over which organization one belonged to, responsibility and results over title, and the ability to create new value over access to existing capital — then the arrangement of wealth and the arrangement of power can only move together. This is the conclusion that follows when Korea's present problem is seen not as a question of individual ability, but as one productivity problem linking the allocation of human capital, the allocation of authority, the growth of firms, and the allocation of capital.

And so, it will be.

Korea's power and wealth will not be overturned by someone on some sudden day. It begins to tip, little by little, the moment authority and capital start connecting faster to the people who read reality at higher resolution and solve the more important bottlenecks. When that change has accumulated enough, people will later call it “a shift of power” — but what actually changed will be the source of power. From status to problem-solving; from seniority to results; from legacy networks to new value creation; from capital held to the ability to move capital productively. The moment that becomes strong enough, the existing map of Korean power and wealth cannot remain what it is.