ai · June 27, 2026

In 1953, South Korea had a per-capita income lower than that of Somalia or Haiti — and within roughly seventy years, it became the world’s tenth-largest economy and the dominant global producer of memory chips, in the fastest national economic transformation in modern history

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In 1953, South Korea had a per-capita income lower than that of Somalia or Haiti — and within roughly seventy years, it became the world’s tenth-largest economy and the dominant global producer of memory chips, in the fastest national economic transformation in modern history

The economic case for South Korea’s hopelessness was, in 1953, structurally compelling. The Korean Peninsula had been a single country until 1945, when the defeat of Imperial Japan resulted in its pa… [+8867 chars]