Event

In this talk, Ha-Joon Chang will use the first ever non-English-language winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, Parasite, by Bong Joon-ho, in order to analyse the political economy of inequality in today’s South Korea. Behind the socio-economic ills depicted in the movie, Chang will argue, lies the history of Korea over the last two generations that first created a relatively equal society with high social mobility and optimism for the future and then an increasingly unequal society with falling social mobility and despair and hopelessness for many. Particular attention will be paid to the interactions between the economic structure, the regulatory regime, the welfare state, and the education system that have generated the uniquely Korean dynamic of inequality and conflicts that is so brilliantly portrayed in Parasite.