Reporter’s Notebook: A Society Where You Can Live Even Without Becoming a ‘Dragon’

The era when “dragons” could rise from humble streams is over. Everyone already feels this in their daily lives. A recent report by the Bank of Korea (BOK) confirmed that parents’ wealth and income are passed down to their children. This is captured by a relative rank slope (RRS) of 0.25. If parents move up 10 places in the income ranking out of 100, their children’s rank rises by an average of 2.5 places. The relative rank slope for assets is even steeper at 0.38.
In the end, it is hard to raise your income or build assets without parental backing. This intergenerational transmission is also tied to regional economic gaps. Being born in the greater Seoul metropolitan area—and managing not to be pushed out of it—significantly increases your chances of success. If you are born in the provinces, you often have to move closer to the capital region to escape the limits you were born with.
In reality, both people and companies are leaving non-capital regions. They are simply following better education infrastructure and higher-quality job markets. There is even a joke that in Busan, the country’s second-largest city, the only people you meet are bank employees, civil servants, and schoolteachers. Ordinary office workers, aside from those in essential occupations, are said to be disappearing.
Underlying all these discussions is a grand premise: that you must become a “dragon.” The desire for economic and social upward mobility is part of human nature, and it deserves encouragement. Yet one thing is certain: not everyone can become a dragon. If so, we need to build an environment where those who never turn into dragons—the lesser creatures in the legend, or even the small loaches—can still live decent lives.
Yet the current agenda in our society is focused on how to pull talented people stuck in the regions up to Seoul and turn them into elites, or how to revitalize local areas so that these talents can become top achievers without leaving home. This is a conversation for the top 1%. When all our energy goes into this, competition within that 1% becomes overheated, while the remaining 99% are left struggling with a deep sense of defeat.
Now we should let dragons soar as they will, but shift our focus to widening the stream and finding ways for many different creatures to coexist. Kang Jun-man, an emeritus professor at Jeonbuk National University (JBNU), pointed this out long ago in his book *We Should Not Have Dragons Rising from Streams*. He wrote, "We do not stop to think about how many people must taste frustration and a sense of defeat because they failed to become dragons." We need a society where you do not feel anxious just because you are not a dragon. That means narrowing the excessive gaps between large and small companies, high- and low-income groups, the highly educated and the less educated, middle-aged and young people, and the capital region and the provinces. At the same time, those on the lower side of these divides must be guaranteed a second chance, which they are rarely given now. We need safety nets that can catch people when they fall at least once. Only then can we break the formula that says, “If you are not a success, you are automatically a failure.”
taeil0808@fnnews.com Reporter