On the evening of April 15, 2014, around 9:00 p.m. KST, the South Korean ferry MV Sewol finally left the dock. The scheduled departure was delayed from 6:30 p.m. due to heavy fog, making it the only ship to leave the port that evening. On board were 476 passengers, 325 of whom were Danwon High School students, embarking on a trip to Jeju, one of the most beautiful (and popular) islands in South Korea.
Such a large trip was uncommon for schools, and this one was particularly special. It marked one of the last opportunities for the students to spend time with friends, as college preparation ramped up. South Korea’s main college entrance exam, Suneung, is one of the hardest in the world: an 8‑hour test covering five areas of study. Many students work late into the night for years, with a common saying that sleeping only 3–4 hours a night is what it takes to reach the top “SKY” universities: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University. Even still, some years have had no perfect scores at all.
Not even a full day later, the ferry would sink, resulting in the deaths of 304 of its passengers, over 80% of whom were children. Only 75 of the students would survive.
South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, would later say “the conduct of the captain and some crew members […] was like an act of murder that cannot and should not be tolerated.” Two years later, she was impeached. By 2017, she would be brought before a criminal court, accused of corruption and abuse of power, and on April 6, 2018, South Korean courts officially sentenced her to 24 years in prison.
The ferry sank because of a combination of lax regulations, poor safety inspections, and a slow and poorly coordinated coast guard response. The MV Sewol was carrying over three times its maximum load limit, and had reduced its ballast to make more room for freight, carrying an estimated load of 3,608 tons, 266% over the ship’s stated maximum limit. In court, the ferry’s first mate testified he raised concerns about the boat's stability on several occasions, including the day before setting sail, but the head of the operating company's logistics division had just shrugged him off: “He asked the division head to stop loading cargo because the ship might sink because of its weight. [...] It appears that such a practice was not uncommon," said a prosecutor on the investigation team. According to prosecutors, more than 300 deaths could have been avoided had the crew acted differently.
The thing is, tragedies like this aren't isolated incidents on the peninsula. In fact, in the same year, Samsung came under intense scrutiny after a string of their employees developed leukemia, lupus, and lymphoma as a result of their work in wet-etching, a chemical-based process used in the production of semiconductors. Workers were exposed to benzene, trichloroethylene, ethylene oxide, Arsine gas, and arsenic trioxide, which are known or likely human carcinogens, resulting in 320 employees developing serious illnesses, and 118 of them passing away.
A "die-in" protest performance organized by a coalition of labor and civil society groups in front of the National Assembly in Seoul.
While the company was forced to establish a landmark ₩150 million-per-case (US$130,000) compensation fund, plus ₩50 billion donated to worker-safety organizations, no Samsung officials were criminally charged or jailed in connection with the scandal. Assuming they compensated all 320 employees, plus the donation, that would add up to be around US$80 million. In the first quarter of 2014, Samsung made around US$50 billion. A drop in the bucket.
So, how? How do they get away with it? It’s actually quite simple: money. The top four chaebols, or large family-owned conglomerates, account for over 40% of the nation's GDP in 2023. The host of a popular South Korean economics podcast, Woo Suk-hoon, even went so far as to say “the Samsung chairman is more powerful than the South Korean president.” Some refer to the country as "the Republic of Samsung."
According to the New Yorker, “closer examination of the Sewol sinking expose[d] structural flaws directly and indirectly tied to Korea’s extraordinary economic development. The cozy relationship between government and industry, which allows leading companies to obtain safety certification from regulators they pay off, has long been a fact of business. So has a reliance on short-term labor, which is cost-effective, but discourages the proper training of employees—like the Sewol crew—in emergency preparedness."
The article is right. But the rot doesn't stop at safety shortcuts and rubber-stamp regulators. The same logic—growth at all costs, accountability for none—has been quietly eating the country from the inside for decades, and now they’re faced with the consequences.
South Korea has the lowest fertility rate ever recorded in human history: 0.72 children per woman in 2023. In Seoul, it drops further still, to 0.55. To put that in blunt terms: if nothing changes, 100 South Koreans today will become 36 in the next generation, then 13, then 5. Within four generations, a country of 51 million people will collapse to the size of a mid-sized city.
The system that Samsung and its peers built—and that the government has protected—demands brutal hours from workers with little to show for it. South Korea has among the longest working hours in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with unpaid overtime so normalized that in 2023 the government floated raising the legal maximum to 69 hours a week. Despite this, wages remain low relative to costs: the Bank of Korea found that South Korea's cost of living sits 55% above the OECD average, with food prices 55% higher and housing costs climbing even faster. In Seoul, the housing price-to-income ratio surged from 8.6 to nearly 13 times over the last decade. To even qualify for marriage, an all-but-mandatory step before having children in a country where only 4.7% of births happen out of wedlock, young Koreans are expected to own property they can't afford.
And even if they manage to do so, the cost of raising a child in this system is staggering. Three-quarters of Korean students attend private cram schools on top of regular school, a direct product of a cutthroat admissions pipeline that feeds into a job market controlled by the same handful of conglomerates at the top. Korean families spend a greater share of household income on education than nearly any other OECD country. The normalization of a system in which you work yourself to exhaustion, pay through the nose to live, and spend a second income on your child's tutoring, only to hand them back over to the same system, has made parenthood feel less like a choice and more like a punishment.
And young Koreans, especially young women, have noticed.
By 2060, South Korea's population could shrink by 30%. Its workforce, from 37 million people today, down to just 17 million. The pension fund, currently one of the largest in the world at $730 billion, is projected to be completely depleted by the mid-2050s, leaving a generation of elderly with nothing, in a country where 40% of those over 65 already live below the poverty line. GDP is expected to peak sometime in the 2040s and begin a permanent contraction. South Korea will still be, technically, at war with the North, and it will have less than a third of today's military-age men to call on.
Decades of spectacular growth bought a country that is now too expensive to live in, too demanding to start a family in, and too unequal to build a future in. The chaebols captured the gains. Everyone else inherited the consequences.
The MV Sewol sank because the people responsible for safety decided the cargo was worth more than the risk. South Korea's demographic collapse follows the same logic. The weight was always going to be too much. They just told the crew to stop complaining.
