[Good Rich, Bad Rich] Good Rich, Bad Rich

Chairwoman Soonjin Kim! She is now the CEO of Nolboo, the country’s largest franchise group, but 20 years ago she was truly poor. When she came to Seoul in her 30s, her education amounted to only an elementary school diploma, and she had just 200 won to her name. She and her husband opened restaurants selling pork ribs, knife-cut noodles, and grilled hagfish, but they failed time and again.

Then she came up with the idea of popularizing bossam kimchi and opened a tiny 5-pyeong Nolboo Bossam restaurant in Sillim-dong. She continuously studied and reinvented the taste of her kimchi. The result was a huge success.

Her success, and the success of Nolboo Bossam, was the reward for providing customers with good food at affordable prices. Money is like a medal bestowed by the market for that. A rich person who earns a great deal of money by offering customers cheaper and better products than anyone else, and who becomes wealthy by saving prudently, is a good rich person who brings great value to society.

But not all wealthy people in the world are like that. Some become rich by winning the lottery. Such rich people are neither harmful nor beneficial to the world. They became wealthy simply through good luck; they did not harm anyone, nor did they succeed by bringing great value to customers as Chairwoman Soonjin Kim did. Such rich people are neither good nor bad. Likewise, someone who becomes rich through inheritance has neither harmed nor benefited anyone merely by virtue of having inherited wealth.

On the other hand, there are also very harmful rich people. These are people who became rich with money taken from others. Ferdinand Marcos, the late former president of the Philippines, was one such person. He seized the people’s property as if it were his own, spent it, and hid it away in secret Swiss bank accounts. As a result, the people were unable to engage properly in economic activity. Consequently, a country that had once been the second most prosperous in Asia was transformed into one of the world’s largest exporters of domestic workers. He was a bad rich person who harmed others in order to make himself wealthy.

According to the analysis of Professor Dongchul Han, a professor at Seoul Women’s University and president of the Korean Association for Rich Studies, 85% of the wealthy in Korea became rich through business or through rigorous saving. The rest became rich through information 7%, personal connections 4%, birth 2%, marriage 1%, and luck 1%. In other words, at least 85% of Korea’s rich are good rich people. Most of the rest can be seen as neither harmful nor beneficial. There may be some bad rich people who made money through violence, fraud, or deceit, but they account for only a very small minority.

Original title: [좋은 부자, 나쁜 부자] 좋은 부자, 나쁜 부자

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2007-12-17

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=19&idx=10699