Odd Lots - What Boy Band Sensation BTS Can Teach Us About Economics

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

South Korean boy band BTS is rarely connected to economics, but as the biggest success to come out of K-Pop, it arguably should be. On this week's episode of Odd Lots, we speak to Euny Hong, the author of 'The Birth of Korean Cool,' about how South Korea made cultural exports a key plank in its economic development strategy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to Oddlots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa, play the podcast, OddLots on Amazon music. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. So, Joe, you know I went to South Korea for the first time a month or two ago? I know. And I was super jealous of it because you posted a bunch of awesome food picks. and it's just a place I've always wanted to go. So thank you for rubbing it in. Yeah, I'm sorry.

I did eat a lot of Korean fried chicken. And I sort of regretted it afterwards, but at the time, it was a really good idea. Okay, so what's the point? What do you try other than reminding me that because of where you live, you get to eat much better food than me all the time, you're always posting about it? What else you're trying to tell me here?

Okay, well, it was my first time in South Korea, despite the fact that I grew up in Asia and spent a lot of time in the region. And I learned a lot in just a few days in Seoul. And one of the things I learned, and this probably won't come as a surprise to anyone with teenage kids, is that K-pop is really, really big in South Korea. I guess I'm not really surprised that it's really, really big in South Korea. but what I am struck by, and it's one of these facets of modern pop culture that I feel incredibly ignorant on, obviously as one gets older, particularly when it relates to music, you sort of grow more and more out of touch. But the degree to which K-pop is this global phenomenon kind of blows my mind.

I think I saw this, like, there was like this piece on Axios I saw a week or two ago. there's a band called BTS, right? They're really huge. Oh my gosh, Joe. Yes, there is a band called BTS. They had a little story about how any time and any news organization does a piece on them, their traffic absolutely goes through the roof. So, A, as an editor, I was like, oh, we should probably write more about them.

B, we should probably, I'm glad we're sort of hitting on this in a podcast because maybe we can like include it in the title and maybe we could get tons of listeners from their, gigantic global fan base. Like we deserve some of that, some of that traffic bump. Oh, you're so Machiavellian about this whole thing, Joe. So, so listen, so I went to Seoul, learned a lot about K-pop and K-culture, came away with a minor addiction to a certain K-drama. And then I started

encouraging everyone in our newsroom to actually write more about this stuff. And I got a little bit of a reputation for like, for being obsessed with K-pop. But the reason I'm obsessed with K-pop is not because of traffic, as you point out. It's because there's actually a really interesting economics and market story behind how K-pop got so popular, both within South Korea and globally. I'm really fascinated by this because even excluding K-pop or Korea's cultural exports in general, Korea has a history of sort of turning conventional wisdom, particularly around economics on its head. And so all of the so-called rules about how a country is supposed to develop

its economy tend to die when you look at the Korean story. It's a country that's gotten very rich by at every step of the way, flouting expectations about how things are supposed to be done, how you nurture a new industry. And so this idea of cultural exports fitting into a sort of broader Korean story is an incredibly fascinating one. Right. And not just nurture any industry, right? We're talking about creative industries. So how does a country or government actually go about encouraging people to be more creative? That's what we're going to talk about today. So to do that, we have the perfect person. She's a journalist and the author of a book that I read a few months before going to Seoul. Her name is Uni Hong and the book is The Birth of Korea Cool, how one nation is conquering. the world through pop culture. So really everything we were just talking about. Uni, it's so nice to have you on the show.

Hi, thanks for having me. How are you? Good, thanks. So I guess just to lay the groundwork, it might be nice for you to give us an overview of where South Korea was a few decades ago. Because I think nowadays, most people are used to talking about it as this sort of tech powerhouse, you know,

Samsung, manufacturing of a big proportionate. of the world's semiconductor chips. That's how most people know it. But just a little while ago, it wasn't actually anything close to that. Well, that's exactly right. I mean, right after the Korean War, which ended in 1953, South Korea was actually one of the poorest nations on the planet. It was poorer than most of South Saharan Africa.

And for decades, it was actually even poorer than North Korea. And that didn't really change until the 60s. when President Park Jong-hee, who was the father of the former female president, that was his daughter, Park Gun-Heh. But Park-Jun-Hi had this policy that basically was the birth of the birth of Korean Kool, if you want to put it that way. And he was the guy who came up to the idea of the Korean government cooperating closely with Korean private industry.

So ever since then, the government has assisted in the ecosystem that props Shandhi and Samsung, and more recently, I mean, President Park has been did for a long time, but his legacy continued. More recently, the government is also propping up K-pop and K-dramas and all of the, what you would associate with the Korean wave cultural products, including makeup and movies and even food. Oh, yeah, I didn't even mention the face masks. I should have mentioned I bought so many face masks in Seoul.

So I said at the beginning that what I love about the Korean development story is the degree to which it sort of flouts conventional wisdom about how a country can develop. And I think that if you, you know, talk to most Western economists, there's this view of, you know, open up free markets. Don't try to pick winners and losers within the economy. Don't try to have centralized planning of key industries. And as you mentioned, starting in the 60s, Korea's success in going from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest countries in the world involved a heavy degree of intertwinedness between the government and the private sector. Oh, yes. Well, that's spot on. And basically, South Korea is the only capitalist country in the world that can, when necessary, behave like a command economy.

So, for example, in the U.S., you can't have President Trump forcing out. to stop making watches or they you know he couldn't say to Jeff Bays that was uh you know I don't understand this drone thing can you please focus on books or something like that but in Korea the president and the government has always had the capacity to do that and it's not by coercion or force it's because Koreans on the whole believe that as the expression goes a rising tide uh boys all six so that's uh the rule breaking that you were referring to just now about how they broke all the rules of capitalism. So with that sort of basis in mind, you actually wrote in the book that after the 1997,

1998, Asia financial crisis, South Korea made some of its best decisions ever. Can you walk us through that thought process and how they ultimately came to the conclusion of, hey, we're going to make a bunch of cultural exports and make that a key part of our economy? Right, exactly. I mean, most of Asia was in a horrible debt after that financial crisis, and Korea was really hard hit, and it kind of doesn't make sense that they would conclude from that that they should then focus on popular culture. But the way that they got to that thinking is the crisis made them realize that they had put too many eggs in one basket. And one of the reasons that Korea was so hard hit economically is that their economy was. overly dependent on the large corporations, which they called Debo's. And these are the multinational, highly diversified companies like Hyundai, Samsung, and L.D. Samsung, for example, I believe, still makes up about 20% of the GDP of South Korea.

And after the financial crisis, the Korean government realized this is way too much, there's way too much hanging on like two or three companies. and if they default, which is what happens in a financial crisis, the entire country default. And they said, well, what can we do, prevent this from ever happening again? And what they came up with was we have to change gears to do something, but we don't have to buy new equipment or machinery, where we can act on it pretty much right away. And they decided, okay, that's going to be pop culture. The inspiration apparently was Jurassic Park.

There was actually a whole white paper presented to the Korean government on Jurassic Park. and how in order to make the same proceeds as Jurassic Park, you'd have to sell 15 million Hyundai cars. And they said, we're in the wrong business. Oh, I see what you're saying. So Jurassic Park, the movie, the enterprise of making Jurassic Park, not the enterprise of bringing dinosaurs back to life, was the inspiration. Well, I'm sure that's happening, too.

I mean, genetics is a big thing in Korea. But the basic gist is cultural exports can be gigantic moneymakers. and ultimately if you nail it, do not require a lot of capital, so incredibly high margin. And so the basic idea is whether it's music, whether it's TV shows, whatever it is, if you can find that secret sauce to replicate that, that is an extraordinary, efficient way to get in dollars or money from the rest of the world. Yeah, that's basically what it came down to low overhead, a fast learning curve, and the rest is luck and hard work.

So what did they do to kick it off? I mean, so it's like, okay, the math makes a lot of sense. We're going to make a fortune on cultural exports, but how do you actually jumpstart that? How did the plan take shape? Right. And the question that you're probably thinking but haven't asked yet is, what were they thinking?

This is everything, well, the number one obstacle is obviously that all Korean pop culture is in Korean. and it's only spoken in Korea. And it started with dramas. I mean, right now it's the music that gets all the attention, but the Korean wave started with the soap operas. And what happened was in the 1990s, the South Korean Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong

tested the waters and thought that it might be a good time to experiment with showing a Korean drama in Chinese. Now, I mean, now there's so much of Mavrakei dramas, but at the time, there was zero interest in it. So they approached the Hong Kong TV networks, and the networks said, well, there's no audience for this. You know, the Korean Chamber of Commerce said, well, we will pay for the subtitling.

We will pay for the doving. We will pay for everything. And they said, okay, that's just a production cost. You know, there's also the question of advertising. So the Korean Chamber of Commerce said, okay, well, we'll take care of that, too. All you have to do is press play. So the Korean government basically subsidized the translation of this drama into Cantonese and also Mandarin, I think. And they sold all of the ad time so that the Hong Kong TV network would not have to do anything.

And then to everyone's surprise, or at least some people surprised, the drama did really well. And then the government started paying to translate more and more and more dramas. And now it's sort of a self-feeding beast. but the government never really completely got hands off, and that's why the Korean wave didn't end, you know, 10 years ago. They're still paying to translate them into languages that are more obscure because they sort of see these emerging markets as being extremely important. So they're not just focusing on the languages that have lots of speakers.

They're focusing on areas where people will someday be able to buy Samsung phones and LZ TV, and they'll already have built loyalty to the brand that is Korea. So the cultural exports are basically a sort of like first step towards other types of exports. Is that the idea? Yeah, that's right, actually. It's not that the pop culture feeds into industry or that industry feeds into pop culture. It's actually everything at the same time. It's considered to be a whole ecosystem.

So it's not that K-pop is a delivery system to sell phones. I mean, that's also true. but the phones are a delivery system to sell K-pop, and the makeup is the delivery system to sell all of the above. And it's kind of like a snake-binding its tail, which actually is sort of the business model for the chairboard. They don't have wholly owned subsidiaries in Korea for these big companies. It's sort of this company owns part of that company.

If you draw the structure, it's not a pyramid. It's a wheel. And that's actually how the whole economy operates, and that is how the whole Korean wave operates in tandem with the government, in tandem with heavy industry. So if you think of it not as a pyramid, but as a wheel, I think it starts to make more sense. So I have a question about how some of the cultural exports play on the ground in South Korea, because I heard when I was having lunch with some colleagues in Seoul that, for instance, BTS wasn't even considered that popular domestically until they sort of enjoyed great international

success. And then they were recognized as a group that was doing something for South Korea as a whole. And then they started to get really big in South Korea itself. Is that how these things generally happen? Mostly, it's the other way around. I would say BTS and SIE, of course, are examples of musical acts that were not everyone's first choice when they imagined what would be the breakthrough. One big surprise to me and to everyone else was that the acts that became really popular were not the girl band, because I think that the Korean industry, I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that they were angling to make the cute, sexy baby, whatever, or bubblegum pop girl band, like, you know, girls' generation. I think that that was what they were pushing for.

Like, you know, the pussy cat dolls, but minus 10 years or something I thought. They were not thinking that it was the boy band that were going to be popular first. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Ruffini.

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Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. So here's what I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around. And I think

your answer just now sort of gets at it. You know, when you think about like sort of developing a homegrown semiconductor industry, a lot of the growth of Samsung. You're like, okay, well, if the chips are a very high quality and they're of competitive price, someone's probably going to buy them. Like, that's clear. If you can show on the specs that the chip is fast and you can make it cheaper than some

competitor, it'll sell internationally. With cultural exports, you know, there's no way to be objectively sure that the taste is going to connect. So, I mean, you know, the big size song that blew up, it could have done. just been a novelty that people talked about for one day and then moved on. Like, there's nothing objective you could say, okay, this song is better than others and this song deserves to have major market share. Or as you pointed out, maybe they thought the girl bands were going to do better. It turns out that it was the guy bands. Beyond even the language question, which is its own

issue, why did they think their aesthetics would resonate and do well internationally? I admit that that's kind of a black box and anyone who says they know exactly how this happened is actually just lying. Because, you know, the question of how to make something viral is like how to make, you know, the immortality pill. It's, if everyone, nobody really knows for sure, how did Bethany Moda become a millionaire before she was 20? If you said that you knew that it was going to happen, I don't believe you, right? But I think that what they did have that was going in their favor is that it's sort of the advantage of the, underdog, because South Korea has been, as they like to complain and or brag, they claim that they have been invaded 800 times in their 5,000-year history and that they have never attempted

to colonize anyone else. And they spent most of their history of being ransacked by Mongols and Manchurians. And, of course, there was a long period of colonization by the Japanese. and if they didn't have any autonomy over their fate, Roosevelt basically decided that Korea would go to Japan instead of Russia. He signed this treaty in Maine, some hotel somewhere, and Koreans didn't even really know about it until later. And so obviously, this is sort of getting kicked around a lot. That happens to you kind of pay attention.

It's a survival thing. As a result of this underdog status, they had to always pay visual attention to what was going on. So, for example, when they were a colony of Japan, they couldn't just do whatever they wanted, but they also wanted to retain some Korean autonomy. And in order to balance that, they had to just pay attention to nuances to reading the room on a national andoxy global scale. And that's what they did when they were trying to develop these K-pop songs and how could we make this catchy? How could we make this global?

And they just, I mean, the answer is kind of boring. They just studied. And there are books that I was given, published by the Ministry of Trade and various government-sponsored industries, explaining how to approach different cultures based on their own local mores. So, for example, there was a section on the Muslim world saying, so for example, if you're going to air a drama in a predominantly Muslim nation, these are the times that they pray. So don't air it during those times.

this is Ramadan, so this is when they're eating in the evening, so maybe it's not the best time to premiere an evening drama. They're not going to show lots of kissing and stuff, so don't have any of that. And they just make careful, careful, careful studies of all of this in order to distill what people wanted. And in the K-dramas, the formula is they realized that there was the need for people to feel things and actually have people crying a lot and being really miserable and not everything having a happy ending,

which is sort of the opposite of the Hollywood formula. And until the popularity of things like Korean dramas and also tell novellas, I guess most people didn't realize that there was this yearning for stories that would make people cry cathartically and not just everything being okay in the end. And with K-pop, I don't know if there's one formula, but they just sort of buy things from different sources and they package things extremely well. So you probably know that the world songwriting factory is Sweden.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not just everyone thinks Abba, but I'm not talking about Abba. I'm talking about people who write, like Britney Spears' most famous hits and stuff forth. They're all written by Swedes. So Korea buys the tune from them, and then they do the lyrics, like, you stuff from somewhere else. And they get choreographers from America or, you know, the French ballet or something.

and they're not afraid to mix and match. They're not worried that this is going to look like a Frankenstein, you know, like piece together songs. They're just like, no, no, no, this is going to work. We're just going to do this. Yeah, the genius is in the packaging, I would say. People forget as well that before K-pop, there was J-pop, right? There was Japanese pop in the 90s, which was incredibly popular.

So it's not like K-pop came out of nowhere. There was a little bit of inspiration, let's say, for it to graft it. onto and then adapt. But that kind of brings me to my next question, which is, I guess when you're talking about creative industries, they're constantly changing and people are constantly trying to one up each other. And recently, we've seen China in particular make a lot more effort at, for instance, coming up with dramas. We've seen Netflix sign some deals for various Chinese dramas recently as well. How long can Korea maintain its edge when it comes to cultural exports? I don't know and I don't think it matters from their point of view because just the Korean

export model is extremely adaptable and I don't think that even they think that the Korean wave is going to last forever. Historically, no music or pop culture trend really lasts that long unless you constantly, constantly reinvent yourself, you know, like Madonna or something. I don't think that they're counting on this to put bread on the table for a very long time, if I'm honest. It's just what they want to do now, and it's basically about building Korea as a brand,

not necessarily K-pop or any of those things as a brand. So, I mean, if you wanted my honest opinion, I would say it's probably going to die out. I mean, the Korean wave is probably going to die out in terms of pop culture. and the Korean industry will simply adapt whatever the next need is. It might be biomedical engineering. It might be continuing entertainment but focusing on technology.

I know that there are some government-sponsored labs that are trying to develop really hyper-realistic holograms, for example. So, like, you know, if you look behind the hologram, you can see the person's back, and if you look in front of the hologram, you see the front, whereas current hologram technology, if you look to the side of the hologram, you can't see anything, right? But, so Korea is trying to make fully 3D holograms so that, you know, not only can you have, like, Michael Jackson and appear from the dead as a hologram, but you can also have a surgeon, you know, at Mount Spina Hospital in New York, demonstrate open heart surgery to people all over the world via holograms. And, you know, they can sort of, it's almost like they're in there in the room with him. So, you know, that maybe is less interesting to teenagers than BTS. but Korea will always be trying to reinvent themselves and they don't hold on to things.

I think it's a very important national change in terms of their ability to adapt. I'm not talking about emotionally. I mean, emotionally, they're really known for holding on the case. But in terms of the industry, if something doesn't work, they're the first to abandon it and pretend it never happened. Tracy mentioned in the intro that she was just in Seoul and had some great Korean fried chicken. Ten years ago, I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of Korean Fried Chicken. And now I love it. And there's all kinds of chains that have opened up in New York City that sell Korean fried chicken.

Everyone I know likes it. How much has the sort of the emergence of Korean food internationally also been part of the same government effort? Well, yeah. Do you surprise to learn that I think Korean food is good. And then when people try it, they often like it. But the fact, before you have people try, you have to have it available. The supply has to be there. And that is where the government steps in.

They put a lot of money to sponsoring food fairs. A big program that they have is these staff scholarships, I guess you could call them. The government sponsors international chefs and not the famous ones, but of any level, to come to Korea for free, stay there for free, and learn Korean cooking techniques for free. and the idea is not necessarily they go back to their home country and open a Korean restaurant, but maybe you'll see

Korean Kohlfla or something or real estate at a standard American restaurant, quote unquote, but with kimchi juice. And guess what? I've seen all of these things. You know, and that, I'm about saying those chefs

actually went on these trips, but that is the kind of thing that can only happen if somebody is making it available to them. I have a big picture question. which is how much of the sort of special Korea economic model is replicable in other countries? Like how much does the South Korea miracle, this idea of cultural exports, depend on the particular nature and structure of Korean society, or could any emerging market do what South Korea

essentially did? Well, that is sort of the big question, is that can you bottle a little bit? and sell this. And I mean, I kind of have two minds about that, because on the one hand, if it were that easy, somebody else would have done it already. You know, there are plenty of underdeveloped countries that could have done this and they didn't. But does this mean that only Korea could ever do it? I mean, probably not. What does make them have an advantage that would make it hard for other countries to do it is, as I said, they have this hybrid capitalist command economy mentality. I'm not aware of any other country that has that structure where the government can say,

okay, we want a pop industry tomorrow, so we're going to requisition funds immediately to build a stadium. I mean, here, you'd have to have so many, here meaning the United States, you have to have so many levels of approvals and vote and it goes to the NIA and then you reply. It would take, you know, years, and then you have to requisition this fund and that fund and that license. And in Korea, it happens very, very fast because industry and government are in, cooperation. Nobody else has that. I mean, China has a command economy, but they don't have the cooperative aspect. It's just too big a country. It's decentralized. They don't all speak the same language. They're not all the same religion. They're not even all the same ethnicity.

China is a country that would be most likely to do it, but they can't for sort of the honest lack of, you know, homogeneity reasons. So I have a related question, and it gets back to what we were saying in the very beginning about Korea having broken all the rules of development. And one of the reasons that people are economists in particular are skeptical of centralized command decisions from the economy is because they figure that bad actors or inefficient actors will get propped up. Cronism essentially. So maybe some company gets big and it gets in with the government. And even if their products start losing competitiveness, it doesn't matter because there's so much corruption and employ all these people and they can't be let to die. And one way that I know that Korea helped solve this problem is by sort of using the export market as the test.

So the companies that thrived in export industries were given more help and companies that couldn't find a compelling export market, they didn't get the same level of aid. And so the export market was sort of used as the ultimate test of who should get aid or who shouldn't. And I'm curious if on the cultural front, some of the same tactics were used so that whether it's directors of, soap operas or writers of songs, whereas the kind of thing where you nurture the winners and if they show some formula to work, then they get more support. And if a writer or director couldn't make it click, then they sort of, over time, didn't get the same support from the state. It's absolutely a rich get richer kind of situation. And what you're saying is exactly right. They use the export figures as the litmus test for the viability of something.

The country is too small for them to rely on local consumption for their economy. They almost don't even care about that at all. And like I said, because they're a small country because of their history, they've always been very, very, very outwardly focused for their survival. So what you're saying is exactly right. Like, if you can't make it outside Korea, you can't make it in Korea, even if you are making it in Korea, kind of thing. All right.

Well, Yuni Hong, the author of the birth. of Korea cool. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. That was really great. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here. So, Joe, I found that conversation really fascinating, not just because we got to talk about pop culture for once on this show, but also because it kind of, it did put me in mind of the conversation. Do you remember the one we had about China made in 2025 initiative and whether or not China could sort of encourage or sort of foster an innovation economy when it came to tech.

It reminded me a lot of that. You know what it reminded me of was not that episode, but the one we did recently with a Fadal Kaboob about MMT within the emerging market context. Because so much of what he was saying was again this kind of stuff that like really flew in the face of conventional wisdom about how a country developed. And he was making the point. He was like, okay, first, absolutely, you have to become food self-sufficient and so forth. And I just think that, like, there are so many areas in which we accept conventional wisdom about economic development or commerce.

And one of them, absolutely, I would have never imagined that you could have sort of, buy design, manufacture a successful cultural export category. And yet, there you go. Korea did it. Right. And if you think, like, if someone had written, you know, post the Asia financial crisis in the late 1990s, early 2000s, that South Korea was trying to develop a cultural export economy because it was trying to replicate the success of Jurassic Park, I think there'd be plenty of people out there that would have thought they were absolutely crazy for a number of reasons. No, I mean, it's crazy. Like, I listened to like a BTS song this morning. and it wasn't in English.

And your verdict? It just would have never occurred to me that that could be, for the language reason alone, it would not have occurred to me that it could be one of the highest charting songs on Spotify's global hit list. It just, it boggles the mind that it's real, and yet it is real,

and all these other things that Korea has done aren't supposed to be how it's done, and yet they continue to do it. So I just love like, how many preconceived notions Korea is destroying. Yeah. All right. So if there's one takeaway from this entire episode,

it's that K-pop is a serious and economic matter, right? And I hope BTS's millions and millions of fans will listen to this episode. Yes. For obvious reasons. Yes. Yes. BTS.

BTS Army. Sign up to Oddlots. Subscribe on your choice of player. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should follow our guest, the author of Birth of Korean Cool, Uni Hong, on Twitter. She's at uni. And don't forget to follow our producers. Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson. Tofor Forges is at Forhes T. And the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy. at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. I'm Francine Lacquois, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Laqua from Bloomberg Podcasts.

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