On: California needs real math education, not gimmicks

[astrange]

Korea's economic growth came from export discipline, a kind of industrial policy where the dictator threw businessmen in prison if they didn't manage to get overseas customers. (See How Asia Works.)

That's not a free market, it's more like heading from communism towards free markets and then continuing over the other end of the horseshoe.

It has the problem that everyone in the country is now working themselves to death and is obsessed with plastic surgery rather than having children.

[WalterBright → astrange]

Free markets are a spectrum, not an absolute. There's never been a perfect free market, just like there's never been a perfect apple.

[astrange → WalterBright]

Using "free" in a situation where there's literally a dictator stretches it though.

Japan didn't have this, but the chaebol/zaibatsu systems are unnatural too, and Samsung seems to own like half the Korean economy.