I recently discovered Amy Kim, a creator posting on Instagram about Korean culture and history. As a black belt in Taekwondo, I have a deeper exposure to Korean culture than many folks in the States. But I still have a lot to learn. I had never heard of Korea’s IMF bailout in 1997.
For me, the most powerful lesson here is one of awareness. As something of an analyst, I can easily get immersed in numbers and spreadsheets. So much so that the impacts of decisions, the HUMAN impacts of decisions, can get abstracted away. I understand, at that abstract level, the value that this bailout and the ensuing austerity brought. Yet there were huge human impacts on people. Lives lost. And a rippling trauma that still haunts the Korean people.
So, the bold question: how do we manage things like economies, societies, and all that while recognizing human dignity? I wonder if there was a way to implement this solution in a way that mitigated the social destruction? Communicate, in some way, that the impacts upon these folks’ lives were not their fault, not a reflection upon their worth and value. That, in a project of this scale, managing the social impacts is just as valuable, perhaps even more so, than the economic ones.
