Politics of blame obscures real solutions

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Jang Deok-jin

The author is a professor of sociology at Seoul National University. 

Recent remarks by People Power Party lawmaker Kim Yong-tae deserve closer attention. Responding to criticism directed at teachers over the decline in school field trips, Kim argued that the president had chosen to “set a public target by demonizing a group before beginning discussion.” He urged the administration to “stop the politics of blame and focus on the substance of solving social problems.”

The comments concerned what appeared to be a relatively small issue involving school programs. Yet they captured a broader pattern that has emerged across nearly every policy area since the current administration took office.

As has often been pointed out in these pages, identifying enemies is a defining characteristic of populist politics. When problems arise, the priority shifts away from solving them and toward deciding who should be blamed. Once a target is identified and attacked, the public may initially feel satisfied. But with time, little is actually resolved.

Among the groups most heavily targeted under the current government are owners of multiple homes. President Lee Jae Myung has even argued that such homeowners contribute to a wide range of social problems, including declining marriage and birthrates, weakening industrial competitiveness and the risk of Korea entering a “lost 30 years” of stagnation.

By today’s standards, it is a remarkable leap in logic. Owning an additional apartment supposedly makes one responsible not only for housing prices but also for whether younger generations marry or whether the country experiences decades of economic decline.

If policymakers were less focused on blaming certain groups and more committed to seeking practical solutions, they might recognize that housing policy is far broader and more complicated than political slogans suggest.

There is no reason — nor is it realistic — for everyone to live only in Seoul, only in Gangnam, only in apartments or only near subway stations. Even Kim Soo-hyun, who helped design and introduce the comprehensive real estate holding tax under the Roh Moo-hyun administration and later led housing policy under the Moon Jae-in administration, emphasized the importance of metropolitan transportation in his writings.

Kim noted that cities such as London and Tokyo commonly regard 80 kilometers (50 miles) as a reasonable commuting distance while Seoul effectively operates within a radius of only about 20 kilometers. By limiting solutions to a narrow geographic range, Korea only makes the housing problem more difficult to solve.

If commuting infrastructure expanded the practical living radius to 80 kilometers, the range of housing policy options would look entirely different. The distance from Gwanghwamun to Icheon in Gyeonggi is roughly 80 kilometers. As a resident of Gyeonggi myself, I would have little desire to move back to Seoul if metropolitan transportation improved even modestly.

Even now, once passengers board a regional express bus, they can arrive in central Gwanghwamun within about 30 minutes. The real inconvenience is frequency. Buses often come only once every 15 minutes. If service doubled, commuting between Gyeonggi and Seoul would become far more manageable. Such improvements would undoubtedly require subsidies and raise profitability concerns, but the cost would amount to only a tiny fraction of what has already been spent on ineffective real estate policies.

Why should housing problems not also be approached as transportation problems? Such an approach could help slow regional decline while encouraging the decentralization of essential infrastructure such as schools and hospitals.

Yet calm discussion of such solutions rarely takes place. Instead, political debate centers on condemning people for owning two homes.

The same pattern can be seen in the ongoing general strike by the labor union at Samsung Electronics. The process leading to the strike has revealed little of the solidarity traditionally associated with labor movements. Some union officials have even suggested separating less profitable business divisions from the company altogether. Concerns about harming shareholder interests or interfering with management rights appear secondary.

Capitalist systems are often described as either shareholder capitalism or stakeholder capitalism. In a shareholder-oriented system, unions would not so casually dismiss shareholder interests. In a stakeholder-oriented system, they would not disregard suppliers or fellow workers so easily. Korea increasingly appears to follow neither principle consistently.

The union’s aggressive demands are also shaped by a broader reality. As other engines of growth weaken, semiconductors tied to the AI era have become one of Korea’s few remaining economic hopes. The implicit message is clear: Because the country depends so heavily on semiconductors, the union’s demands must be accepted to avoid broader national harm.

In that case, who deserves greater criticism — people owning two homes or those demanding record-breaking bonuses while holding the national economy hostage?

When politics focuses more on blaming targets than solving underlying problems, governments end up producing fragmented measures that often conflict with one another, leaving even basic governing principles unclear. The politics of blame must end so that attention can return to the substance of solving problems.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.