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[WaPo] The stylized facts about South Korea are changing

July 16, 2015

It’s long been thought that Korean youth are more hostile to the United States than their elders. That’s not true anymore.

(Yonhap)

(Yonhap)

[THE WASHINGTON POST] —  Social scientists use “stylized facts” as shorthand when talking about an issue. A stylized fact is a finding that is observed so frequently it is simply accepted as given. In order to have any kind of breadth of knowledge, analysts will internalize stylized facts to sketch out the state of the world. And, usually (though not always) something doesn’t become a stylized fact unless it’s pretty obviously true.

I bring this up because one of the stylized facts that many foreign policy-watchers in the United States have had in their head for years is the notion that there is a generational shift in attitudes in South Korea towards the United States. About a decade ago, the common narrative was that while older South Koreans valued the US-ROK alliance, younger Koreans felt very differently… [READ MORE]