984 FINANCIAL REFORM AND THE ECONOMY
more people are driven to destitution every day. I would compare these goods to
a well. If you draw water from it, it will [continue] to refill, but if you stop, then
it goes dry. So if you don't wear brocade, then the country won't have any
weavers and the skills of the women will decline. If you have no distaste for
cracked cups or don't care for fine workmanship, there won't be any mechanics
and potters in the country, and the skills and arts [of technology] will disappear.
Even agriculture will go to ruin and its methods will be lost, and commerce will
be weakened and the occupation will be lost. The people in all the four basic
occupations [scholarship-and-govemment service, agriculture, commerce, and
manufacture] will end up in difficult circumstances, and they will be unable to
render assistance to each other. The treasures that exist in our country will not be
accepted within its territories, so when you visit a foreign country, you will find
their people waxing wealthy while ours descend into poverty.23Because of his instrumental approach to the mechanics of economic behav-
ior, Pak Chega had been able to derive the relationship between demand and
production. and his logic had led him to see the economic danger involved in
the constant moral emphasis on frugality. Kim Yongd6k has written that Pak's
belief in the benefit of consumption over saving as the means to stimulate greater
and more varied production was unique to Korean thought, even including the
scholars devoted to practical affairs, and was characteristic of modem economic
thought. 24 Unfortunately, it is not clear today that an emphasis on consumption
over savings is necessarily a characteristic of "modem" thought, since many econ-
omists in the late I980s and early I990S have explained the decline of the U.S.
economy in part as a result of consumerism coupled with a low rate of saving.
Others have praised the high rate of saving in countries like South Korea and
Japan as a means of capital formation for productive investment. The real prob-
lem was the misuse of savings in a precapitalist economy, the failure to use those
savings to expand investment in industrial production, infrastructure, trade, and
marketing.
Pak Chega also claimed that there were two fundamental differenees between
the Chinese and Korean economies: the widespread network of shops and mar-
kets in China and their superior circulation and distribution of goods, and greater
toleration of commercial activity and the merchant class. Since there was no
stigma attached to commerce in China, anyone could go into business without
damaging his dignity or reputation. Even the highest ministers of state person-
ally went shopping for antiques in the market district of the capital, and they
had been doing so since the Sung and Ming dynasties. But in Korea, the sadaebu
(the yangban elite) avoided those mundane activities because they were over-
whelmingly attached to the superiority ofliterary talent, what Pak deprecatingly
referred to as their "empty" scribblings. Those who lacked a post and had no
money had no experience in working the fields and no knowledge of agricul-
ture. Since commerce was taboo, they were left without any means of making