Inequality facing the children of Korea’s second baby boomers

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Inequality facing the children of Korea’s second baby boomers

Published: 19 Nov. 2025, 00:01

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Park Sun-young

The author is a professor of economics at Dongguk University.

I belong to the cohort immediately below Korea’s second baby boomers, those born between 1964 and 1974. Unlike that older group, my generation did not enjoy the same breadth of opportunity. Even so, I see myself as part of the last group that could build a career and achieve economic independence without direct financial help from parents. This was possible only because I entered society during a favorable period for the Korean economy, not because my generation worked harder.

A job seeker scans openings at an employment center in Mapo District, western Seoul, on June 26. [YONHAP]

When my cohort came of age, Korea was benefiting from China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the extended upswing that lasted until the global financial crisis, when the economy grew around 5 percent a year. For many in my generation, it was still possible to save money through a few years of steady employment and buy a home in Seoul before real estate prices surged in 2015. These were advantages tied to timing, not individual merit.

Applying the U.S. definition of millennials to Korea can therefore be misleading. U.S. millennials are shaped not only by exposure to the internet and personal computers but also by their position as the children of U.S. baby boomers. Korea’s demographic patterns differ. Its baby boom began nine years later and split into two parts: the first from 1955 to 1963 and the second from 1964 to 1974. Because of this structure, the Korean cohort born from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s overlaps across two distinct parental generations. Grouping them all as “millennials” obscures the differences that shaped their social and economic conditions.

Job seekers browse company booths at the 2025 Win-Win Cooperation Job Fair held at Coex Magok in Gangseo District, western Seoul, on Oct. 21. About 500 partner companies from 13 major conglomerate groups took part in the event. [NEWS1]

The children of the second baby boomers, particularly those born around 1990, stand at a major inflection point. Across education, employment, housing and asset acquisition, their economic dependence on their parents is higher than for any previous generation. They attended elementary and secondary school in the years after the Asian financial crisis, when restructuring had ended and the economy was recovering. That period also saw a rapid rise in private education spending and a widening gap in educational investment among different income groups. As schools adopted multilayered evaluation systems involving transcripts, extracurricular activities and personal statements, the consulting and resume-building market became more expensive. Parents’ information, resources and purchasing power increasingly determined the quality of college preparation.

This cohort entered university in 2009, just as the global financial crisis began affecting the labor market. With an average six-year path to graduation, many joined the job market around 2015. That year became symbolic in Korea’s public discourse on youth inequality. Terms like “gold spoon,” “dirt spoon,” the “spoon class hierarchy,” the “N-po generation” representing a group that largely gave up on life goals and “youth employment cliff” spread widely. Two structural factors drove this shift.

The first was the shock to youth employment. The unemployment rate for ages 15 to 29 reached 9.2 percent in 2015, the highest on record. Some analyses placed the real unemployment rate — including job seekers and discouraged workers — above 30 percent. Structural issues such as deindustrialization and a persistent dual labor market played a part, but another factor was the extension of the legal retirement age to 60. After the law was passed in 2013, large firms and public institutions reduced new hiring in anticipation of the 2016 implementation. These adjustments contributed directly to the employment cliff facing young adults.

The second factor was the shift in the housing market. Prices bottomed out in 2014 and rose sharply in 2015, with both transaction volumes and prices jumping year on year. Until 2013, jeonse (lump-sum deposit) leases remained more popular than home purchases, enabling a rapid expansion of leveraged gap investment. The average sales price of a Seoul apartment rose from 508.35 million won ($347,000) in July 2015 to more than 1.4 billion won this July, a 2.77-fold increase in a decade.

Protesters celebrate at the parliament building after it was set on fire during a protest against a social media ban and corruption in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Sept. 9. [AP/YONHAP]

More fundamentally, Korean youth now face three types of global crises at once. They face Europe-style pressures from a rigid seniority-based labor market, high youth unemployment and unsustainable pension burdens. France is often cited as an example. The same age bracket there also experiences U.S.-style de-skilling as AI begins replacing higher-skilled white-collar jobs and the wage premium for university degrees erodes. De-skilling refers to the process in which specialized abilities lose value because technology automates tasks once performed by trained workers. And, as youth protests in Nepal last September showed, they face emerging-economy-style inequality in which family wealth, power and networks dictate access to education and jobs — a “nepo baby” structure that has become visible in Korea as well.

These realities clarify where policy attention must focus. The priority should be young adults who cannot rely on parental support. Structural reforms in regulation, finance, public administration, pensions, education and labor must aim not only to raise Korea’s potential growth rate but also to rebuild a system in which young people can achieve economic independence regardless of family background. That is the minimum responsibility owed by older generations who benefited from opportunities created not by effort but by the particular era into which they were born.

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.