Everyone knows the obvious fact that the US is the world's best and strongest country, but its recent upward trend is absolutely insane.
Just looking at GDP per capita, the US has already surpassed $90,000. For reference, it was $64,000 in 2020 and will be around $90,000 in 2025; in just 5 years, the US GDP per capita rose by a whopping 40 million KRW. It's massive. Korea is at a level where we're worried if we'll even hit $30,000 this year due to the collapse of the won, so there's already a 3x gap. Statistics prove it's no lie that part-timers at McDonald's in big US cities make about $40 an hour. The 3x gap between the US and Korea is similar to or even larger than the gap between Korea and Thailand (10k range). The way Koreans feel looking at US prices is similar to how Thais feel looking at Korean prices. The way the US looks at Korea is how Korea looks at Thailand.
What's even more surprising is that while the GDP per capita rose by nearly $30,000 in 5 years, the US population grew by over 2 million a year—over 10 million in 5 years—and is nearing 350 million. This means the world's top brains and best talents are flocking to US elite universities and companies. Getting into the US is practically a badge of success in itself.
You can feel the sheer scale of the US just by looking at global company rankings. NVIDIA's market cap is $4.7 trillion, about 7,000 trillion KRW. Samsung's market cap is around 600-700 trillion KRW, so NVIDIA is about 10x Samsung, 10x Korea's national budget (700T)—10 years of Korea's national budget is NVIDIA's market cap. Besides that, Apple is $4.1 trillion (~6,000T KRW), Microsoft is $3.7 trillion (~5,400T KRW), etc. You can assume there are already dozens of companies in the US that are 5 to 10 times larger than Samsung.
On top of that, the US basically dominates the top of the global university rankings too lol... The total GDP of Korea's 50 million people combined is similar to that of just 17.5 million Americans... In other words, even if you 'young-kkeul' (scrape together) Korea's entire GDP, it's only about 4.8% or less of the US population. $100k GDP per capita incoming lol.
Source: Sing-geul Beong-geul Earth Village Gallery [View Original]
"Netizens are oscillating between being awestruck by the 'Murican scale' and doom-posting about Korea's relative decline, with some spicy takes on US social issues like the wealth gap and demographics."
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