I just finished watching Squid Game on Netflix. This Korean tv-series has been widely popular around the world. I was thinking about the series and I think there are a few lessons and insights in Economics that we can take-away.
Spoiler Alert: Spoilers ahead, I highly recommend you to watch the show first.
High Risk Behaviour
The main protagonist Seong Gi-hun (SG) has fallen on tough times. He is divorced, has a lot of debt and lives with his mother who has to work to support themselves. He is also a gambler and tries to gamble as a way out of poverty.
He is recruited by an anonymous recruiter to participate in the Squid Game.
The interesting way in which SG and several others like him are recruited shows that the selection is not arbitrary.
For about 100$s a turn, a small game is played in a station where one has to use some amount of skill to flip a card. The loser gets slapped in the face. SG, accepts it and gets slapped several times but keeps going on hoping to win desperately. In the end, after being slapped to the point of exhaustion he is given the card to participate in the Squid Game.
The recruiting process clearly filters people who are willing to risk a lot to win. Even public humiliation of being slapped by a stranger is no deterrent.
SG and all the participants are in a similar economic situation in life. Huge debts and almost nothing to lose. Money seems to be the only solution and they are all looking for a gamble to resolve it.
I think low social mobility in societies can motivate people to take higher risks just to get out of the endless cycle of poverty. Poverty can span generations and as society becomes highly economically polarized, it pushes people to take crazy risks just to have a decent life.
Zero Sum Games
The setup of the game is such that ‘for you to win, others must lose’. This becomes increasingly clear to the participants that they will have to betray friendships, marriage and basic human decency to win.
In highly competitive economic systems with limited social mobility, people always revert to ‘Scarcity Mindset’. Where the perception is that the prize is limited and the only way to improve one’s economic situation is to deny others.
Zero Sum Games almost always bring the worst in human beings. We have to try and avoid such a mindset both at the personal and the level of the economy.
I call this a perception because the world is indeed plentiful as long as our needs are reasonable.
The Game is Rigged
In one of the games where the participants have to walk on different types of glass. One of the participant is a glass factory worker. He is able to tell the difference between the types of glass.
Once the Game Organizers get to know this. They change the rules by changing the light setting. This neutralizes the advantage the glass factory worker had.
The present state of the economy tending toward such a scenario. Earlier this year the GME short squeeze, was allowing the small investor to unite on social media and play the same game that the Elites have been playing. But, in a very blatant move, all trading was stopped to the loss of the small players. This is a very bad incident and if more trust in the economic system is eroded then it creates real, long-term risks to the economy.
Losers are not Losers
The last two remaining participants are friends and are very different from each other. SG is the loser while his friend was a winner all his life. He went to a great University and worked in High-finance but lost all of it due to a bad trade.
Although SG is a loser when we dig deeper we can see that he ‘lost’ in his life because he chose morality over selfish interests.
For example, he was not able to be there for his wife during child-birth as he chose to be with his co-worker who died in an accident. In the end, he gives away most of his winnings to his friend while taking care of the brother of another participant.
The so-called ‘winners’ in society are extremely image conscious and give up on their humanity to look good. I think with the attention-perception based economy that we are tending towards. There is a risk that we will have more such fake ‘winners’.
Kindness of Strangers
In Spite of the dark nature of the series there are moments of genuine human goodness. The way in which one of the younger girls chooses to die as she has nothing to look forward to. Or, how the old man pretends to lose to let SG win ( this turned out to be anti-climactic in the end though).
Everything we possess in this world is of this world
The key take-away though is that everything that we possess in this world is of this world. Made by strangers. The computer that I am typing this on and the device that you are reading this on.
I think there is an underlying kindness when any stranger offers us a service even if it is in exchange for money. Being able to recognize and cherish this will lead to a better outcome for everyone.
Human beings are not resources or horses to place bets on. In the end this realization motivated SG to give-up meeting with his daughter to seemingly disrupt the cruel games from happening.
In the real economy I hope more people choose this over mere winning.