In my last essay for The Korea Herald, I introduced the idea of the "Paradox on the Han River." To understand South Korea today, one must squarely face two contradictory realities.

One is of incredible success, a rag-to-riches story with global brands, an addictive K-culture and a rising power at the Olympics. Political progress followed this success. Korea is a rare nation in the modern era with a conviction around constitutional democracy.

At the same time, Korea’s youth is characterized by a widespread lack of hope, with one of the world’s highest suicide rates and the world’s lowest fertility rate at 0.73 birth per woman. Simply put, Korea as a society is literally disappearing.

Both the suicide and birth rates are linked to society’s future hopes and aspirations. Neither the national development nor democratic participation that once served as unifying moral purposes in the 1960s to 1990s are sufficient today. Too many people are left behind under the current system, with fierce competition beginning as soon as babies are born. This is a prelude to a society with fierce divisions among regions, age, income and education pedigree, to mention a few.

A new Korean social contract is needed, one that guarantees not only growth and democracy, but also mutuality. Steve Garber, an astute observer of societies, noted that culture is upstream from politics. So while there is a critical role of the state, I want to turn to the role of businesses in creating mutuality and common good. This bottom-up approach has been quietly growing in Korea and elsewhere.

For many years, Milton Friedman’s single-metric profit maximization became the standard economic model in maintaining company discipline and aligning incentives for CEO pay. But the excesses of this model in the past decades -- such as the collapse of Enron and the financial crisis of the 2000s -- led many to question the logically elegant but troubling results behind the Friedman model.

As a response, a variety of alternatives emerged in recent years that go beyond philanthropy or corporate social responsibility. Significantly, Michael Porter of Harvard developed the concept of “shared value” which aligns business and social impact (such as training inner city youth with IT skills which Cisco may have a shortage of), thus there is no contradiction between shareholder value and social engagement.

Moreover, at least for a period, the environmental, social and governance standards took the financial and business world by storm, rating businesses to redirect trillions of dollars toward ESG compliance.

At the same time, impact investment became a trillion-dollar global industry, bringing innovative social solutions ranging from prison reforms in the UK to last-mile distribution of life-giving-and-saving products to remote communities in India.

For Mars Corp., a $45 billion privately held company, exploration of their role in society began with the question: What is the right level of profit in a company? This was later turned into a book aimed at “Completing Capitalism,” which viewed single-metric financial capitalism as incomplete.

The company owners concluded, starting with its Wrigley brand in Kenya and the Philippines, that it was necessary to invest in social and natural capital within the ecosystem around it, much like how farmers invest in the long-term care of the land (in contrast to a mining mindset, which seeks to extract as much as possible until the site is depleted).

Significantly, the think tank within Mars that was tasked to answer these questions in partnership with Oxford University, now an independent group of organizations within the Economics of Mutuality Alliance, has been developing business cases around the world addressing systemic breakdown in trust in the ecosystem.

In Korea, as more global companies started to integrate responsible business models, the rigid separation of business and charity started to crack. Despite their controversies, some of Korea’s largest conglomerates, such as SK Group and Posco, have been experimenting with different business models for social engagement.

Unexpectedly, some of the most exciting developments in the last decade are happening elsewhere. Little known to the outside world, this is the inspiring story of Seongsu Social Valley, the “Brooklyn of Seoul,” a gentrifying area of cool cafes and hard-to-book restaurants with about 3,000 social ventures. Some are going global, such as a Korean company providing drinking water wells in Laos and constructing minihydro power in Uzbekistan -- all profitably using commercial mechanisms.

Hanyang University has been a critical catalyst of the Seongsu Social Valley (analogous to Stanford’s role in the creation of Silicon Valley), with many of its graduates starting new social ventures. Seongsu-dong today feels like a different Korea -- more risk-taking, creative, and more connected to each other. This mutual ecosystem is a promising sign of hope for the next generation.

Can this unholy mix of companies, nongovernmental organizations and academics -- all working through what the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats once called “the greasy wheels of commerce” -- prepare the ground for a more mutual Korean society? It will be an uphill battle. Korean corporate structure has the largest pay difference between large and small companies among the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Seongsu-dong feels like a bubble, and its influence has yet to reach Seoul business districts such as Gangnam and Yeouido. Ethical lapses of business leaders abound, even those championing social innovation. Some challenges are beyond the ability of a single business.

That is why new business approaches involving multistakeholder capitalism to address large-scale problems are so significant. DBS Bank in Singapore, for example, has been looking at the aging demographics through a coalition of businesses, NGOs, churches and government leaders.

Business is not a new magic bullet to help society. But according to another Irish poet. U2’s Bono, if the above helps us to “tear a little corner of darkness” in this world, we are inching closer to a more mutual society. Embracing more mutual business models in Korea is a good place to start.

Kwang W. Kim

Kwang W. Kim is chairman of Economics of Mutuality’s Human Flourishing Foundation and a partner at Sohnamu Global and its impact affiliate, SAV Ventures. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. -- Ed.