It's a bit different this time, South Korea is keenly aware of the cost and already has allocated a lot of money towards the possibility. Last I've heard a tax and much larger fund has been proposed by various politicians though I'm not sure what the state of that is today. Furthermore, it seems to be greatly beneficial for Korea in the long term due to the abundance of natural resources in North Korea. Goldman Sachs for example predicted in 2009 that a unified Korea would be the largest economy in the G7 after the US in 30 years.

Not to mention that East Germany still suffers from economic stigmas that still haven’t gone away 30 years after reunification. It doesn’t get the same kind of investment or attention that West Germany does today.

One fairly high-profile (yet topical) example of this is the top flight of German Football. East German teams rarely even make the German Bundesliga[0], and my understanding is that there’s currently only one Eastern German team in the 20-team league.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/oct/17/west-g...

I sort of agree with you on the idea but top flight soccer teams are a bad example. That requires fans / high population density and then investment from a group into paying and attracting players. West German is much more dense. You’d also have to look at the distribution of top flight teams when Germany was separated, which was probably still population density skewed.

They can probably learn from the German reunion. A lot of mistakes could have been avoided, like letting western companies buy and close east German companies that were previously owned by the state, or closing eastern youth organizations.

Why is cost even an issue? The cost is nothing compared to all the suffering.

Building up North Korea isn't hard, living in North Korea is hard.

Look, I get that you mean that it's worth paying a high cost to stop all that suffering, but the cost not nothing.

The reason it's important to me to say so is that at some point, some actual people with actual (limited) resources, will have to devise a plan to make it all better, and then actually do the plan. That is a huge challenge that involves trade offs and hard decisions. And if you start with magical thinking, instead of extremely realistic reasoning, you're going to end up hurting a lot of people.

If cost wasn't an issue, rich countries could already take in millions of refugees from countries where life is very hard. Or they could pump trillions into the countries. They don't because cost is an issue. I am not sure if South Koreans are very happy about the prospect of paying for a reunification. A lot of West Germans would have been perfectly OK with East Germany staying its own democratic state.

Tell that to the South Koreans who don't want to reunify due to the amount of money it will cost the South Korean economy. https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/03/11/why-young-south-korea...

Tell that to literally every rich country.