Frankly frank you're a Frank.

You sound like an senile old man.

America also literally built South Korea into the global high tech powerhouse. Before the ridicalously massive investment in the 1960s the SK economy was worse than NK's.

In the last six decades, South Korea has grown from a war-torn nation mired in abject poverty and dependent upon US aid into one of the world’s leading industrial nations. In the span of one lifetime, a nation where hunger was often commonplace has largely eliminated poverty and now boasts some of the world’s most successful companies: Samsung, LG, Hyundai, and Kia.

In the aftermath of the Korean War, South Korea was in ruins. Much of the industrial capacity on the Korean peninsula built up during the Japanese occupation in North Korea, along with much of the mineral wealth. The state of sanitation was so dire that children often had to be sprayed with DDT by American soldiers to kill lice. The prospect that South Korea would develop and not require continued US assistance was seen as so grim that General Charles Helmick, the deputy military governor of the US occupation forces, said that “Korea can never attain a high standard of living. There are virtually no Koreans with the technical training and experience required to take advantage of Korea’s resources and effect an improvement over its rice economy.”

General Helmick’s skepticism could be seen in South Korea’s own imports. During the 1950s, South Korea was heavily reliant on foreign aid, which financed 70 percent of its imports. The majority of this was financed through US foreign aid, with a small portion of support also from the United Nations, with “three main objectives: to prevent starvation and disease, to increase agricultural outputs, and to provide essential consumer goods.” As a result, very little of South Korea’s imports during this period were focused on acquiring the capital goods and technology needed to move the economy beyond being an agricultural exporter. In the long run, that was unlikely to be a promising path to development. With a rugged and mountainous terrain, South Korea lacks the arable land. As a result, modern-day South Korea imports upward of half of its food.

While some measures were put in place during the 1950s, a major shift in South Korea’s economic policies occurred in the 1960s after Park Chung-hee’s coup in 1961. While the new government put in place an export-oriented economic policy designed to begin developing South Korea’s industrial base, it faced many of the challenges of the prior government. There was a lack of capital to finance the basic infrastructure that would be needed for development. At the time, South Korea produced less electricity as a whole than Ford Motor Company did in Detroit.

The first-to-develop Japan also helped a lot. As did the war in Vietnam, including SK trade with South Vietnam.