Important point, and it was not just South Korea. In the 1960s, for example, it was widely "known" among development economists that countries with predominantly Confucian cultures were incapable of developing thriving, manufacturing-driven economies, which is why East Asia was likely forever to remain among the poorest parts of the world. Japan and Hong Kong were the exceptions only because Japan had supposedly escaped its Confucian heritage during the post-Meiji period, and because Hong Kong was actually British. Meanwhile Latin America, in part because it had absorbed US and European cultural values, was growing so fast and so inexorably that it was the only developing region certain to reach rich-country status within a few decades. By the late 1980s, perceptions had reversed. It was then widely "understood" that having predominantly Confucian cultures and "Asian values" would propel any developing country to rich-country status, and Japan and Hong Kong were restored to the Confucian fold. Latin America, it turned out, had actually been Catholic and authoritarian all along, and so was incapable of advancing except temporarily through debt and corruption (never mind that being "authoritarian" had long been considered among the cardinal Confucian values). Analysts love cultural explanations for why countries are or aren't able to get rich because they seem to explain all the things that are hard to understand, but as a Franco-American who grew up in Spain, Pakistan, Peru, and Morocco, went to university in NY, and who spent his entire career in international finance, including 24 years living in in China, I have always found cultural explanations for economic performance very provincial – superficial at best, and often pretty foolish, usually based on pretty simple-minded comparisons and an ignorance of history (there was once a theory, for example, that Confucian cultures excelled at simple manufacturing because their use of chopsticks made their hands more nimble). You can make a much stronger argument that it is institutions that mainly matter, although unfortunately, as Albert Hirschman warned, institutions in each country develop within their own historical and cultural contexts, so that there isn't a one-size-fits-all set of institutions that guarantees success. In fact a disappointingly small number of developing economies have achieved advanced-economy status in the past 100 years, and they all followed very different paths. They include Hong Kong and Singapore, two city-states that achieved a unique kind of economic success as trading and financial entrepôts; South Korea and Taiwan, two economies that succeeded during the worst years of the Cold War at least in part because of very heavy US and Western economic support; and perhaps Chile, with its set of "Latin American" conditions. You might also want to include Spain, Poland, and a few other European countries, but only if you consider them to have been developing countries in the same sense as those in Latin America, Asia and Africa, which I don't.

This is an insightful way of putting it that hadn't occurred to me before. Economists who think in terms of internally consistent models have a very different way of understanding the economy from those who think more systemically, in terms of balance sheets. I'd add that perhaps Hyman Minsky's greatest contribution was his insistence that you can only understand how an economy works when you understand the interactions between both sides of an entity's balance sheet, and how changes in its balance sheet are aligned or misaligned with changes in the balance sheets of other economic entities.