This hits everyone, rich and poor alike.
I readily grant that a Confucian culture can have effects comparable to those of Western Christianity, though it has key inherent defects when it comes to Confucian ideas of the worth of the group as opposed to the worth of the individual. Long-term, I believe Asian culture without Christian influence will lead to centralized control and a form of fascism, not true capitalism. Even so, the simple fact of the matter is that fascism works better than classical socialism and far better than communism. All three are wrong, of course; the solution is the freedom of capitalism which presumes the right of an individual to work hard to better himself.
South Korea, despite all of the problems of the Korean church world, is the single biggest exception to the non-Christian economic progress of Asian economies. The rise of Japan and China could have been predicted based on economics and demographics, and the same is probably true of Indonesia due to oil wealth.
However, the economic rise of South Korea definitely could **NOT** have been predicted. It was an irrelevant backwater that has become a major economic player.
How is that to be explained?
Religion has clear effects on culture once that religion has permeated the culture. It's been a joke for a long time that copper wire was invented by a Hollander and a Scotsman fighting over a penny. It's been an obvious reality, not just a joke, that New England frugality and thrift managed to survive the collapse of the Puritan theology that created those attributes.
However, when I look at the work ethic of Koreans, I think it's clear in a generation or two, somebody is going to have to start inventing jokes about the Korean work ethic.
Calvinism encountered a pre-existing capitalist ethos in the Netherlands and a Marxist argument could be made that the Dutch became Calvinists for economic reasons, not the other way around. That Marxist logic definitely does not work with Scotland, which was a backwater of largely uneducated near-barbarians before the Reformation. Scotland was radically transformed by the preaching of the Reformed faith. When Scotland became Reformed, it led to radical changes in society, primarily due to the need for people to be able to learn to read their Bibles and secondarily due to teaching people that it was perfectly fine to learn to govern themselves through local kirk sessions rather than kowtowing to far-away bishops and secular lords. Those two changes — improved literacy and legitimization of self-government — laid the foundations for the rise of Scottish capitalism.
Marxist analysis works even less well with South Korea, where religion is a critical motivating factor in much of what has happened in the last 80 to 90 years. The Korean Independence Movement under Japanese occupation was largely though not entirely led by Christians. Google “Esther Ahn,” a heroine of Korean independence, and you'll see an example of someone who wasn't explicitly political but strongly opposed Japanese imposition of emperor worship. Multiply her example by tens of thousands, and you'll get an idea of why South Korea did not capitulate to the Japanese or to the Communists.
The Korean church has many, many problems, and the parallels with Scotland are far from precise. However, the Korean church definitely has taught a biblical work ethic to its people, and that has had major cultural and economic consequences.
Since this is a Reformed thread, I'll add a side point — if we don't do something in the near future to fix our churches in the West, we'd better all figure out how to read and speak Korean soon. Raw numbers show that Calvinism is already a predominantly Korean phenomenon on a worldwide basis — their churches are rapidly growing while we're destroying our own Reformed churches in America by abandoning our roots.
It's certainly happened before that God has raised up powerless people to shame and embarrass the proud.