Stack ten years of average lawmaker net worth and plot it, and the curve rises and falls like a stock chart. From the ₩3.8 billion range in 2016 it plunged to the ₩2.8 billion range in 2020, then climbed back to the ₩3.5 billion range in 2025. It looks like the result of a churning market. Read it that way and you get it exactly backwards. What shook this curve was not prices but the general election that returns every four years — and the real movement lies not in the average but in the assets beneath it.
First, the swing the average draws
Lawmakers and other senior public officials declare their assets every year, and the Public Service Ethics Committee publishes them in the official gazette. Add up real estate such as land and buildings, financial assets such as deposits and stocks, and subtract debt, and you get one person’s net worth. Average those declarations across all lawmakers, year by year, and you get the curve below.
In figures: ₩3.83B (2016) → ₩2.85B (2020) → ₩3.52B (2025). The deep valley of 2020, nearly a billion won down, is plain at a glance. From the graph alone it reads as if lawmakers’ finances shrank all at once that year. But the moment you read this valley as ‘lawmakers got poorer,’ you misread the data backwards.
The 2020 inflection — not the market, but the turnover of people
A clear external event overlaps the 2020 valley. That year saw the 21st general election, and a wave of first-term lawmakers with relatively little wealth entered the chamber. The average fell not because sitting lawmakers lost anything, but because new names joined the roster. The average reflects not ‘how much the same people changed’ but ‘who is on the roster right now.’ So when the people change, the curve swings.
The same valley is dug, without fail, right after the 2016 and 2024 elections too. The sawtooth shape — the curve sinking on a four-year cycle and rising again toward mid-term — is the mark of the election cycle itself, not of any rise or fall in prices. What pulls the average down is not market prices but the turnover of people.
Over the same decade, how did Gangnam real estate move?
So where did the assets themselves go? Set down the swinging lens of the average and follow an asset fixed in one place, and the direction looks rather different. The largest single chunk of lawmaker wealth is real estate, and within it the top district by declared value has consistently been Gangnam-gu. Sum the value of real estate lawmakers declared in Gangnam, year by year, and you get the curve below.
The total went from ₩54.6 billion in 2016 to ₩98.1 billion in 2025 — about 1.8 times over the decade. The larger trend points up. It resembles the Gangnam housing curve we all know. Even in 2020, when average net worth was carving its valley, the Gangnam total held at ₩67.1 billion, near the prior year; and in 2024–2025, as the average refilled, it leapt to ₩88.4 billion and ₩98.1 billion. Lawmaker wealth is, for the most part, less something ‘earned’ than a structure in which the real estate already held simply rose on its own. What filled the coffers was less diligent investing than the appreciation of the Gangnam property they sat on.
Why you still cannot call it ‘a steady climb’
Yet even this second curve cannot be pinned down as ‘ten straight years of climbing.’ Two confounders must be separated honestly. First, interest rates. When rates jumped in 2022–2023, the Gangnam total fell back from ₩72.2 billion to ₩58.1 billion. The ₩58.1 billion of 2023 is in fact lower than the ₩61.7 billion of 2018. When prices drop, declared values drop with them.
Second, this curve too cannot fully escape the turnover of people. The number of lawmakers declaring real estate in Gangnam itself fell from the 50s to the 37s across the 2020 election. In other words, before and after 2020 are effectively the declarations of two different parliaments stitched together, so a single continuous line hides a break in the series. The rise in the total reflects both price appreciation and a shift in ‘who declares Gangnam.’ To read this curve literally as ‘each lawmaker’s assets grew every year’ would be another misreading. More precisely: ‘the assessed value of Gangnam itself, ups and downs included, became about 1.8 times over the decade.’
What shook the curve was a change of roster, not prices
The reason the two curves move differently converges on one thing: what you are tracking. Average net worth shifts its composition with every election, so it also captures ‘who is a lawmaker now’; track a fixed asset item like Gangnam real estate, and the grain of the curve changes. Both come from the same disclosures, but one reflects a roster of people and the other the assessed value of assets. From the same data, the choice of what to put on the vertical axis builds the opposite story.
That is why news that ‘the average lawmaker’s wealth rose, or fell’ is only half right. The swing of the average measures the election cycle, not prices; the rise of assets measures the changing assessed value of holdings, not behavior. The moment you read the swing of the average and the trend of the assets as one and the same, the data begins to lie.Doubt the average — the real story is not in the swinging average but in the assets that quietly gained volume beneath it.
Why it matters
Asset disclosure exists so that citizens can watch the relationship between power and wealth. But when that record is consumed only as a one-line ‘the average rose / fell,’ the purpose of the system grows blurry instead. Blame the swing on the market and you bury the question that actually deserves asking — who holds which assets, and how much those assets swelled while barely leaving their hands. Doubting the single number of the average and pulling apart the items beneath it is the first step to reading disclosed data properly and restoring oversight to its original purpose.
Method & source · Based on public-official asset disclosures published in the official gazette by the Public Service Ethics Committee. Average net worth is a separately compiled figure; because the makeup of lawmakers changes with every election, simple year-over-year comparison has limits. Gangnam real estate is the value of real-estate items in the disclosures summed for Gangnam-gu by year; being based on declared bases such as the official assessed value, it can differ from actual transaction prices. In particular, the number of lawmakers declaring Gangnam fell from the 50s to the 37s across the 2020 election, so before and after 2020 effectively stitch together two different parliaments and the series is broken. Disclosures are a year-end snapshot; the figures are aggregates at the overall or regional level, not for any specific lawmaker. Data tally · kookrator.