Myungji Yang. From Miracle to Mirage

In Miracle to Mirage: the Making and Unmaking of the Korean Middle Class, 1960–2015, author Myungji Yang attempts to explain middle-class dynamics in South Korea’s rapid development trajectory. An effort to extend a case study of real estate investment or “speculation” in the Gangnam area of Seoul into a broad chronicle of national class formation and dissolution proves quite a challenge. A political scientist by training, Yang bravely ranges across social narratives, class structure, and cultural practice. Adding a historical perspective, she devotes separate chapters to class emergence (1961–1979), class expansion (1978–1996), and class contraction (1997–2015). What might explain the current fragility of middle-class identity and the middle class’s declining economic status? The reader is left with the conclusion that the cause was “deeply embedded in the speculative and exclusionary ways in which it was formed during the era of high economic growth” (137). The fact that Korea enjoys a relatively equal income distribution among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members certainly gives the author pause. She counters that indicators such as the Gini coefficient do not reflect “an accurate picture of social inequality” (160 n. 30). Yet she later uses that indicator to discuss inequality in China (145). But what indicator would better reveal inequality in the Korean housing market? The author cites the Gini index in real estate for the single year of 2004 to bolster her argument, based on a secondary source (110). A further problem is balancing global and local causation in the decline of the middle class. She recognizes that economic recession and neoliberal policies have “negatively affected the middle class” (97), but argues the rather obvious point that there were also domestic factors. Yang might well have discussed how the global and local can be distinguished, how they interacted, or how their relative significance might be assessed.

Economic inequality · Economics · Gini coefficient · Inequality · Literature · Middle class · Miracle · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Real estate · Sociology · Speculation · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · History · Law