Author Q & A: 'Misery Beneath the Miracle' Upends Received Wisdom About East Asian Economies

A meticulously researched new book challenges decades of orthodoxy surrounding East Asia's economic rise. 

By
Jeff Tompkins
January 22, 2025

The latest title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute series, Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) is a collaboration between Columbia University professors Arvid Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro that reevaluates East Asia’s much vaunted economic rise and finds an atmosphere of crisis simmering underneath outwardly successful, productive societies.

Stagnant wages in Taiwan; child neglect and abuse in Japan; elder poverty in South Korea; chronic housing shortages in Hong Kong: Pairing their own research with a mass of data from several disciplines, Lukauskas and Shimabukuro diagnose a host of ills in these countries "that have put large swaths of their populations in dire straits.”

“In summary," the authors write, "East Asian governments dedicate sizable resources to social protection but have opted to exclude large segments of their populations from enjoying the phenomenal economic success they have achieved.” The result, they charge, is a rise in inequality that may threaten the foundations on which East Asia's economic success rests. 

Arvid Lukauskas is the executive director of the Picker Center for Executive Education and the MPA in Economic Policy Management (MPA-EPM) program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Yumiko Shimabukuro is Director of the Urban & Social Policy concentration for SIPA's Executive MPA Program. Via email, they jointly answered questions about their new book.

Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia delivers an urgent message: The same policies that have driven extraordinary economic growth could conceivably bring it to a halt, unless they are adjusted or ameliorated. Do you have a particular audience in mind for this warning?

Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro: The relationship between economic growth and equity continues to be the subject of intense research. Are there sharp trade-offs between them? Or can policies to ameliorate inequality lead to better economic performance in the long run? Our book tackles this puzzle head on using an interdisciplinary lens by drawing on the insights of several academic fields, such as demography, economics, political science, and sociology. It speaks to researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and students interested in East Asia as well as experts from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and other part of Asia who are eager to engage in broader comparative analysis of the links between social policy and economic development. We hope that by bringing East Asia into debates that have been dominated by advanced industrial states in Europe and North America, we have made a contribution to this literature.

Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro

You identify a common social welfare ethos, “productivism,” as uniting a group of countries that in other ways are very different from one another. (To cite the most obvious example, some are democracies while some are not). How would you define productivism, and how did it become so entrenched in one part of the world?

Lukauskas and Shimabukuro: Productivism describes the general approach of subordinating social welfare to the dictates of a growth-oriented economic policy. This strategy has led governments to channel maximum resources toward economic development and resulted in a slim, uneven welfare system. The social expenditures East Asian countries have made are concentrated in healthcare and education since these are viewed as social investments that increase human capital. A constellation of factors undoubtedly spawned productivism, since the nations we examine share several characteristics, such as a tradition of Confucianism that emphasizes the value of hard work and political systems with strong business influence at the expense of weak labor/left. We offer several insights into why productivism has persisted over time, such as the prominent voice of business in political life, but the origins of productivism is a question that warrants more research.

In each of the countries considered here, you first present various social ills through the stories of actual people. At what point in the writing did you decide to introduce people’s lived experiences as a way of humanizing the material?

Lukauskas and Shimabukuro: We are strong believers that narratives have pedagogical and analytic benefits. Cognitive scientists have shown that our brains are wired to learn through people-oriented stories because they lead to higher levels of engagement and remembering. We have used the chapters in this book as instructional case studies for our undergraduate and graduate-level courses as well as executive programs for policymakers from East Asia to great effect. We hope others will use our country studies in this way.

On the analytical side, most studies of social and economic policy often focus solely on policymakers and interest groups and neglect the circumstances facing citizens. Several recent works, notably, Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, have shown the value of exploring public policy issues through the eyes of those whose lives are directly affected by them. For this reason, we propose a new approach to studying social policy, called “dynamic integrated social welfare analysis,” that includes this view from the ground. It proposes examining multiple social welfare issue areas simultaneously from the perspective of different disciplines, considering dynamic elements such as the welfare system’s ability to adjust over time, and using a dual micro/macro lens to capture the views of ordinary citizens as well as government officials.

Street scene, Hong Kong, October 2020 (Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@drown_in_city?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">drown_ in_city</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/man-in-black-t-shirt-and-gray-pants-standing-on-the-street-cNKPOkmeWA4?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash</a>

In the West, growing and pervasive inequality is at least partly responsible for the rise of populist movements that have upended politics as usual in one country after another. Populism remains offstage in your book, but did you have these developments in mind as you were researching and writing? Are comparable populist movements a possibility in any of the countries you focus on?

Lukauskas and Shimabukuro: We were very focused on the types of problems that have raised the appeal of populist movements globally, such as growing inequality, the disruptions attributed to globalization, and the rising cost of housing, to name just a few. In many countries, like Britain, Germany, and France, these movements have taken hold despite the existence of relatively generous public social programs.

Why these same issues have not led to populism in East Asia, where social protection is far more limited, is an excellent question. Protests that have been fueled in part by anger over social ills have emerged in the region, most notably, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. But some governments in the region have not hesitated to suppress dissent and limit the emergence of political groups or civil society organizations that could spawn populist movements. The authoritarian roots of some countries in the region and their prolonged experience with the productivist approach also may have increased societal tolerance for acute and sustained inequality. 

In your introduction, you cite South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite, and for this reader the book also evokes other recent East Asian films that depict life among the precariat, like Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters and Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin. Why has popular culture been ahead of officialdom in recognizing some of the ills your book diagnoses?

Lukauskas and Shimabukuro: Good question and those are excellent films that deserve a wider viewership. There is, of course, an extensive literature that examines how the arts can identify and sound the alarm about economic, political, and social problems and become a driving force of change. Examples abound, from Sinclair Lewis’s novel The Jungle for food safety to Terry George’s film Hotel Rwanda for genocide and humanitarian crises.

Circling back to our discussion of the power of narratives, the arts can frame the injustices experienced by ordinary citizens in creative ways that make them more relatable and sharpen our focus. They can critique societal issues more openly and provocatively than may be possible in ordinary public discourse and deliver a greater emotional punch. Star power can draw in a broader and more numerous audience that might not always follow current events closely but who are engaged with popular culture.