By Tom Kenny
Arvid J Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro’s Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia is a bracing, data-rich intervention that punctures the triumphalist narratives still clinging to the region’s growth story. Published by Cornell University Press in December 2024, the book makes a simple but politically explosive claim: decades of “miraculous” GDP gains were built atop welfare architectures designed to prioritise production over people, and the cumulative human toll—elderly poverty, child maltreatment, low wages, and urban housing precarity—has been systematically minimised or misrepresented.
Central to the book is the authors’ characterisation of East Asia’s productivist welfare strategy: states deliberately directed resources toward growth-enhancing economic objectives while deferring or downscaling universal social protection. The result, they argue, isn’t merely a lag in social spending but an integrated regime in which policy choices across labour markets, education, pensions, and housing are mutually reinforcing—and often mutually harmful for those at the bottom. It’s a helpful reframing, because it resists the familiar habit (common in anglophone debates) of appraising “welfare policy” distinct from the economy within which it is implemented. As Lukauskas and Shimabukuro put it, productivism helped deliver early rapid economic development, but then hardened into a structure that normalises low wages, substandard housing, and threadbare safety nets even as national incomes soared.
To study this, the authors propose a new methodological approach that they call “dynamic integrated social welfare analysis.” In plain terms, they insist on examining multiple welfare arenas simultaneously, tracking how systems adjust over time, and switching between macro structures and micro experiences. It’s part political economy, part policy analysis, with qualitative narratives interleaved within national datasets. That last move matters. The book blends high-level metrics with ground-level individual accounts—what the authors call “connecting policy with people”—to show how policy designs are often experienced as precarity. In a field famous for bar charts and bland averages, the insistence on interconnection and temporality brings the book to life for both the academic and general reader alike.
The middle chapters offer a series of case studies in how productivism yields human distress alongside economic growth. South Korea’s “golden years” seem anything but: an anatomical study of old-age poverty reveals how a development model that lauded family sacrifice ended up destroying the material basis of a dignified retirement. Parents’ lifetime savings were funnelled into children-as-human-capital arms races; meagre public pensions and low coverage rates did the rest. The result is a cohort of seniors working menial jobs—or not working at all—while living below the poverty line. To deepen the indictment, the authors note that some governments, including Singapore and Taiwan, do not even maintain official poverty lines, obscuring the scale of deprivation.
If the old are squeezed, East Asian children are hardly spared. A chapter on Japan charts a grim landscape: under-resourced child-protection systems, social stigma that mutes reporting, and policy designs that treat maltreatment as a fringe pathology rather than a structural outcome of labour insecurity, cramped housing, and caregiver overload. By embedding child welfare in the wider regime—long hours, low pay, fractured support services—the authors push readers beyond moral outrage to class analysis. Child abuse is not an aberration in an otherwise healthy system; it is a predictable by-product of policies that exhaust households and hoard risk in the private sphere. This is a crucial shift: instead of locating harm in the family alone, the book traces how the state’s abdications set the conditions under which families fail.
The urbanisation story is told most vividly in a chapter about housing in Hong Kong. The authors link global finance, land scarcity politics and a technocratic planning ethos that treats the financial value of property as sacrosanct. Here the “affordable housing crisis” is not a market hiccup but the logical output of a development platform organised around real-estate rents. A chapter about China points to the social wreckage of migration and the hukou system: families fractured by work patterns and administrative exclusion, with rural children and elderly bearing the costs of urban accumulation they do not share. By yoking housing and migration to welfare outcomes, the book refuses the comfort of sectoral analysis; the slumlord logic of urban land and the bureaucratic gatekeeping of urban citizenship are shown to be part of the same machine.
A chapter on Taiwan examines the low wages paid to many workers, offering a sharp reminder that high-tech branding can coexist with wage stagnation and weak labour bargaining power. The authors are at their strongest when they connect wage policy to the education “arms race” and to the wider political settlement that privileges firms and credentialled insiders over precarious workers. One motif recurs: governments across the region routinely deploy what the authors term “policy façades”—one-off rebates, temporary stipends, or headline-friendly reforms that leave the baseline economic and social architecture untouched. It’s a catchy piece of phraseology that should resonate far beyond East Asia.
The book’s signal contribution is its systemic clarity. East Asia has often been lauded as an economic success story whose residual social ills are either cultural (familialism) or transitional (catch-up growth). Lukauskas and Shimabukuro demolish both these alibis. Familialism is revealed as statecraft—a deliberate assignment of care obligations to households so that public budgets can be freed for industrial policy. “Transition” becomes a permanent deferral: a promise that the welfare state will arrive once growth “matures” even as each cycle of reform hardens privilege and exclusion in labour markets, and stratification in schools and housing.
For all the book’s many strengths, the book is likely to raise unanswered questions in the minds of left readers. Firstly, how new is the methodology? The authors’ insistence on dynamics and interconnection echoes older Marxian and feminist welfare-state scholarship that has long treated social reproduction, labour regimes, and housing as co-constituted. The novelty here is less theoretical than institutional: the authors are political economists operating inside mainstream policy schools, and they bring that audience with them. Second, while the case studies are well chosen, organised labour appears mostly as a backdrop. A more thoroughgoing analysis would interrogate why unions in the region—where they exist—could not arrest wage stagnation or win solidaristic pensions, and how capital mobility and state repression have hemmed in labour’s horizons.
A third tension is normative. The authors make a pragmatic case that social spending can promote growth by sustaining demand, reskilling workers, and stabilising expectations—exactly the Keynesian line that social policy is productive investment. This is tactically persuasive, but a more radical stance would insist that human flourishing is not contingent on GDP performance. The book hints at this—especially in the child-abuse and housing chapters—but often returns to growth-compatible arguments, perhaps to broaden its policy coalition. Readers of Liberation may wish for a bolder declaration: even if social protection didn’t boost growth, it would remain a democratic necessity.
Where the book does break fresh ground is in its attention to measurement politics. The observation that Singapore and Taiwan lack official poverty lines brings the politics of visibility to the fore. If poverty is not measured, it is easier to deny; if abuse is framed as private family tragedy rather than social failure, it is easier to defund prevention; if housing is treated as an asset class, tenants become statistical noise. This is why the “dynamic integrated” approach matters: it forces the analyst to watch the feedback loops—how hiding a problem in one domain (say, poverty) enables the starvation of another (say, pensions), which then deepens the original problem.
The book is academically rigorous enough for scholars but written in accessible prose that foregrounds lived experience. The authors deftly balance sympathetic vignettes with uncompromising structural critique. Their conclusions have implications the United States and Europe: the dangers of “growth at all costs” are not uniquely East Asian. They are symptoms of a global political economy that has allowed capital accumulation to colonise the language of welfare, treating minimum social guarantees as discretionary and temporary.
What, then, is to be done? The book points—cautiously—toward re-embedding markets in robust social institutions: credible poverty measurement, universal floors for income in old age, child-protection systems that intervene early and generously, and housing policies that are disconnected from speculative finance. It does not pretend there is a silver bullet, and it is appropriately wary of technocratic tinkering. But it demolishes the fatalism that says East Asia’s welfare deficits are cultural destiny. They are policy choices, and policy choices can be unmade.
For left readers, Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia is both a diagnostic and a provocation. It invites us to retire the stale debate between “developmental state good” and “neoliberal state bad” and to train our attention on who the state develops for, and how. If we take the authors seriously, the miracle was always double-sided: dynamism for capital, misery for too many of the people who made the miracle possible. Naming that truth is the first step toward something better.
“Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia” — a reckoning with Asian productivism’s human costs. Published by Cornell University Press
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation.
Tom Kenny is a Liberation member
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