Measured Excess Paperback – November 15, 2000

This very entertaining illuminated a developing country's discovery of consumerism. I enjoyed not ony the insight into Korean life, but the way the book put this bahavior in a broader context.

This is one of a spate of new books looking at Gender and Consumption in the new middle classes developing around the world. In general, I much prefer Mills' "Thai Women in the Global Labor Force" or Wolf's "Factory Daughters" to this one. Those two books have an explicit focus on gender and aknowledge the contentious nature of household decisions on spending money. The case of the Korean middle classes during the "miracle economy" of the 1970s and 1980s has a lot of intrinsic interest, and there is a lot of information here to think about. But too much of the information is summary statistics on whole segments of the population, or relatively fragmented stories and anecdotes drawn from personal encounters and interviews. It gets very hard to connect these two levels.Rudi Colloredo-Mansfield's book "The Native Leisure Class" about highland south America does a better job of linking intimate details of daily life with 'big picture' ideas about consumer culture and development in general. It is a very tough assignment.Nelson has a great topic. She writes well, and clearly knows Seoul extremely well. But this is not the great book on the consumer culture of a developing country that we have been waiting for.