Korea as the First Dream Society

Living Make-Belief, Chapter 2

I’m spending the next few months analyzing the ideas in Jim Dator’s new book Living Make-Belief, along with related works. The introduction to this project can be found here. All entries are listed here.

The Korean Wave

After opening his book with the bold claim that society is undergoing a fundamental shift, Jim Dator devotes chapter 2 of Living Make-Belief to a case study of Korea¹, which he labels “the world's first Dream Society of Icons and Aesthetic Experiences” (p. 8). Certainly, for a country barely larger than Spain², Korea is punching well above its weight. In addition, the ascendance of Korean culture has been rapid, with “Gangnam Style” creating a beachhead for K-pop in 2012, PUBG releasing in 2017, Parasite winning Best Picture in 2020, and Netflix releasing Squid Game in 2021 to mid-pandemic acclaim³.

Your own connection to Korean culture may look different, but there’s probably something that has resonated with you. I personally never got into K-pop, but I have my own little corner of the Korean cultural world that I’ve enjoyed. I found Train to Busan delightful⁴, the Du Kuh Bee noodles from The Bulgogi is one of my favorite takeout dishes⁵, and our family even made plum cheong last year.

Dator details how this cultural explosion, which appears organic to the naive observer (aka me), was in fact the result of careful, intentional government policy spanning decades and parties to create and cultivate an international Korean brand for economic and soft power reasons. This isn't the only factor in their success, however. For example, while the rest of the music industry was working hard to sell CDs in a physical-media-first strategy due to higher profitability, the Korean industry, willing to invest heavily in expanding its audience, was focusing much more on mobile video; this allowed them to capitalize on YouTube and reach outsized exposure⁶.

Weighing the Arguments

The logic of Andy Hines’s ConsumerShift would require that this explosion of cultural output be accompanied by changes in values, and preceded by changes in development. The story of Korea’s rapid development is reasonably well known; as Dator says, “[t]he utter routine of the process historically enabled Korea to be the first nation to transform from being an agricultural society, to an industrial society, to an information/knowledge society, to a dream society in 50 years”. Here are the facts I could cobble together that support that argument:

• The majority of the population switched from agriculture to something else between 1955 and 1970, with agriculture becoming a tiny minority by 2000:

  

  I tried to extract this data from Korea’s statistical service but failed, so here’s an infographic from a newspaper instead.

• Manufacturing absorbed most of the shift away from agriculture during the 70s, but peaked by around 1990, making Korea a majority-service economy:

  

  This chart comes from this research paper about economic complexity.

• Last, note that knowledge work grew over this period but plateaued around 2008, just in time for the Dream Society to emerge.

  

• Compare this to the US, where the growth in knowledge work was slower and was still going as of 2015 (hopefully these roughly correspond):

  

  This graphic is all over but appears to originate from the St Louis Fed.

• Longitudinal numbers on poverty are hard to come by, but page 8 of this paper suggests that poverty in Korea halved between 1975 and 2001, which would enable the kind of values shifts Hines postulates, where the amount of economic security people experience as children predisposes them to sets of values (with some malleability later in life (p. 70)⁷.

Interestingly, though, while the World Values Survey data indicates Korea is deeply secular, it hasn’t budged much toward self-expression values, making it seem much less Post-Modern than the countries in the upper-right. Indeed, this looks thoroughly Modern to me, focused on achievement etc.

Mapping of countries by values from the World Values Survey. I downloaded their full data set but it’s like digging through Census data.

Not surprisingly, Rolf Jensen’s 1999 preview of the Dream Society didn’t have much to say about Korea, other than its rapid recent economic growth. However, the Korean example does shows the evolution between Jensen’s 1999 conception of the Dream Society as founded on stories⁸ and Dator’s focus on performance. Most people who fell in love with K-pop, or Korean soap operas, or bibimbap, didn’t think of a grand narrative of Korean progress or Korean cultural values as part of their consumption. Jensen does get tantalizingly close to today’s reality when he says “[m]ost likely, the medium of the Dream Society will be the picture” (p. 40). If anything, the medium of the Dream Society is short-form video, which increasingly powerful mobile devices and networks have allowed to be streamed almost anywhere in the world as a distraction from almost any activity.

Conclusions

The evidence, between the historical facts and the values data, suggest that Korea may have been driven to the forefront of the Dream Society due to intentional national policy rather than evolving naturally based on values. If so, it may provide a model for other countries to pursue in revitalizing and positioning themselves for the next century. If Korean values continue to be dominated by Modern perspectives over coming decades, it suggests that the line of causation is much more from values to social form than the other way around, or maybe the two aren’t as connected as they at first appear. I’d love to hear your arguments or evidence for either side.

1. Clearly there are political implications to the choice of names. My understanding is that in modern usage Korea would properly refer to the ethnicity, language, or culture, and the country would be South Korea. But I will follow Dator’s example here, and use Korea throughout for convenience.

2. It's worth noting that Korea also has an extremely low birthrate and declining population, so it may have a relatively short window to cement its cultural standing.

3. The idea of a “Korean wave” apparently dates to the earliest years of the 21st century, but the first decade or so was mostly confined to Korea’s neighbors, with the West catching on later.

4. Korean cinema is interesting to me, because the cultural norms seem similar enough that I can usually understand the archetypes and most of the subtext being conveyed, but I’m also more likely to be surprised by what happens, presumably because the tropes are slightly different.

5. Try the kimchi, bacon, and cheese. Trust me.

6. There’s a whole Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message” sub-article that I’ll gesture toward here but not write: mobile phones not only imply that the proper consumer unit is the individual, but that everything should have a video component. K-pop capitalizing on this and making dance/costume an integral part of the musical product is a major part of its success.

7. It’s possible to imagine that a country could develop faster than generationally, and values would significantly lag, but this would require something historically unprecedented.

8. Part of this is because Jensen is trying to make it rhyme with hunter-gatherer societies, where lore and myth play such a big role. The extent to which the big picture of history includes cycles or near-cycles will be an interesting question to explore when I’m ready to tackle Spiral Dynamics.