Ideals of Upward Mobility
What I am about to say may make you feel uncomfortable. Some may even find it offensive. In some circles, it’s still a distasteful taboo. Westerners rarely speak about it publicly, certainly not directly, even though most people definitely want it.
As a social scientist, I am not so squeamish. So I’ll say it…
Many people want to make MONEY!
They care about economic advancement; they want a nice home, to provide for their family, keep up with their peers, and enjoy a few luxuries.
But even if everyone would like to be wealthier, many readily forgo additional income if they have competing priorities. Even if a poor student could get free accommodation in exchange for sex, he may still refuse. Conceivably, no amount of money would compensate for his pride and esteem.
Across the world, societies vary in how much they care about economic advancement. If communities care more about getting to paradise, and believe that this requires keeping their wives away from unrelated men, they may refuse her employment. In India and Uzbekistan, men explicitly told me that no matter how much their wives could earn, they would still resist. I call this “The Honour-Income Trade-Off”. Families may then be caught in what I call “The Patrilocal Trap”: daughters are socialised to get married, stay put, and avoid unrelated men.
Through life history interviews in Hong Kong and South Korea, I realised a crucial driver of their historic rise in female employment. East Asians had a weak preference for female seclusion and a strong desire for economic prosperity. Eager to maximise household incomes, fathers sent their daughters to work.
Chinese readers may see this as all extremely obvious - akin to a tourist visiting to the Middle East and exclaiming that “Islam seems very important!”. In my defence, none of the literature on gender in East Asia ever mentions materialism or overwhelming desire for upward mobility. Country specialists may take it for granted, perhaps not recognising how it differs from other world regions, or might have contributed to ‘The Great Gender Divergence’.
This Substack is divided into 3 parts:
My methodology. How I used interviews, material culture, literature to understand this strong cultural desire for upward mobility.
Confucian culture was not materialistic, but there was a strong culture of ‘good fortune’ and an ideal of upward mobility in this life.
How East Asia’s 20th century economic growth led to rapid cultural change.
