"Writers have compared Seoul’s Gangnam district to Beverly Hills or the Upper West Side, but Hong clarifies that this is a weak parallel. “Gangnam has no real equivalent in the United States,” she writes. “The closest approximation would be Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Beverly Hills, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Miami Beach all rolled into one.” It’s a 15-square-mile neighborhood whose astronomically pricy real estate makes it more valuable than all of Busan, Korea’s second-largest city, put together. All of Seoul’s major transportation lines converge there. All of Korea’s biggest and most influential companies are headquartered there. All of the wealthiest scions of Korea’s superclans — the families that run the egregiously powerful conglomerates known as chaebol, which include global brands like Samsung and Hyundai — live there. And, as Hong points out, 41 percent of attendees to prestigious Seoul University come from Gangnam: “Imagine if 41 percent of Harvard University undergrads came from a single neighborhood,” she says. This, in a country with the third-highest level of income disparity among industrialized nations, according to the OECD."