[Books of the Week] Who Gets Rich from Inflation? and More

Who Gets Rich from Inflation?

The phrase "prices are rising" has become so familiar that it barely registers anymore. Hwanjong Shin does not view inflation solely as pain at the checkout counter, but interprets it as a grand mechanism of redistribution, illustrating how wealth shifts from one place to another. The book outlines nine causes of modern inflation: monetary oversupply, an overheated labor market, supply shocks, corporate profits, demographic reversals and deglobalization, greenflation, and expected inflation. It strings together events from America’s 1960s “guns and butter” era, to the Nixon Shock and oil crises, Volcker’s tightening policies, and the post-2000 asset market climate. The author’s track record, which includes predicting the 2008 financial crisis and a career as a credit analyst, places this book closer to a long-term market chronicle than a simple outlook.

The core focus is the period from 2026 to 2030. The author examines trends such as AI infrastructure investment, the US-China hegemonic rivalry and supply chain realignment, and the rise of digital assets like Bitcoin all at once, describing this as the “Era of Complex Inflation.” Rather than being a book about hitting a predicted number, it guides the reader through the terrain where prices and interest rates, commodities and equities, bonds and monetary trust all push and pull against each other. However, when every shift is translated into an investment opportunity, the faces of everyday people suffering from inflation seem to recede into the distance. Even so, this book replaces the conventional phrase “Prices are going up” with a far more unsettling question: “Who is making money in this phase?” (Written by Hwanjong Shin | Forest Books)

Local Shift

Regions are no longer peripheral areas simply waiting for central support. "Local Shift" promotes the idea that regions should “speak for themselves,” treating localities not as targets for promotion, but as actors who build relationships. Eight PR professionals certified by the Korea PR Association—Yeji Jeon, Ji-Young Park, Suh Suhyeon, Kiyun Jung, Mincheol Jeon, Cheolje Jo, Han-Deuk Yoon, and Yunmi Kim—write about local branding, storytelling, local food, tourism, transportation, IT, climate change, and community. The diverse professional backgrounds of the authors—including live commerce production at TMON, tourism, and work in transportation, IT, ESG, and grassroots governance—shape the book's perspective. The goal is not to treat “local” as a pretty slogan, but to view it as a communication ecosystem interwoven with distribution, mobility, technology, food, and community.

Local discourse often either devolves into sentimental neighborhood tales or becomes stiff with the bureaucratic language of balanced development. This book steers a more pragmatic course, posing questions such as: What stories will shape a region’s memory? How do tourists become affiliated members of the local population? How does local food become a brand? How do transportation and IT reduce regional isolation? As with any multi-author volume, the style and depth may vary chapter by chapter, but this diversity actually reflects the reality of localities. It shows that revitalizing a region does not come from a single brilliant campaign, but from connecting the languages of many different fields. (Written by Yeji Jeon, Ji-Young Park, Suh Suhyeon, Kiyun Jung, Mincheol Jeon, Cheolje Jo, Han-Deuk Yoon, and Yunmi Kim | Sairoun Saramdeul)

Speak in the Language of AI: Branding in the AI Era

The time spent typing brand names into search bars and scrolling through results is shrinking. Seyong Park believes that consumers are no longer asking for “the best value products,” but instead are explaining their unique situations and conditions to AI, beginning their purchase journey with a few options suggested by those responses. Thus, the central question of this book is simple: Is your brand among the answers given by AI? Drawing from 400 million Korean search queries and 11 petabytes of accumulated search data spanning Korea, the US, and Japan, the author argues that the era in which brands competed to be discovered is giving way to an era where brands must operate to be “the answer.” The key concepts are CEP and GEO. Situations such as quenching thirst on a hot day, late-night hunger after overtime, packing for a business trip, or the dull ache in your knees when going down stairs—these specific scenes become the entry points, or CEPs, where categories and brands open up in a consumer’s memory.

The book does not stop at simply adding another buzzword after SEO. It explains, step by step, how to use search data to unearth the hidden inconveniences of non-customers, transform those moments into brand assets, and reinforce AI’s reasons and signals for recommending a brand with owned media and third-party endorsements. The practical perspective—“A slogan builds memory, evidence triggers recall”—is clear throughout. Admittedly, the abundance of terms such as GEO, AEO, brand ops, and agentic commerce may make the text dense for readers outside the field of marketing. Yet the changes it identifies are clear: In the AI era, brands are not polished up with catchy lines; instead, they are organized to answer consumers’ questions in sequence, and managed so that they are simultaneously readable in both human memory and AI’s semantic space. (Written by Seyong Park | Illustration by Jin-Ho Jung | Chaekman)

The Dopamine Trap

You intend to watch just a few short videos, but an hour slips away; you check the charts, and your mood rides the ups and downs all day long. Tawei reframes dopamine—not as the familiar “happy chemical,” but as a reward signal that propels humans toward their next stimulus. The book expands dopamine’s domain to include not just short-form videos, social media, shopping, gaming, and investment psychology, but also relationships, love, and emotional regulation. Concepts such as the pacifier effect, withdrawal symptoms, hedonic calculus, manipulated memories, and “the first 12 seconds of an impression” in the table of contents make it clear that this is more a book of everyday psychology than a neuroscience textbook.

Advice to avoid stimulation is easy, but a stimulation-free life is impossible. The value of this book lies in not framing desire as a moral issue, but as a matter of neural circuits. Questions like why we cannot let go of a finished relationship, why we become more attached to uncertain love, and why an inability to withstand losses leads to even bigger losses are explained with nuance—more so than the catchall phrase “lack of willpower.” However, seeing everything through the lens of dopamine risks oversimplifying the complexity of human emotion into a single neurotransmitter. Still, the diagnosis that today’s emptiness is not a lack of pleasure but the numbness that follows over-stimulation remains persuasive. (Written by Tawei | Translated by Jiyoun Lee | Genie’s Bookshelf)

Language and Counter-Language

To Karl Kraus, language was not a decoration, but a courtroom. In 1899, he launched the magazine “The Torch,” using it as a one-man platform to attack the hypocrisy of the press, law, art, and war—continuing for 922 issues until the year of his death. This essay collection, newly translated into Korean, includes aphorisms, short essays, and extended essays, and collects Kraus’s sharp prose on subjects from “the press, folly, politics” to “the world of posters,” “in this great age,” and “Heine and his legacy.” His writing—combining biting wit and wordplay—shows that the precision of language itself is an ethical foundation for social critique.

Kraus’s work remains relevant because he saw dangers greater than lies themselves. These include cliches blindly repeated, media that parrots the words of the powerful, and art that blankets reality with beautiful language. This is why thinkers like Benjamin, Adorno, and Brecht paid attention to him. Kraus’s sentences are not friendly, sometimes walking the line between dogmatism and mockery. Yet it is precisely this discomfort that allows readers to see how easily language becomes corrupted, and how quickly that corrupted language ruins the world. The belief that repairing language is the first step to repairing society is the greatest weapon in this collection. (Written by Karl Kraus | Translated by Byungryul An | Bookinthegap)

Eti’s Summer

In 1920, a man arrives at a remote farmhouse in Provence. Joseph, a British journalist living with the scars of war, the legendary painter Tartuffe who hides away refusing interviews, and Eti, the niece of the household. Lucy Steeds positions the summer shared by these three on the borderline between romance, mystery, and the art novel. There is a scene where Joseph witnesses Eti burning a painting—yet the next day, that painting hangs untouched—capturing the novel’s peculiar atmosphere. The story interrogates what is real and what is staged, whose name remains in art, and whose body is erased.

More important than the buzz of being selected as both Waterstones “Debut of the Year” and “Book of the Year” is the density of sensation. Sentences like “sunlight like melted butter,” “olive groves,” and “brushstrokes in the hush of night” transform Provence from a tourist scene into a place where desire and secrets ferment. Love is depicted not as a sweet escape, but as a risk that pulls one into another’s shadow, while art is both salvation and another form of exploitation. Beneath the beautiful surface of summer, a long-suppressed woman’s voice gradually rises in warmth throughout the novel. (Written by Lucy Steeds | Translated by Jinseon No | Dasan Books)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.