[Books of the Week] Bread or Lottery: Finding the Balance and More

Inclusive Finance

Finance, by its nature, can be cold. It ranks people according to their credit scores, collateral, income proof, and repayment history, and charges higher rates to those deemed risky. Yonggi Kim does not deny the efficiency of this familiar order, but he questions whether its standards truly reflect today's labor and business reality. This book begins with the stories of young people with short credit histories, platform workers and freelancers with irregular income, small business owners lacking collateral, and people trying to get back on their feet after a failure—those who find themselves excluded from mainstream finance. While his previous book, "Productive Finance," asked where money should flow, this time he examines whom and how finance should reach.

The word 'inclusion' can easily slip into the language of good intentions. What sets this book apart is that it drives the discussion of inclusive finance beyond charity or benevolence toward the issue of more sophisticated risk assessment and recovery planning. The suggestion to look at cash flow, alternative data, relationship information, product structures, and post-loan management ultimately targets the inertia in finance that hides behind the word "risky." The book surveys the U.S. Community Reinvestment Act, UK and EU regulations, M-Pesa and Grameen Bank, as well as India’s JAM Trinity and UPI, challenging the complacency that Korean finance is already advanced enough. The conclusion is not just about how much more has been supplied, but whether borrowers' interest burdens have decreased, credit has been restored, and businesses have survived. This book isn’t about making finance warmhearted—it is about making it less cruel and more accurate. (Written by Yonggi Kim | Medici Media)

Bread or Lottery: Finding the Balance

What do young people really need—bread or a lottery ticket? Seokhun Woo doesn't force a choice between the two. Bread represents the daily reality of economics—rent, food, employment, income—essentials that must not collapse. The lottery stands for hope, randomness, and a sometimes reckless expectation about the future. Two decades after his classic "880,000 Won Generation," Woo returns to the lives of young people, exploring issues such as jobs, stocks and gold investments, climate crisis and technological change, vocational and consumer dreams, lifetime income, value-added, and creative destruction—all tailored to a young person's experience. That the first and last chapters of the table of contents are titled "Are you living a life worthy of respect?" is no coincidence.

Woo's economic writing often starts with figures but swiftly returns to the human faces living behind the statistics. Even as the book discusses natural interest rates and the world of gold investments, it soon questions one’s identity between large corporations and small firms, or what kind of colleague one would want in an international organization. As such, this book is less of a personal finance manual and more about the ethics of an economic life—how not to chase only money in a country where wealth is often seen as happiness, and how not to give up everything in an age when even talk of dreams can feel aggressive. When the author asks, "Do you have to have a dream to be happy?" it perfectly reveals the book’s temperature. You can’t survive without bread, but life can’t be sustained by lottery-like hope alone. The key is not to lose your sense of balance in between. (Written by Seokhun Woo | BookMentor)

The Age of Superabundance

Futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue that humanity is not merely heading toward a singularity, but is already there. "Superabundance" is not simply having more things; it is a civilizational shift in which AI, robotics, biotechnology, and energy technology converge, making the production costs of education, medicine, information, and goods plummet, and democratizing resources once considered scarce. Defined as the culmination of their exponential technology series following "Abundance," "Bold," and "The Future Is Faster Than You Think," the book envisions a world where Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) will change the course of civilization itself. Examples such as 20-minute organ delivery, the end of slaughterhouses, portable MRI scanners, AI tutors, organ regeneration, humanoids, synthetic biology, satellite data, and solar energy grids are all presented in rapid succession.

The authors are radically—and rapidly—optimistic, and so persuasion and hyperbole often run neck and neck throughout the book. Ideas like beings a billion times smarter than humans, income without labor, ageless life free of disease, or existence without scarcity are fascinating yet also dangerous. The authors recognize these dangers. Chapter 6, "The Dystopia of Abundance," deals with plastic, engineered addiction, the dilemma of growth, a world where anyone can craft a virus, and the ethical issues of superintelligence. The book closes with the unsettling possibility, reminiscent of John Calhoun’s utopia experiment, that social bonds can break down even after scarcity disappears. The real question the book asks is not how much technology will enrich humanity, but what will sustain human life once abundance replaces purpose. Even for those who do not agree with Diamandis's optimism, the book makes it clear that we are already far beyond the point where the future after AI can be described as just a story of productivity or investment opportunity. (Written by Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler | Translated by Kim Taehun | Business Books)

Chicken Bones and Plastic

If someone were to dig up today’s geological strata in the distant future, chicken bones and plastic might be far more conspicuous than statues of heroes. Jongyoung Nam uses these two peculiar specimens to illustrate the Anthropocene. Chicken bones, produced by industrial-scale consumption, and plastic, which hardly degrades, are proof of how the abundance we have created is so easily transformed into waste. The book begins from the question of the "Age of Flooding and Concealment," traversing the origins of the Anthropocene, the great acceleration, plantation economies and “cheap nature,” agriculture and the climate crisis, the spread of zoonotic diseases, cranes, and even debates among geologists over whether the Anthropocene should be officially recognized. The author's background as an environmental journalist and a research associate at the KAIST Anthropocene Research Center grounds the book in real-world and interdisciplinary perspectives, not just abstract ecological theory.

Importantly, the author does not reduce the Anthropocene to just another name for the climate crisis. He insists the era must be seen as a multidimensional dilemma, where geological layers, chicken bones, plastic, capitalism, climate crisis, and inequality all entangle, not simply a single crime by the "greenhouse gas" culprit. The book’s latter half naturally moves into planetary boundaries, doughnut economics, climate litigation, international climate politics, and democracy for non-humans. Disasters are no longer fate dropped from the sky, but the result of human activity operating behind the curtain. That the materiality of "Chicken Bones and Plastic" as a title lingers so long is precisely because the things we comfortably eat, use, and throw away will one day testify most accurately about our era. (Written by Jongyoung Nam | BookTrigger)

A Room of One's Own Life

Some books do not so much offer knowledge as help you endure difficult times. For Joanna Biggs, literature was a lighthouse in this way. In her thirties, after separating and divorcing the husband she met at nineteen and spent her twenties with, and caring for a mother with Alzheimer's disease until her death, she returned to the lives and words of women writers. Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante make up the book’s eight chapters. Questions such as "Can you fall in love while being a feminist?" or "If life's conventional goals fail to give you meaning, what should you live for?" begin at a deeply personal place, much more so than standard literary criticism.

What makes this book special is that these writers are not presented solely as icons of greatness. Biggs approaches them not as objects of reverence but as predecessors and friends who have experienced failure and wandering. Woolf’s "A Room of One's Own" here expands to "A Life of One’s Own," and the words of de Beauvoir, Plath, Morrison, and Ferrante serve as experiments in whether narration can be reclaimed after a life has come apart. As Biggs writes, reading should be a transformative experience, not just the accumulation of knowledge. The book follows this conviction—literature cannot eliminate wounds, but it can teach us what words to call upon for life after hurt. (Written by Joanna Biggs | Translated by Lee Mi-ae | Saramin)

Probation

In the poems of Hana Jeong, society resembles a ward, and people wander around hiding their symptoms. "Probation," the poet’s third collection since debuting in the magazine "Contemporary Poetry" in 2006, contains 57 poems and is No. 639 in the Moonji Publishing’s poet series. The introductory blurb, "The world is generally calm. If you ask where it hurts, it will erupt," aptly summarizes this collection's diagnostic approach. On the surface, all is calm, but beneath lies a critical condition—put a stethoscope to things, bodies, and society, and repressed sobs are amplified. Poem titles such as "Zoonotic Infection with Cold Chest," "Canned Human," "Ethics of the Marketplace," "Treadmill," "Solitary Cell," and multiple versions of "Probation" recast personal melancholy with the vocabulary of social pathology.

The book’s tone is not gentle. In the poem "Human Resource," the cynical drive of “It’s just labor, just a resource,” the belated realization that what seemed a hummingbird was a hawk moth, the bluish potatoes languishing in the shade, and the black etiquette of mourning and funerals—a litany of images that demonstrate how people easily become resources, products, or symptoms. Jeong’s poetry does not strive to be easy to read. Rather, among phrases that try to escape being read, the wounds we have ignored become more vivid. While the title "Probation" refers to a system that monitors and controls, in this context, it is the poet’s determination not to look away from a wounded world. (Written by Hana Jeong | Moonji Publishing)

The Acceleration of Evolution

To understand AI, you must first dissect the human mind. Ray Kurzweil, instead of focusing on the uses of generative AI or its prospects for industry, follows the evolution of intelligence through the birth of the universe, life, DNA, the nervous system, neocortex, language, and civilization. As the subtitle states, the central question is "How are the minds of AI created and how do they evolve?" At the core lies Kurzweil’s "pattern recognition mind theory." The neocortex doesn’t store the world as it is; it extracts rules from repeated experience and uses small patterns to build up to larger ones and predict the future. Just as humans read letters as words, words as sentences, and sentences as meaning, Kurzweil explains that AI likewise learns associations and rules from vast data sets.

Kurzweil's optimism has always been both alluring and dangerous. The thought experiment of "You 2.0"—how far can replicated patterns of memory, emotion, and judgment in digital systems still be called 'me'—pushes the boundary well beyond technical literature. He never depicts AI as a monster outside of humanity, but as the next step where human intelligence imitates and expands upon itself. Both strengths and weaknesses are equally clear: weaving neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, and futurism into a single sweeping narrative is impressive, but that same narrative can gloss over uncertainty and ethical mud. Still, if we are to talk about humanity after AI, Kurzweil reminds us with remarkable density that we must eventually return to consciousness, subjectivity, and the seat of identity. (Written by Ray Kurzweil | Translated by Yoon Youngsam | CHOLACHE)

Changing Times, Unchanging People

Even in an age when AI can write business plans, it is people who ultimately stand in front at presentations. Eunjung Lim notes that as a reviewer for government support programs, in IR pitch sessions, and in startup mentoring, she has seen the same scene repeatedly: in the past, lack of preparation was obvious in the proposal, but now AI fills in the gaps with seamless prose. The documents sound convincing, but when asked why they are pursuing this business, what they have confirmed with customers, and how far they can persist after failure, the empty spaces become clear. That’s why, she explains, she wrote a book that is more about "observing people" than conveying startup know-how.

The ten pillars are simple but not flimsy: motivation, trust, people, execution, relationships, resources, cooperation, risk, tools, and individuality. The direction of the book is evident from the chapter titles alone: "Dense Paper, One Empty Line," "Some Wait Until 100%, Others Start at 70%," "Those Who Fear Nothing Fall Fastest," and "Some Use Tools, Others Are Used by Tools" all emphasize attitude more than technique. This is not a book that piles up inspirational stories of successful entrepreneurs. Instead, it asks why, after starting from the same position with the same idea, two people end up in totally different places a year later. As fast tools proliferate, it is not the technology for finding the answer that becomes expensive, but the steadfastness of a person who does not lose their own reason till the end. (Written by Eunjung Lim | Sogeumnamu)

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