[Books of the Week] Fake Money, Real Wealth and More

Fake Money, Real Wealth

Why did the wealth gap widen even though we saved diligently? Park Jonghoon begins his answer not with individual investment failures, but with the transformation of money itself. Compare the interest rate on asset-building savings accounts, which reached an annual peak of 41.6% around 1980, with the rise in the price of an Eunma Apartment from 21 million won in 1979 to 4.3 billion won, and the phrase “the betrayal of diligence” no longer sounds like an exaggeration. New money does not reach everyone at the same time. People with collateral and credit buy assets first at low interest rates, while those who rely on wages and deposits encounter that money only after prices have risen. If Part 1 traces “the value of money” from Roman silver coins to today’s dollars and won, and even to the demand for copper and electricity driven up by AI, the later sections examine a phase in which “the price of money” pushes back, bringing in U.S. 10-year Treasury bonds, fiscal deficits, private credit, and stablecoins.

The book’s fourth and final part has the unmistakable feel of a personal finance guide. Don’t assume that long-term bonds are always safe assets; divide your assets into “anchors” that can weather storms and “sails” that catch the winds of growth; and don’t bet on the dollar and risky assets all at once. The argument that “a sale is only a sale for those who can endure it,” especially in a market crash, captures the book’s central concern. The same downturn can trigger a forced liquidation in an account funded by living expenses or debt. Bringing macroeconomics and investment strategies together in one volume means some passages lean too heavily on confident forecasts. Still, the explanation is clear in showing how interest rates, exchange rates, and stock prices are connected—not as separate news stories, but as one structure shaped by the question, “Who gets the money first, and who gets the bill later?” Before teaching readers how to build wealth, the book prompts them to question whether the money they hold is truly safe. (By Park Jonghoon | Glopus)

The Work of Making Something Special

Special brands were rarely special from the start. Acne Studios began not as a fashion company but as an advertising agency, while Alo was born when its two founders, already in the clothing business, built their everyday yoga experience into a venture. From these origins, Joel Kimbeck takes some of the mystique out of the myth of “originality.” Rather than inventing something no one has done before, a brand achieves status by combining what it already knows well with what it already does well in a different way, then sticking with that approach over time. The book’s lineup—from Acne, Augustinus Bader, Jacquemus, Tom Ford, and Toteme, through Louis Vuitton, Byredo, and Alo, to Glossier, Hermès, and Tiffany—is also arranged around the stages of a brand’s life: “birth, expansion, and endurance.”

The book feels especially grounded in its chapters on entering overseas markets. A name and concept that succeeded in Korea can be blocked from entering the U.S. market if it misreads the cultural context, while Sephora can serve not merely as a retailer but as a vast experiential platform where consumers try unfamiliar brands. Glossier held on to its online direct-sales success formula, but eventually joined Sephora and significantly increased its sales in 2023. The author also places Japanese brands Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons, Shiseido, Suntory, Dassai, and Hoshino Resorts side by side, asking what Korean brands will be remembered for after interest in “K” fades. The book is weighted toward fashion, beauty, and luxury, but the “specialness” described by someone who has worked directly with global brands’ strategies and visuals for more than 20 years is less about advertising slogans than consistency in the choices a brand makes. It advises readers to establish one principle they won’t abandon after a trend passes, rather than simply following the latest fashion. (By Joel Kimbeck | Bookstone)

The Lie That Growth Will Save Us

Does society really improve when GDP grows? Timothée Parrique takes degrowth out of the realm of moral restraint and lifestyle campaigns urging people to “consume less,” and places it within the economic debate. Care, leisure, community, and a healthy environment are only faintly reflected in GDP, while spending prompted by social losses—such as environmental restoration or accident response—is also counted as economic activity. His more fundamental challenge is directed at “green growth.” After examining the decoupling argument—that technological efficiency can separate economic growth from environmental destruction—alongside hundreds of studies, he questions the reality that production is expanding faster than efficiency is improving, as well as the rebound effect. In a system where three “speedometers”—individuals seeking higher incomes, companies pursuing profits, and governments seeking GDP growth—accelerate one another, even environmentally friendly technology can lead to more production and consumption.

What sets Parrique apart from simple opponents of growth comes next. After tracing the history of degrowth thought in Chapter 5, he turns to the question of “what to build in its place,” proposing that companies formally define their production mission, that multiple stakeholders determine it, and that external organizations assess whether it aligns with social needs. He also directly addresses the criticism that degrowth amounts to “ecological austerity” that forces workers to tighten their belts, taking on 12 points of debate and addressing them in an appendix. Of course, many questions remain unanswered about how markets, prices, private property, and money would function in a post-growth society, and the author does not hide the difficulty. That is all the more reason to read the book. It brings to the center of the economic debate a far more demanding question than the slogan “stop growth”: What should we reduce, and what should we increase, to make human life more fulfilling? The book makes readers reassess what we have overlooked since growth rates became society’s goal. (By Timothée Parrique | Translated by Lee Miok, Park Daejin, and Jeon Gwangcheol | Chakhan Chaekgage)

Slow Branding

There are more ways than ever to make a brand known quickly, but that does not shorten the time it takes to make it memorable. Takao Egami, who has worked in Japan’s branding industry for more than 30 years, calls this gap “slow branding.” By slow, he does not mean advertising less or delaying the launch of new products. Through the stories of Coco Farm Winery, which grows grapes with people with intellectual disabilities and insists on using wild yeast; Brunello Cucinelli, which places human dignity at the heart of its business principles; Tanabe Farm, which uses neither herbicides nor chemical fertilizers; and Naito, which has translated five generations of craftsmanship into modern shoes, he shows how a brand takes root in customers’ minds as an “accumulation of memories.” The Ritz-Carlton’s story of sending a child “vacation photos” of a beloved stuffed toy left behind at the hotel makes the same point. Extra care that goes beyond the manual can sometimes last longer than an advertisement.

It is easy to miss the point if you read this as a book praising “inefficiency.” The question the author ultimately asks is: What is that inefficiency worth enduring for? He reframes a brand not as a set of characteristics that distinguish it from competitors, but as an existential question—“Why do we exist?”—and distinguishes marketing, which focuses on acquiring customers in the short term, from branding, which builds value over time. A banana that costs twice as much and clothes without visible logos become persuasive only when the choices behind them all express a single philosophy. The book leaves readers with a more demanding instruction than simply slowing down: First decide what you cannot easily give up for today’s results. A lasting brand is not one that follows trends slowly, but one that first knows why it should remain unchanged. (By Takao Egami | Translated by Choi Jihyun | Gimmyoung Publishers)

A Conscious Universe

In 2008, Eben Alexander fell into a coma for a week after contracting bacterial meningoencephalitis. His claim that he experienced a state of consciousness more vivid than any he had known before, even as his neocortex and other brain functions were severely impaired, turned his earlier book, “Proof of Heaven,” into a subject of global debate. “A Conscious Universe” does not stop at retelling that experience. In 528 pages, the neurosurgeon, who performed more than 4,000 operations, joins Karen Newell in questioning the premise that “the brain produces consciousness,” weaving together neuroscience, philosophy of mind, quantum physics, and near-death experience research. The table of contents, which ranges from “the hard problem” and the “primordial mind hypothesis” to prayer and meditation, free will, and the quantum measurement problem, reveals the book’s ambition.

At the same time, the book stands on a precarious boundary between science and spirituality. Drawing on his near-death experience, Alexander interprets the brain not as the source of consciousness but as a kind of channel through which a greater consciousness is received, and sees humans as “a window through which the universe becomes aware of itself.” It is difficult to accept this leap from personal experience to the ontology of the universe as a scientifically proven conclusion. The book becomes more interesting when read instead as a metaphysical hypothesis and a proposal for how to live. That is also why its later chapters turn to love, compassion, connection, and how to live now, rather than what happens after death. Rather than solving the hard problem of “Where does consciousness come from?”, this book persistently asks what remains unexplained by materialist accounts alone. (By Eben Alexander and Karen Newell | Translated by Oxford Humans | Gimmyoung Publishers)

Missing Person

The last case left for the detective Roland is himself. When the owner of the private detective agency, Hutte, retires, the man who has lived under the name “Roland,” given to him by Hutte after he lost his memory, begins investigating his own past. All he has are a photograph with a corner torn off and a few meager clues, like an obituary. Following the trail of a bar pianist, a gardener, a photographer, old addresses, and phone books, he tries to guess which man in a photograph might have been him and clings to the names of people who may once have been close to him. Each clue leads to another, but instead of coming together, the puzzle grows more unstable. This is why Modiano’s celebrated novel, which won the 1978 Prix Goncourt, adopts the form of a detective story while moving in the opposite direction from the pleasures of solving a mystery.

For Modiano, memory is not an archive that can be fully recovered through excavation. I become a slightly different person in each other person’s memory, and photographs create new doubts rather than serving as evidence. Beyond Roland’s amnesia looms the collective forgetting of French society, marked by the war, the Occupation, and the persecution of Jews. What Roland seeks, then, is not simply a name, but traces of people erased by an era. Even after his search reaches Rome’s “missing person” listings, the past is not restored in full light. Like footprints that appear briefly before disappearing in the sand, human identity takes shape only tenuously in the memories of a few people and the pages of old directories, then fades again. A novel that begins like a story about recovering one’s memory ultimately shows how easily human beings can disappear. (By Patrick Modiano | Translated by Kim Hwayoung | Munhakdongne)

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