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

Fake Money, Real Wealth

Why did the wealth gap widen even though people saved diligently? Park Jonghoon starts his answer not with individual investment failures, but with the transformation of money itself. Put side by side the interest rate on workers' asset-building savings accounts, which peaked at 41.6% a year around 1980, and the rise in the price of Eunma Apartment from 21 million won in 1979 to 4.3 billion won, and the phrase “the betrayal of diligence” no longer seems like an exaggeration. New money does not reach everyone at the same time. Those with collateral and credit buy assets first at low interest rates, while those dependent on wages and deposits encounter that money only after prices have risen. The first part traces the “value of money,” from Roman silver coins to today's dollars and won, and on to the surging demand for copper and electricity driven by artificial intelligence (AI). The book then turns to U.S. 10-year Treasury bonds, fiscal deficits, private credit, and stablecoins to examine how the “price of money” strikes back.

The book's final, fourth part takes on the unmistakable tone of a personal finance guide. Don't assume long-term bonds are always safe assets; divide your portfolio between “anchors” that can weather storms and “sails” that catch the winds of growth; and don't bet everything at once on the dollar or risk assets. In particular, the argument that “a sale is only a sale for those who can withstand it” during a market crash encapsulates the book's central concern. The same downturn can trigger a forced liquidation for an account used to cover living expenses or burdened with debt. Since the book covers both macroeconomics and investment strategy, some passages express their forecasts with more certainty than warranted. Still, it clearly connects interest rates, exchange rates, and stock prices—not as separate news stories, but as parts of one structure: “Who gets the money first, and who receives the bill later?” Before teaching readers how to build wealth, it makes them question whether the money they hold is really safe. (Written by Park Jonghoon | Glopus)

The Work of Making Something Special

Special brands are 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 apparel business, built their daily yoga experience into a business. Starting from these examples, Joel Kimbeck demystifies the idea of “originality.” Rather than inventing something no one has done before, a brand achieves status by combining what its creators already know and do well in a different way, then pursuing that approach over time. The book's selection—from Acne, Augustinus Bader, Jacquemus, Tom Ford, and Toteme to Louis Vuitton, Byredo, and Alo, and then Glossier, Hermès, and Tiffany—also follows the life cycle of a brand: “birth, expansion, and longevity.”

The book feels especially grounded in its chapter on international expansion. A name and concept that succeeded in Korea may be blocked from entering the U.S. market if it misreads the cultural context. Sephora, meanwhile, is more than a retailer: it becomes a vast experiential platform where consumers can try unfamiliar brands. Glossier, after insisting on the formula behind its success selling directly online, eventually entered Sephora and significantly increased its sales in 2023. The author also places Japan's Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons, Shiseido, Suntory, Dassai, and Hoshino Resorts side by side to ask what Korean brands will be remembered for after interest in “K” wanes. The book leans heavily on fashion, beauty, and luxury, but the “specialness” described by someone who has spent more than 20 years working directly on global brand strategy and visuals is closer to consistency in choices than to advertising copy. This is a book that urges readers to establish a standard they will not abandon when trends fade, rather than simply cultivating a feel for what's fashionable. (Written by Joel Kimbeck | Bookstone)

The Lie That Growth Will Save Us

Does society really improve when GDP rises? Timothée Parrique takes degrowth out of the realm of moral restraint or lifestyle activism centered on “consuming less” and brings it into the economic debate. Care, leisure, community, and a healthy environment are only faintly reflected in GDP, while spending arising from social losses—such as environmental remediation and accident response—is also counted as economic activity. A more fundamental challenge is directed at “green growth.” After reviewing the decoupling argument—that technological improvements in efficiency can separate growth from environmental destruction—along with hundreds of studies, Parrique 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 seeking greater profits, and governments seeking higher GDP—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 ideas in Chapter 5, he turns to “what should be built in its place,” proposing that companies formally define their production missions, that multiple stakeholders determine them, and that external bodies assess whether they align with social needs. He also directly addresses, through 12 key issues and an appendix, the criticism that degrowth amounts to “ecological austerity” that forces workers to tighten their belts. 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 a far more difficult question to the center of the economy than the slogan “stop growing”: What should we reduce, and what should we increase, to make human life more prosperous? It makes readers reconsider what we have overlooked since growth rates became society's purpose.

Slow Branding

There are more ways than ever to make a brand known quickly, but the time it takes to make it memorable has not shortened. 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 new product launches. Following Coco Farm Winery, which grows grapes alongside people with intellectual disabilities and insists on using wild yeast; Brunello Cucinelli, which makes human dignity a management principle; Tanabe Farm, which uses neither herbicides nor chemical fertilizers; and Naito, which has transformed five generations of craftsmanship into modern footwear, he shows how a brand takes root in customers' minds as an “accumulation of memories.” The Ritz-Carlton's story of sending “vacation photos” of a child's beloved stuffed toy after it was left at the hotel makes the same point. Effort that goes beyond the manual can sometimes last longer in people's memories than advertising.

It is easy to miss the point if you read this as a book that praises “inefficiency.” The question the author ultimately asks is what the inefficiency is for. He shifts the idea of a brand from a collection of features that distinguish it from competitors to the existential question “Why do we exist?” and distinguishes marketing, which focuses on acquiring customers in the short term, from branding, which builds lasting value. Even bananas that cost twice as much or clothes without visible logos become persuasive only when the entire choice expresses a coherent philosophy. The book leaves readers with a more demanding directive than simply slowing down: decide first what you cannot easily give up for today's results. A lasting brand is not one that follows trends slowly, but one that knows why it should remain unchanged. (Written by Takao Egami | Translated by Choi Jihyun | Kim Youngsa)

The Conscious Universe

In 2008, Eben Alexander fell into a coma for a week after contracting bacterial meningitis. He claimed that during this period, when his brain functions—including those of the neocortex—were severely impaired, he experienced a state of consciousness that was more vivid than anything he had known before. That claim made his earlier book, “Proof of Heaven,” the subject of a worldwide debate. “The Conscious Universe” does not stop at retelling that experience. A neurosurgeon who performed more than 4,000 operations, Alexander joins Karen Newell to question the premise that “the brain produces consciousness,” weaving together neuroscience, philosophy of mind, quantum physics, and near-death experience research across 528 pages. The table of contents—from “The Hard Problem” to “The Primordial Mind Hypothesis,” prayer and meditation, free will, and the quantum measurement problem—reveals the book's ambition.

At the same time, the book occupies 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 that receives a greater consciousness, and sees human beings 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 established conclusion. The book is more intriguing when read 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 consciousness comes from, the book persistently asks what remains unexplained by materialist accounts alone. (Written by Eben Alexander and Karen Newell | Translated by Oxford Humans | Kim Youngsa)

Missing Person

The last case left for the detective Roland is himself. When the private investigator Hutte retires, the man who has lived with the name “Roland,” given to him by Hutte, despite having lost his memory, begins to trace his own past. All he has are a photograph with a corner torn off and a handful of 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 rather than coming together, the puzzle grows more unstable. This is why Modiano's celebrated novel, winner of the 1978 Prix Goncourt, takes the form of a detective story yet moves in the opposite direction from the pleasures of solving a mystery.

For Modiano, memory is not something that can be fully recovered by digging it up. In other people's memories, I become a slightly different person, and photographs create further doubts rather than serving as evidence. Behind Roland's amnesia also looms the collective forgetting of French society in the wake of war, occupation, and the persecution of Jews. What Roland seeks, then, is not just a name, but the traces of people erased by an era. Even after his search leads him to Rome's “dark streets of shops,” the past is not restored in full light. Like footprints that briefly appear in the sand and then disappear, human identity takes shape only faintly in the memories of a few people and the pages of old directories, before fading once more. A novel that begins like a story about recovering memory ultimately shows how easily human beings can disappear. (Written by Patrick Modiano | Translated by Kim Hwayoung | Munhakdongne)

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