The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong

There is a lot to learn about Korea in this memoir. Today, the South Korean capital Seoul is one of the most modern on the planet while North Korea, historically the more prosperous half of the Korean peninsula, lives on the edge of hunger. It's easy to forget that, in the 1960s, South Korea's per capita GDP was less than that of the socialist paradise to the north, or of countries such as Ghana. Even as late as the 1970s, there was little to choose between living standards in Seoul and Pyongyang. Today, South Korea is the world's 15th largest economy and London worker bees would buzz with envy at the superfast internet connection their counterparts in Seoul enjoy on their air-conditioned subway journeys to work, all courtesy of enlightened government investment. The author and her family moved back to Korea in 1985, and in the course of describing her life there, she also goes on to bust many myths in her highly entertaining account of how South Korea, once one of the world's poorest and least fashionable countries, became a cultural superpower. One is that private enterprise is invariably a more effective driver of growth than government action – 25% of venture capital in Korea in 2012 came from the government – and that government intervention makes people lazy. May we all learn our lesson.