1. What is Money Dysmorphia?
(1) The Definition of Money Dysmorphia
You work. You are not starving. Yet, you have no money.
This is Money Dysmorphia—the state of earning, but having nothing left. It is not absolute poverty, but a glitch in perception. We can call it “Phantom Poverty.” It is a poverty without substance, but the uncertainty it produces is real.
A Note to the reader
this essay draws primarily from Korea and the UK. But the pattern holds wherever you look — small open economies:
- where manufacturing has collapsed,
- where finance and services have piled into a single capital city,
- where the regions have hollowed out,
- where the welfare state promises everything and delivers debt.
If you’re young and living in one of those places, Money Dysmorphia is not a personal failing.
(2) Is it Just Because of Social Media?
People usually blame social media. The comparison trap, relative deprivation. They aren’t wrong, but it’s an insufficient answer. Human comparison existed long before SNS. In Korea, there’s a thousand-year-old proverb: “When your neighbor buys land, you get a stomachache.”
Social media merely amplified this inherent emotion. But in the past, the feeling of “earning but having nothing” wasn’t this widespread. Even if you heard someone made a fortune, there was an underlying belief that you could do it too. Money Dysmorphia is a phenomenon that became mainstream only in the 2010s.
The root cause of money dysmorphia—the persistent feeling of financial stagnation despite earning income—is the disappearance of the positive effects of leverage. Debt is essentially discounting future assets into present value. The core issue here is the subjective perception that this debt is being squandered on expenses without increasing productivity, rather than being invested in future assets.
Whether in business or investment, the ultimate purpose of taking on debt is to lower marginal costs and improve return on equity (ROE). However, the democratic welfare state prevents healthy market cleansing and induces inflation. This inflates fixed costs without any corresponding growth in productivity. Consequently, it transforms today’s expenditures into one-off expenses rather than assets for the future. In this environment, debt ceases to function as leverage.
To be frank, was the debt taken on for university tuition truly worth it? If that spending guaranteed employment or a higher salary, today’s expense would be a justifiable investment in a future asset. Because reality failed to deliver on that promise, people are left with the feeling that they have nothing to show for it. In fact, compared to the actual productivity gains from education, university tuition in almost all developed nations is excessively high. Acquiring bachelor’s level knowledge is much faster and more efficient through private or internet academies. Therefore, after paying for basic necessities like living expenses, interest, and education, there is literally no money left over. Social comparison and relative deprivation driven by social media simply act as a moderating variable (Z) that amplifies this subjective perception.
Conversely, when leverage is alive and well—like in Japan during the 1980s bubble—the entire society overflows with a sense of abundance and certainty. Therefore, as long as our economic and social leverage remains intact, we do not suffer from money dysmorphia, even when using social media. Instead, everyone simply reinvests their profits, use debts and sprints forward, dreaming of their own better tomorrow.
In conclusion,
X (Perception of lost leverage) → Z (Moderator: SNS comparison/deprivation) → Y (Money Dysmorphia)
(3) Why Money Dysmorphia Might Actually Help Producers
Let’s detour for a second. AI is already crushing humans in functionality and efficiency. You must now become a solo creator whose work resembles art. If you don’t, you cannot generate added value. Eventually, every individual must become a micro-entrepreneur, an indie researcher, or a creator. This is because, ultimately, AI will assist producers but eliminate laborers.
For producers, Money Dysmorphia can be a source of inspiration. Why? As Mises of the Austrian School stated, value in a capitalist society stems solely from consumer utility; thus, the paradox of ‘working hard but having no money’ can drive a search for higher value creation. It forces you to remain hyper-aware of your audience. You become fully immersed in creating ‘artistic practicability‘ for the consumer. This is a paradox we can enjoy because we are producers.
Therefore, money dysmorphia becomes a problem primarily for laborers and consumers, not producers. Depending on how one accepts it, this dysmorphia can actually serve as the core engine of suffering that drives artists, creators, and producers to generate utility for their consumers. If producers were to enjoy abundant income from their creations, they would have no reason to try and sublimate suffering into meaning; they would inevitably lean toward maintaining the status quo.
However, while this remains a psychological dynamic, the physical reality is that losing the economic and social leverage necessary for production is fatal. This loss of leverage makes one wonder whether many underground producers are forced to abandon their core convictions, clinging desperately to the mainstream market.
Looking back, the 1990s and 2000s were the golden era of underground producers in the US, the UK, and South Korea. In the hip-hop scene, creators spent entire nights debating a single rhyme or a sampling source, risking everything to verify whether one’s identity and subjective truth were real or fake.
However, as rents, education, and living costs skyrocketed, capital began draining away as the mere cost of breathing—in the form of debt and interest—without contributing to actual productivity. This completely destroyed the underground ecosystem. From a producer’s perspective, the disappearance of the leverage once accessible with minimal capital is what forces modern products to cater to the masses.
Therefore, for any producer determined to defend their own originality, understanding money dysmorphia is essential for mapping out future survival strategies.
2. What is Leverage?
(1) Classical Leverage: High Fixed Costs Mean High Leverage
Leverage is the strategy of using debt as a fulcrum to maximize the return on your equity. It allows massive transactions with minimal capital. Textbooks say this: High fixed costs yield high leverage effects.
You build a massive factory and fill it with machinery. Your fixed costs skyrocket. But once you sell enough to pass the break-even point, the manufacturing cost per unit plummets, and your operating profit explodes. You just keep printing products without additional investment. In the past, the ultimate investment strategy was to drive up fixed costs to increase immobility, monopolize the market, and reduce marginal costs to zero through the economies of scale in mass production. This is operating leverage.
Then there is financial leverage. You take on debt to inflate the yield on your own money. As long as the asset appreciation rate is higher than the interest rate, taking out a mortgage to buy an apartment is a winning game.
There was an era when this was the undisputed formula for success. A time of booming economies, low interest rates, and overflowing demand for single mass-produced goods. You could change the mold on a single machine, print it out, and it would sell instantly. You simply pulled future capital returns into the present in the form of debt.
Today is different. The fundamental reason why the positive effects of debt, such as operating leverage and financial leverage, have vanished is that democratic welfare states ensure that failing companies, zombie industries, and unproductive workers continuously participate in the economy. Because the market is not allowed to clear, entry barriers continue to rise, causing factor prices to explode. This is then passed on to consumers in the form of inflation. With productivity stagnant while prices soar, it has become impossible to use leverage to lower marginal production costs. This prevents businesses from scaling through replication, ultimately deteriorating producer profitability.
To summarize, the core of the leverage effect—whether by increasing fixed costs through investment or increasing interest expenses through debt—is to achieve high marginal productivity with minimal capital. However, the democratic welfare state has paralyzed the clearing function of the market, destroying price signals and causing factor prices to skyrocket. This destroys the leverage effect, wasting precious debt and profits on fixed costs rather than productivity gains. As the destruction of price signals drives societal uncertainty to extremes, a growing realization emerges that nothing is left over—not just in economic terms, but also in social dimensions such as investments in education. This is the root of money dysmorphia.
(2) Leverage as a Double-Edged Sword
In a stagnant, high-interest economy, combining high fixed costs with high interest expenses means a slight dip in sales leads directly to bankruptcy. This is the double leverage effect working against you.
Hence, a paradox emerges. This means that operational leverage, driven by high fixed costs, and debt leverage, fueled by collateralizing future earnings, are no longer viable. Now, the opposite is true. It has become far wiser to lower fixed costs to increase mobility and to minimize debt as much as possible, leaving future ‘profits’ as a reward for the future self. For examples:
- Those who use their current capital to build an archive of assets or hard money that do not depreciate. (Time leverage)
- Those who physically or digitally relocate to find arbitrage, spending $1 to get $3 worth of value.
- To invest in intangible assets and network effects—such as software, AI, intellectual property (IP), and content—to expand into global markets with zero distribution costs.
(3) The Relationship Between Leverage and Money Dysmorphia
In the 2010s, I saw something fascinating in Vietnam. A teacher’s monthly salary was around $1,000, yet the pubs were always packed. Groceries were a third of the price in Korea. Private tutoring was booming, with parents begging public school teachers for extra lessons. Savings accounts yielded 9% interest. It was an era where taking on debt to scale a business or education guaranteed wealth. Leverage was alive.
Most developed nations, including Korea, had this era in the past. Today, that structure has collapsed. In a democratic welfare state where leverage has vanished, the productivity of fixed costs spent on basic living is dismally low. Because the market lacks liquidation and reallocation, scarce real capital flows into failing firms and unproductive workers, driving up prices across the board. In this environment, no matter how hard you work to earn money, it all drains away just to keep you breathing. The deadweight loss caused by monopolies (which the welfare state tacitly guarantees in exchange for predatory taxes) and the costs of wage-control policies (implemented under the guise of protecting the vulnerable) do not drive any productivity gains; instead, they solely inflate prices. In this situation, taking on debt to increase fixed costs is madness. The reason for leveraging debt to expand economic activity is to reduce marginal costs through additional production, which is meaningless when the price of physical capital keeps rising. When money must be spent as a fixed expense without generating economic value added, that expenditure does not accumulate as an asset. It simply vanishes as a one-off cost. This evaporates any financial capacity to invest in productive, scarce ‘real assets.’ This is the precise economic reason behind the feeling that even when you earn money, you have nothing left.
3. The Collapse of Economic Leverage
Let’s examine exactly why economic leverage collapsed, using South Korean society as a case study. As you read, compare it to your own society.
(1) Insane Inflation: Living Costs, Asset Prices, and Wages
Fiat money doesn’t inflate all assets equally
First, a close examination of employment statistics in most advanced economies, including the U.S., reveals that while job numbers are rising, their quality is deteriorating. Full-time, high-value jobs in the private sector are shrinking, while government-driven public works or contract jobs at subsidized companies are expanding. This inevitable stagnation occurs because the welfare state blocks healthy market liquidations, forces wages above productivity, and plunders corporate reinvestment profits through excessive taxation and regulation. Market monopolies are worsening, and producers are voluntarily giving up their businesses to become ‘rent-seeking’ workers. Developed governments have no choice but to print money.
This triggers a bigger vicious cycle. Once debt is incurred, inflating it away to reduce its real value becomes a much easier path than paying back the principal. As populations age and productivity stagnates, governments choose to run the printing presses rather than grow the market.
But freshly printed fiat doesn’t inflate all assets equally. Money floods into exactly two categories:
- Productive Assets: Assets that take $1 of investment and turn it into $100 while others struggle to make $10 (e.g., Big Tech stocks, Bitcoin).
- Scarce Assets: Assets with a hard-capped supply
(e.g., Bitcoin, Gold, prime real estate in Seoul).
You might ask: Wait, doesn’t Bitcoin lack productivity? This is answered by the Network Effect (Metcalfe’s Law). As more people put money into the Bitcoin network, its transactional web expands exponentially. This draws more exchanges and miners into the market, enhancing security and streamlining payments. This spillover fuels the altcoin market—like Ethereum championing smart contracts and tokenization—expanding the entire crypto ecosystem. In fact, in the non-Western world, where fiat inflation is wildly unstable, even government officials save their wealth in Bitcoin. Gold lacks this explosive network effect.
The working class buys tangible assets. The elite invests in the intangible.
Let’s return to the main point. The problem is that the working class carries a high proportion of fixed expenses relative to their monthly income, leaving them with little capital to invest in Productive or Scarce Assets; furthermore, their investment timeline is severely delayed, and wage growth fails to keep pace with inflation. Rent, education, healthcare, and debt interest bleed their wallets dry.
Furthermore, their spending habits also hinder asset accumulation. Because mass media still prioritizes ‘what is visible,’ it tends to portray winners as those who possess massive tangible assets. This is where the public’s delusion begins. As René Girard pointed out, the masses don’t truly know what they want. Consequently, they tend to desire what is projected by the media—desiring what others desire. As a result, they crave assets that are vulnerable to depreciation and incur heavy maintenance costs: jewelry, designer bags, luxury cars, oversized homes, and expensive business equipment. These are all tangible assets.
In an inflationary era, their real value constantly erodes. The continuous decline in the value of what they once desired deeply engraves a psychological sense of ‘the futility of labor.’ Yet, as long as they remain dependent on mass media, they can never escape this Matrix.
Meanwhile, the rich take the freshly printed fiat and buy more Big Tech, Bitcoin, and stocks.(Productive or Scarce Assets) Because they have stellar credit, they borrow at dirt-cheap rates. They enjoy direct proximity to the central bank and tier-1 financial institutions, they acquire assets using currency untouched by inflation. They ride the leverage wave, perpetually compounding their wealth. We call this the Cantillon effect.
What we must pay attention to is what kind of assets they purchase by leveraging the Cantillon Effect. To start with the conclusion: they primarily invest in intangible assets. According to recent Federal Reserve asset distribution data, the share of real estate in the portfolios of the top 10% wealthiest Americans has fallen to a six-year low of 17.1%. This trend is related to the phenomenon of rising holding taxes, labor costs, and maintenance fees required for real estate management. In contrast, intangible assets have zero physical costs. Unlike the working class, they are reducing their investments in tangible assets.
True elites do not lead lives dependent on mass media. They operate on private information networks. If they have a question, they ask insiders directly. They read physical newspapers, deep-dive blogs, and books. They know exactly how mass media is manufactured, so they trust none of it. They know mainstream news censors itself to please advertisers and minimize liability, failing to capture the raw truth of the streets. Therefore, the elite do not desire what the masses desire(depreciating assets). Instead, They drive an old Ford and live in inherited homes. They ruthlessly cut depreciation costs and invest in intangible assets with infinite upside. As a result, their ROI absolutely crushes everyone else’s.
In conclusion, the working and lower-middle classes are left with no financial leeway to invest in productive or scarce assets, suffering from the painful feeling that they have ‘nothing left to show for it’.
(2) The Bureaucrat Father: No Means of Production to Inherit
The collapse of economic leverage is linked to inflation and the Cantillon effect, but it also stems from the inability of parents to pass down means of production to their children—often because these assets are seized by the welfare state through inheritance taxes. This issue is exceptionally severe in South Korea, a predatory welfare state that imposes inheritance taxes as high as 60%. While the UK maintains an inheritance tax, it preserves a philosophy that spares family businesses and means of production from state seizure—making it far more favorable than South Korea—while the US eliminates the burden through exceptionally high exemption thresholds. Alternatively, it may simply be that the parents worked within bureaucratic organizations, leaving them with no independent means of production to pass down in the first place. In any case, children are forced to build everything from zero, stripped of any generational leverage. Let us examine this in detail.
Born Into the Workshop
People I met in Gori (Georgia) pass down their fields and cattle across three or four generations. The younger generation does not start from zero. They start on top of the soil and trade routes their parents built. The government knows this, so they impose almost zero inheritance tax. With $0 in new capital input, they expand their means of production, exporting cheese, fruit, and wine to Russia and Turkey. Scale is possible. This is true asset leverage.
The Bureaucrat Father Had Only a Business Card
But if the patriarch of a family is a product of a bureaucratic organization, the story turns bleak. Because there is no tangible means of production to hand down, the next generation is thrown back to ground zero.
South Korea from the 1950s to the 80s experienced explosive growth. Jobs were everywhere, and employment was guaranteed until age 60. As the 2020s hit, these baby boomers began to retire. However, their 20 to 30 years of “experience” was merely process management—a skill valid only inside the greenhouse of the corporation. It is a perishable asset that cannot be inherited by their children. They possessed no embodied, hard skills to generate money out in the wild. Their business cards and status evaporated the second they retired.
Post-retirement, they live on pensions. Most of their net worth is trapped in a house or domestic stocks. Because they lived their entire lives as institutional cogs, they lack the “street eye” for the market. They lack the instinct to migrate their assets to where structural leverage still exists.
What happens when severe inflation hits this demographic? Expenses rise, prices surge, and they feel the crushing pressure of living costs. They might even need to help pay for their children’s weddings. Meanwhile, the government hikes healthcare premiums, choking their cash flow.
Desperate, they take out a mortgage on their house to gamble on stocks or open a small franchise business. But having lived inside a padded system their whole lives, they are blind to the brutality of the wild market. They are easily swayed by the smooth talk of financial products and franchise promoters. A single failure becomes a fatal blow.
When the parents’ investments fail, the children inherit nothing. No seed money. Buying a house in Seoul becomes a mathematical impossibility. Everything the child earns drains away just to cover the basic “cost of breathing.” And it is practically agonizing for the parents to sell their last remaining asset—their home—to downgrade their standard of living.
It is a sad reality, but for the democratic welfare state, the tangible assets the older generation has spent their lives building are merely marshmallows destined to melt in the fires of inflation and taxation. Yet, this generation of fathers, pleading out of fear of failing to become producers, requests protection and basic income from the state—without realizing that those very demands are tightening the noose around their children’s necks. This tragedy isn’t because the father was irresponsible. It is simply a man who only knew the corporate greenhouse failing to survive in the jungle. There is no family business, no apple orchard to pass down.
Consequently, the children of fathers who worked as laborers or bureaucrats in giant manufacturing nations are thrown into the world with nothing. Since they possess no leverage, they come to the painful realization that even when they earn money, nothing remains in their hands.
(3) The Immobile Society: The Seoul Addiction
Why can’t people leave Seoul?
If you leave Seoul, there are no jobs. But because Seoul demands exorbitant fixed costs, failing to leave means you contract Money Dysmorphia.
Why can’t people leave Seoul? In South Korea, there is not a single local government capable of financial independence through local taxes alone, without central government subsidies. If government-subsidized jobs and infrastructure (SOC) projects halt, the local economy vanishes instantly. If you move to the provinces to lower your fixed cost burden, your absolute income plummets. It’s not that there are zero jobs in the provinces. The core issue is that most of them are driven by local public institutions. Because surviving there is equally brutal, local cartels fiercely gatekeep and monopolize the interests. There is no fair redistribution.
People aren’t flocking to Seoul to consume its glamour; they are escaping the closedness, corruption, and vested interest cartels of the provinces, crowding into the expensive shelter of Seoul, where anonymity and opportunity are at least somewhat guaranteed. It’s hard to even imagine escaping it. From the youth’s perspective, at least there’s no territorial gatekeeping in the capital, so it feels like there are opportunities.
So everyone flocks to Seoul. But the metropolitan area comprises only 11.8% of the country’s landmass, yet 55% of the population is crammed into it. This is exactly why housing costs are exploding.
London is same
London, UK, suffers the exact same disease. Every industry generating added value is heavily concentrated in London. Economic zones outside the capital have been frozen in time since the 1990s. All the youth flock to London, while local cartels guard their turf in the provinces. But in London, electricity, gas, water, buses, subways, and private medical insurance are so expensive that you cannot survive unless a corporation covers part of it.
Frankly speaking, if people could make a living independent of physical space, not many would stubbornly cling to Seoul or London. But they can’t leave. So they catch Money Dysmorphia. It’s true they enjoy top-tier infrastructure, but fundamentally, the matrix is simply coded that way.
If you cannot move geographically or across class lines, every dime you make vanishes as the “cost of simply breathing.” In conclusion, if parents blow their entire paychecks on Seoul’s living expenses, the children’s generation has no assets to inherit. Because there is no leverage, they have no choice but to feel poor.
(4) No Market Yields Higher Returns Than Private Lending Rates
Why Korea’s Interest Rate Spread Is Among the Largest in the World
Currently, South Korea’s base interest rate is 2.75%. Yet, private lending rates are nearing 8~9%. Why is the margin between deposit and lending rates so massive? The answer is singular: The socialization of financial ruin.
South Korean household debt is approximately 1,900 trillion KRW ($1.43 trillion USD). If you include Jeonse (lump-sum housing deposit) debt, it hits 145% of the GDP. An global #1. Consequently, the government tacitly guided banks to hike private lending rates. Furthermore, to stimulate the economy, they incentivized the massive construction of apartments and commercial buildings in the provinces. But unsold inventory piled up. Now, approximately 150 trillion KRW ($113 billion USD) in real estate Project Financing (PF) bad debt is on the verge of detonating. They exactly replicated Japan’s mistake of building airports and apartments in the middle of nowhere.
Currently, banks are operating with over 10x leverage on a razor-thin cash reserve requirement of 7%. If this bad debt is recognized all at once, a bank run erupts instantly. Thus, the government turns a blind eye to the banks’ murderous interest margins. The banks use that blood-sucked interest income to pile up loan loss provisions, buying themselves time. The high-interest rates citizens are paying right now aren’t just interest on their own mortgages. The citizens are collectively paying the hospital bills for dying zombie construction firms.
If GDP Growth Is 1% and Loan Rates Are 7%, Where Can I Make Money?
It’s fine if the banks and the government engage in such tacit collusion. But the problem is, at this level of lending rates, it’s nearly impossible for investment returns to beat the interest.
How is anyone supposed to make a living? From the perspective of the 20s and 30s demographic, there’s no market to generate wealth, yet their cash bleeds out through student loans and wedding loan interest. Debt, too, is cursed by compound interest. The longer the timeframe, the more the debt explodes.
UK loan rates are lower than Korea’s — but the para-taxes are heavier. Both economies grow at 1–2%. The game is the same: there’s no room to make money. Because their seed money is microscopic, it’s hard to see the light even if they invest. This is exactly why the 2030 generation goes all-in on the crypto futures market. It seems the government has given up too, allowing the launch of degenerate products like “Samsung Electronics 2x Leverage ETFs.” In a distorted market where Samsung Electronics alone commands 20% of the total market capitalization, permitting a 2x leveraged single-stock ETF is a comedy. This is a tacit admission by the government itself that sound investment and savings can no longer yield returns that outpace lending interest rates. Introducing such extreme derivative and speculative instruments to the spot market is pathological. Rather than hosting a gambling den that only inflates market bubbles, it would be infinitely better to permit individual short selling to correct price signals. Ultimately, for citizens stripped of any viable means to build normal wealth, this is nothing less than a declaration—handing them a legal, speculative drug and telling them to melt their brains staring at their phones.
The US is still in a better situation. Sure, fixed costs are high and debt is massive. But the market is vast. That is a truly good advantage. Stocks rise by an annual average of 8~12% because global capital flocks there. It’s possible to achieve returns that easily cover loan interest. Leverage is still breathing. Small open economies like South Korea and the UK do not have such vast financial plains.
When interest rate spreads are wide and GDP growth remains low, the benefits of leverage are effectively neutralized.
(5) The 2030 Gets Employed Too Late to Enjoy the Compound Interest Effect
On top of the problems common to advanced nations, South Korea has one extra “Hell Mode” gimmick: The fortress of the labor market. The average age of male college graduates landing their first job has crossed 30. If you enter the workforce too late, you lack the time to let the compound interest effect do its magic.
The reason is simple. The wage gap between conglomerates and SMEs is 2.5 times. The labor market is brutally rigid. While conglomerate employees enjoy high wages and guaranteed retirement ages, the 2030 generation spends years wandering the wasteland as job seekers. What if they get a Master’s or Ph.D.? The invisible opportunity cost is staggering.
The UK is no different. Driven by an obsession with white-collar prestige, most enter the workforce late, starting the race shackled by approximately £30,000 (about $38,000 USD) in student loan debt. This annihilates any chance of utilizing the leverage of compound interest.
By entering the workforce this late, the holes draining their money—marriage, buying a house, children’s education—keep multiplying, and suddenly it’s already time to retire.
“I worked hard, why don’t I have any money?”
That thought inevitably creeps in. Even Warren Buffett built 99% of his wealth after his 50s. Compound interest demands time. For a normal person, it requires at least 30 years. Assume you start at age 22 after military discharge and save $1,000 a month. If you pour it into the S&P 500 at an average 7% return for 40 years, you’ll have $2.62 million by retirement. Your principal investment is $480,000. The pure profit swelled by compound interest is $2.14 million. The difference in wealth at age 60 between someone who started at 20 and someone who started at 30 is not merely 10 years worth of savings; it creates a gap of more than double the total assets. If the most high-yielding period of one’s life must be squandered on tuition debt and job searching just to build a ‘spec,’ the opportunity to accumulate true wealth disappears.
In theory, everyone knows the math. Yet, consequently, the 2030 generation in both the UK and South Korea enter the labor market far too late. Why? Because both nations share a historical legacy of rigid class systems. The social stigma that looks down on blue-collar labor is embedded in their cultural DNA.
But here is the brutal truth: the longer you spend ‘preparing’ to become a white-collar worker, the higher your probability of contracting Money Dysmorphia.
4. Conclusion
Money Dysmorphia—the sensation of earning but having nothing left—is a psychological disease. You’re not starving to death, but you’re definitely not getting richer either. Usually, the comparison and deprivation manufactured by SNS and mass media are blamed as the root causes. However, I view them merely as moderating (amplifying) variables.
The absolute core is that leverage has vanished from society. Leverage refers to the mechanism that achieves high marginal productivity with minimal equity capital. It is the process of continuously moving forward into the future by reinvesting both profits and debt. In a society where leverage functions properly, capital does not evaporate in vain; consequently, regardless of absolute GDP, there is a passion for production and savings, and a conviction in reinvestment, making the society feel young and dynamic. If the money you spend doesn’t accumulate as future assets, you naturally become poor. In this Part 1, we dissected economic leverage.
- Asset prices skyrocket unevenly due to inflation, while wages fail to keep up.
- The investment failures of the inexperienced parent generation block the asset accumulation of the child generation.
- You cannot leave Seoul, where essential living costs are astronomically high.
- There is no market yielding returns higher than loan interest rates.
- Employment comes too late to enjoy the compound interest effect.
In a society where high fixed costs and debt act as guillotines, no matter how hard you work, it’s nearly impossible to escape the feeling of being dead broke.
“Money Dysmorphia = You earn money. But absolutely nothing is left.”
5. Next
In the next article, we will dissect the “Collapse of the Meritocracy Narrative.”
If you enjoyed this article, you can support the project – thank you!