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Comment by mftb | Hacker News Reader

I agree with everything you said, but want to add, that with regards to this article it's also just the Economist being the Economist. When they say X eclipses Y, they mean makes more money. The fact is that culture is a completely different, parallel value system, that they just don't grok. The most culturally valuable things, frequently only have limited, or no economic value, contemporaneous with their creation, and they're just not gonna get that.

I've been watching the Webtoons stuff, and I'm gonna give Peerless Dad another look because you mentioned it, but I couldn't summon up a single one that has really impacted me.

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Peerless Dad is excellent. It starts off with a trope (secretly high-potential martial artist) and gimmick (but he has triplets). But, unlike others which fizzle out once the gimmick gets old, this one actually gets better because of its main gimmick. (the MC being a dad).

The MC is competent, knows his limits and navigates a complex class system to set his own children for success and safety. And then it has its badass moments to bring it all together, which is far more rewarding with the time it spends doing the 'boring' groundwork.

Cool, I'm sure I saw it go by, thinking I didn't give it enough of a chance.

Very surprised to see a comment about Peerless Dad on HN, and it being top comment. Huge fan of the series. But surprisingly, I've found the spin off series Administrator Kang Jin Lee to be even better. Peerless Dad has suffered a bit from trying to weave too many threads simultaneously which takes away from the focus on the main character. As a result, it occasionally struggles to thread the needle, especially with the politicking subplot. Administrator KJL starts with an incredible premise (What if you took a high functioning autistic amoral sociopath and tried to teach him how to blend in with normies) and has kept building on that premise to some really good shit. IMO it hasn't suffered any of the same inconsistencies of Peerless Dad. Still love PD though.

I think that even if you stick with a purely economic analysis, looking at the print market size might not be at all right? There's so much money in secondary goods (well, for the publishers). People have mentioned movies of course, but just general merchandising is a huge win (see Star Wars as a good US example of "the primary material isn't the point")

Having said that I don't know anything about the Korean market on this front, and I can totally see a legitimate decline from Japanese publishing just like in many other media spaces over the past couple of decades.

Yeah, and this is kind of a baffling oversight considering the value of franchises is well understood. There's even a table on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...

Edit: I don't know what happened to this article - it used to list a LOT more Japanese stuff - Bleach, Naruto, Pokemon, Mario easily dominate stuff like the MCU in terms of value.

Looks like some source issues and editor drama from the talk page[1] and the edit that removed Mario[2].

The editor drama is apparently a user who made many thousands of edits over the last 17(!) years, using multiple accounts, and misrepresented sources[3][4][5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_highest-grossing_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_highest-g...

[3] https://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...

> The fact is that culture is a completely different, parallel value system, that they just don't grok.

No, they just report on that. They report on money-related things. Doesn't mean they don't understand other things.

That's fair, overstatement on my part.

> they mean makes more money. The fact is that culture is a completely different, parallel value system, that they just don't grok

You mean a newspaper about the economy has to explain to you that they're talking about the business side of things, you can't just assume good faith on the part of the author and instead assume that they're some unthinking, cultureless robot who only cares about money?

Yes, mea culpa. I was calling out that I expect them to concentrate on economics, beyond that I surely went a clause too far.

If you took the time to read The Economist, it would be clear that culture is well understood. In fact, a section titled “Culture” features in every issue. More broadly, I would go so far as to say that topics of a socio-cultural nature are de rigueur, without which, The Economist would surely be reduced to a shell of its current self.

That's fair. I'm sure I did not give a fully-balanced view of the Economist.

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