There are books that you know before reading them will change you. There are books you read precisely because you want to change yourself. But The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy belonged to neither category. In fact, H2G2 (as a tribe of Douglas Adams fandom calls it) is special because I didn’t expect it to have any effect on me, let alone one so enduring. I don’t even remember exactly when I read it, except that it was in the first few years of my arrival in Britain as a graduate student in 1986. The only thing I remember is being intrigued by the description of it as a piece of comedy science fiction (SF).

I had been a fan of SF since I was 10 or 11, when I started devouring what I could from the rather meagre selection (often in simplified children’s editions) available in Korea in the 1970s and 80s. SF was serious stuff then: intergalactic wars and imperialism (Skylark), technological dystopia (Brave New World), post-apocalyptic worlds (On the Beach, The Day of the Triffids). It wasn’t supposed to be comical.

But H2G2 was the funniest thing I had ever read. It wasn’t just hilarious, it was beyond my then mental universe: a depressed robot that saves the lives of the novel’s protagonists by striking up a casual conversation with the enemy spaceship’s computer and unintentionally talking it into depression and then suicide; the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council surviving a recitation of bad poetry by gnawing one of his legs off; the title of the third book in the God-bashing trilogy by Oolon Colluphid, Who is this God Person Anyway?

But what fascinated me even more was how H2G2 deployed off-the-wall humour and industrial-grade satire to discuss serious issues. The central story about the relationship between mice and men (I won’t spoil the fun if you haven’t read it) satirises humanity’s belief in its own brilliance. The proof against the existence of God with the use of the Babel Fish is a clever piece of sophistry, making fun of religious and philosophical debates. The description of the Vogons as a race that will not save their grandmothers from certain death “without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subject to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters” is a perfect lampooning of bureaucracy. The bit in which Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect lie through their teeth with big, meaningless words to praise Vogon poetry, to save their lives, is one of the best spoofs of literary criticism.

And only the comic genius of Adams could have simultaneously made fun of two things that no one else would have thought of putting together: British trade unionism of the 1970s and existentialist philosophy; two members of the philosophers’ union demanding “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty”.

As an economist, what delighted me especially were the representations of economic theories. The story about people paying large sums of money for Antarean parakeet glands, which taste revolting, only because they are “very rich idiots who want to impress other very rich idiots” is a reworking of the 19th-century American economist Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. The wildly profitable planet-building business of Magrathea forced into hibernation for 5 million years because its own success impoverished everyone else, thus destroying its own market, is a clever way to describe the “under-consumptionist theory” that was popular in the 19th century. This theory has actually become much more relevant since Adams wrote H2G2, with the rise in inequality to shocking levels in many societies.

So there it was. Many books have changed me: A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez did. The work of Zhuangzi, the Chinese Taoist philosopher, taught me that there isn’t just one way of understanding the world. Gaekji , the collection of short stories by the South Korean writer Hwang Sok-yong, exposed me to the underbelly of my own country’s economic miracle. And Herbert Simon’s Reasons in Human Affairs fundamentally transformed the way I think about human rationality, organisation, and institutions – and indeed my view of economics itself. But H2G2 made me understand that serious didn’t have to be sombre. It taught me that poking fun at things can be the most effective way to criticise the dominant power structure and the myths that support it. It liberated me from the burden of solemnity.