President Park Geun-hye is rolling up her sleeves to boost corporate investment. On Wednesday, she is hosting a lunch for the heads of the top 10 conglomerates. The next day, she is meeting with the chiefs of 30 midsized companies. The Presidential Office said Park arranged the meetings to listen to the captains of Korean industry air their views on corporate investment, job creation and her vision of an economy driven by creativity and technological fusion.Increasing corporate investment is one

The Korean economy’s job creation capacity continues to weaken, aggravating the sad phenomenon of jobless growth.According to the Bank of Korea, the job creation effect of exports ― Korea’s primary engine of growth ― fell more than 30 percent between 2005 and 2011. The employment inducement coefficient of exports stood at 7.3 in 2011, which means that a 1 billion won increase in overseas demand for Korean goods added 7.3 jobs to the economy two years ago. The figure was 10.8 in 2005. It is not j

Like the hundreds of tons of radioactive water now streaming daily into the Pacific Ocean off the Japanese coast, the bad news from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi plant just keeps coming. Stanching the flow and getting the Fukushima cleanup on track are critical not only to health and safety, but also to the future of nuclear energy in Japan and elsewhere, and to the credibility of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government. The latest scare came last week, with the announcem

August is the holiday month ― the time when we pause to take stock of a hectic first half year, and wonder what lies ahead. Nestled in the hills of northern Laos, the ancient city of Luang Prabang sits around a bend in the river Mekong, isolated for centuries and renowned today as a city of 15th century Buddhist temples, protected as a UNESCO Heritage site. It was a good place to catching up on one’s history to try to comprehend the uncertain future. The recent best-seller by MIT economics profe

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of such popular science books as “The Blank Slate,” recently wrote an essay for the New Republic in defense of science. From left and right, he notes, from intellectuals as well as from anti-intellectuals, science is under attack for its arrogance, vulgarity and narrowness of vision. Why is this happening? Pinker asks. Because, he says, science is intruding on the humanities, disciplines lacking in vitality or any real purpo

Patent trolls are a widely reported problem for big business and technology makers. They are companies that exist primarily to buy up patents and then collect money, in the form of licenses or lawsuit settlements, from alleged infringers of those patents. Trolls take advantage of a patent system with serious flaws, and their abuse of the system is creating, as a White House fact sheet recently put it, a “drain on the American economy.”And, as it turns out, a drain on you, the ordinary consumer.L

Forget Client No. 9. If you want to understand the future of world politics, it’s Document No. 9 you need to know. This semisecret directive from the senior members of the Chinese Communist Party tells you how President Xi Jinping plans to manage pro-democracy voices in China: by shutting them down. The sharp repudiation of constitutional government, human rights, civic participation and free speech ― not to mention truly free markets ― guarantees that the ideological struggle between China and

Like many others who read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” when it came out five years ago, I was impressed by the 10,000-hour rule of expertise. I wrote a column (for a different publication) espousing the rule, which holds that to become a world-class competitor at anything from chess to tennis to baseball, all that’s required is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. David Epstein has convinced me I was wrong. His thoroughly researched new book, “The Sports Gene,” pretty much demolishes the 1

PARIS ― The war in Iraq ― which led in 2003 to the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime ― had one clear winner: Iran. The United States-led military intervention resulted in the weakening of the Middle East’s Sunni regimes, America’s traditional allies, and the strengthening of America’s principal foe in the region, the Islamic Republic.Ten years later, we may be witnessing yet another ironic outcome in the region: At least for the time being, Israel seems to be the only clear winner of the “Arab Spr

President Obama has demonstrated leadership qualities ranging from poor to nonexistent. But is a president who lacks visible leadership qualities really such a bad thing? Or is he lazy like a fox? A lack of leadership ― whether deliberate or accidental ― can have a surprising upside, as none other than the French have historically exemplified. (And no, I’m not being facetious.)As a conservative whose heart leans firmly right, I would have thought the idea crazy until I moved to France four years

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of such popular science books as “The Blank Slate,” recently wrote an essay for the New Republic in defense of science. From left and right, he notes, from intellectuals as well as from anti-intellectuals, science is under attack for its arrogance, vulgarity and narrowness of vision. Why is this happening? Pinker asks. Because, he says, science is intruding on the humanities, disciplines lacking in vitality or any real purpo

In the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” Karl Marx outlines a theory of the bleak consequences of modern industrialization ― the experience of being alienated from one’s work, one’s relations, and ultimately oneself. No longer in control of their work or products, Marx argues, the workers are reduced to replaceable components in a colossal social machine. Building on this analysis, the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs viewed the spread of alienation in the beginning of the 20th

It is becoming increasingly clear that the universal welfare programs introduced in recent years under political motivations are unsustainable.Last week, Kim Moon-soo, governor of Gyeonggi Province, declared that the provincial government would drastically cut its financial support for the free school lunch program next year.The provincial government had originally planned to provide 86 billion won ($76 million) for the scheme next year. But it decided to cut the budget to 18.7 billion won and u

Six months have passed since President Park Geun-hye was sworn in as the nation’s first female chief executive on Feb. 25. Six months is not a short time for Park ― it accounts for a 10th of her five-year term. Yet it is still too early to evaluate her performance, especially on the economic front, as many of her key policies still wait to be put in place. In the fields of diplomacy and national security, however, she has already cut a brilliant figure.Park’s approval ratings are currently above

It may take awhile to determine whether, as the opposition claims, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons to slaughter more than 1,000 of his citizens. If he has, this brazen atrocity not only changes the U.S. calculus in the region but also requires a clear response from the civilized world. Words and resolutions would not do for a massacre of this scale. Ideally the United Nations Security Council would sanction limited international military action to punish and deter Assad. I

Congress is in recess, but you’d hardly know it. This has been the most do-nothing, gridlocked Congress in decades. But the recess at least offers a pause in the ongoing partisan fighting that’s sure to resume in a few weeks.It also offers an opportunity to step back and ask ourselves what’s really at stake.A society ― any society ― is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospi

The bloody images coming out of Egypt invite Americans to pick white hats and black hats: to punish the generals who staged a coup and, rather than listen to American pleas for restraint, killed many demonstrators. Or to hold our noses and work to restore a democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, no matter how much we disagree with his Islamist agenda.In determining what America should do, there’s no satisfying answer. But there is an obvious one: The U.S. shou

TAIPEI ― The South China Sea controversy continues to roil the waters. China claims to own almost every square inch, including every island and natural feature in this vast sea ― despite angry protestations from its neighbors.Well, a similar debate simmers just north, in the East China Sea, which borders Taiwan, China and Japan. There, a group of small islands known as the Diaoyu if you’re Chinese, or Senkakus if you’re Japanese, are also objects of covetous contestation.Various passive explorat

The pork barrel scam ― whose intricate web of ghost projects, fictitious beneficiaries, and fake nongovernment organizations is unraveling before the nation’s eyes ― is a good example of a “discrepant event.”This is a term used in science education to refer to something that happens contrary to expectation, a phenomenon without a visible cause, begging for explanation. I think we may use the concept to describe the kind of governance we have ― a way of doing things for which no one takes respons

It is beyond imagination more than 100 officials and staff are under investigation for allegedly embezzling public money after a probe into the Henan branch of the China Grain Reserve Corporation.The probe was launched after the branch’s head fled to the United States last year with money he had embezzled.The Henan branch of the grain reserve reported to the higher authorities that they had bought a certain amount of fresh grain to keep in reserve and sold the grain they had in storage. They the