Here is a famous finding from social psychology. If you want to encourage people to get vaccinated against some disease, it helps to educate them about the benefits of vaccination. But you’ll have a much bigger impact if you give people a map, showing them exactly where to go to get a shot.Elementary though it is, this finding is important, because it demonstrates that when people don’t respond to a suggestion, it may be because they need some help in identifying the specific steps they are bein

Some of my best friends are very rich ― people with condos on Central Park West and tastefully refurbished palazzi in Italy. The puzzle: Why do so many of them vote Democratic or praise the high-taxing European welfare state?How rich? When one of them had an art lover on the phone, who was offering to pay $30 million for a famous painting, he refused. Frustrated, the would-be buyer groaned: “Look, man, I just more than doubled the going price for this piece, and you still won’t take it. Why not?

The Financial Services Commission has unveiled a vision to foster the financial industry as a growth engine of the Korean economy. Dubbed the “10-10 Value-Up Plan,” it is aimed at increasing the financial sector’s share of Korea’s gross domestic product to 10 percent over the next 10 years.Currently, the financial industry accounts for about 7 percent of Korea’s GDP, relatively small for an advanced economy. In some advanced countries, such as Singapore and Australia, financial services account

Returning home after a six-month stay in Germany, former Prime Minister Kim Hwang-shik recently admitted his envy of the European country’s political culture. He was deeply impressed by the negotiations on forming a coalition government between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the allied Christian Social Union on the one hand, and the main opposition Social Democratic Party on the other. Surely, it was a scene totally unimaginable here.At the September parliamentary elec

NEW DELHI ― China’s growing geopolitical heft is emboldening its territorial creep in Asia. After laying claim to 80 percent of the South China Sea, it has just established a so-called air defense identification zone in the East China Sea, raising the odds of armed conflict with Japan and threatening the principle of freedom of navigation of the seas and skies. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic continues to nibble furtively at territory across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India.Few se

The Communist Party can’t wait to see the back of Gary Locke, the outgoing U.S. ambassador who ruffled many a feather during his two-plus years in Beijing. The 1.2 billion Chinese who aren’t party members should be begging him to stay.After Locke’s Nov. 20 resignation announcement, online commentators claimed Beijing’s toxic air was forcing the ambassador back to Seattle, where his family relocated earlier this year. Locke’s denial that he was fleeing to bluer skies couldn’t quell the rumors, wh

Having failed to defeat the Affordable Care Act every other way, Republicans are now hell-bent on destroying it in Americans’ minds.Every Republican in Washington has been programmed to use the word “disaster” whenever mentioning the act. The idea is to make it so detestable it becomes the fearsome centerpiece of the midterm elections of 2014.Admittedly, the president provided Republicans ammunition by botching the Affordable Care Act’s rollout. But the president and other Democrats should be st

According to one of South Korea’s largest newspapers, JoongAng Ilbo, the Pyongyang regime executed 80 North Korean citizens in one day, for crimes including watching smuggled videos or owning a Bible.The report is shocking, and nearly impossible to verify. Some experts are skeptical, but a number of North Korea watchers tell me it is completely consistent with other information and quite credible.If true, the multiple executions by squads of machine gun-firing soldiers ― reportedly carried out b

The protracted standoff between political parties over the state spy agency’s alleged meddling in the parliamentary and presidential elections last year is threatening to boil over into a conflict between the government and progressive religious groups.Today, a group of some 1,000 Buddhist monks are to hold a rally at a temple in central Seoul to denounce the National Intelligence Agency’s involvement in the elections and criticize President Park Geun-hye for her “inability to communicate with t

The government is rushing to put in place its part-time job scheme to attain President Park Geun-hye’s promise to boost the nation’s employment rate to 70 percent from the present 64.2 percent.The government’s plan calls for the creation of a total of 930,000 part-time jobs by 2017, 40 percent of the 2.4 million jobs it needs to produce to meet Park’s campaign pledge.On Tuesday, the government organized a job fair to help private corporations recruit part-time employees. A total of 82 companies

WASHINGTON ― Count the Iran nuclear deal as a rare win for President Barack Obama’s secretive, cerebral style of governing. His careful, closeted approach has produced many setbacks over the past five years, but it was at the heart of last weekend’s breakthrough deal with Tehran. This was secret diplomacy that a Henry Kissinger could appreciate. Obama began by authorizing carefully concealed meetings back in March, through Oman, the most opaque and discreet nation in the Persian Gulf. The presid

The Chinese Communist Party announced grand plans for “reform” at the end of its third plenum meeting in November, including a promise to end its disastrous one child per family policy.Don’t bet on it.That one-child law leads to ugly forced abortions and sterilizations ― as well as rampant cheating. Wealthy people have been having as many children as they want. No one tries to stop them, as long as the parents are willing to pay a fine of $50,000 or more.All of that is bad enough. But the larger

Western analysts have been scratching their heads trying to figure out if China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, can properly be labeled a “reformer.”His new policies promise to end labor camps, ease the one-child policy and migrant-residency requirement in cities, grant property rights to farmers, and open up many new areas to a “decisive” role for the market. At the same time, he has strengthened the grip of the Communist Party, accumulated more power at the center, asserted ideological orthodoxy and

PARIS ― Remember when you were a kid and you would open a full refrigerator right after mom’s latest grocery-shopping trip, only to complain that there was nothing to eat and that she was starving you to death? Well, that’s Iran right now. Iran has enough energy to light up the entire planet several times over ― 138 billion exploitable barrels of oil and more than 28 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency ― yet it constantly whines that it’s sta

U.S. President Barack Obama has had two overarching goals in the Iran crisis. The first was to stop the Iranian regime from gaining possession of a nuclear weapon. The second was to prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.This weekend, the president achieved one of these goals. He boxed-in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so comprehensively that it’s unimaginable Israel will strike Iran in the foreseeable future. Netanyahu had his best chance to attack in 2010 and 2011,

Hollywood has long fetishized Japanese gangsters, with their full-body tattoos, missing pinkies and harems of buxom groupies. Ever since Sydney Pollack’s “The Yakuza” in 1974, the colorful mafiosi have provided regular fodder for directors including Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino.Curiously, studios are again abuzz with a flurry of Japanese mob projects. Warner Bros. is developing “The Outsider,” about an American prisoner of war who joins the yakuza after World War II. Robert Whiting’s 1999

As a Catholic and long-term resident of Korea I feel a need to respond to the remarks made by Catholic priest Park Chang-shin as reported on the front page of your paper on Nov. 25.The statement attributed to Park, “What should North Korea do if South Korea-U.S. military exercises are being carried out (near) the problematic NLL? North Korea needs to open fire. That was the shelling of Yeonpyeongdo Island,” spoken at a Catholic Mass held on Friday, has no place in the Catholic church, and in fac

The Obama administration has cut an interim nuclear deal with Iran that gravely worries some of America’s strongest allies in the Middle East and even gives pause to some of President Barack Obama’s allies in the U.S. Senate.It’s easy to see what Iran gets out of this: a reprieve from crippling economic sanctions worth some $6 billion to $7 billion in cash.It’s more difficult to figure that Iran views this as the first step toward giving up its nuclear ambitions. Iran will stall some of its deve

I often think about how much more interesting the world would be if we could free ourselves from the confines of conventions and see things from different perspectives. For example, we customarily think of refrigerators and televisions as two different things. What if, however, we were to combine the two and create a refrigerator with a built-in TV and MP3 player so people could watch a television drama or listen to their favorite music while cooking in the kitchen? By thinking outside of the bo

Should Korea continue to pursue its goal of becoming a regional financial hub? The question is being raised as the nation takes stock of what has been achieved for the past 10 years since it unveiled this aspiration.In December 2003, President Roh Moo-hyun disclosed a road map to make Seoul a financial hub in Northeast Asia by 2020. One key objective was to attract the regional headquarters of the world’s 50 largest asset management companies to Seoul by 2012.Since then, an array of measures has