The Korea Herald

[Anne O. Krueger] Trump’s brain drain

America’s quality universities are among the key sources of its greatness. Every year, top students from all over the world vie for access to graduate and undergraduate programs in the US, and American universities occupy most of the top spots in global rankings. Moreover, the basic research conducted at US universities has been a primary driver of innovation and economic growth, as well as the source of a disproportionate share of Nobel prizes.America’s universities cater to a wide variety of s

Jan. 23, 2019

[Emily de La Bruyere and Nathan Picarsic] China wants to dominate internet

For the past year, the US and China have been engaged in a wide-ranging trade war. Nominally, the dispute concerns intellectual property violations, forced technology transfers and other unfair practices. In reality, though, this clash is a symptom of a much larger strategic showdown -- one in which Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks “decisive victory.”Aided by technology, China is embarking on a new kind of geopolitical strategy. As the Chinese Academy of Sciences explained, the goal is to buil

Jan. 23, 2019

[Lionel Laurent] Make no mistake, Davos, fat cat backlash is coming

Ten years ago, the Davos conference asked the question: “What must industry do to prevent a broad social backlash?” The answer probably wasn’t “Double, triple or sextuple the wealth of the most prominent conference attendees, while letting median household incomes stagnate back home.” Yet that’s what happened. Make no mistake: The backlash is coming.　There has always been a whiff of hypocrisy at Davos, where elites expand their carbon footprint, eat $43 hot dogs and throw lavish parties in the n

Jan. 23, 2019

[Ferdinando Giugliano] Plenty of Uber drivers love their jobs too

The “gig economy” has become the cause celebre for people who think labor needs help from government in its struggle with capital. Politicians from the radical left and anti-establishment parties say the rise of casual work is a sign that work relationships are sliding back in time and that the state must step in to address this decline in standards.　John McDonnell, the UK Labour Party’s economics spokesman, says “zero-hour contracts” and the gig economy have produced workplace “insecurity not s

Jan. 23, 2019

[Chun Sung-woo] Moon walled by confirmation bias

Confirmation bias seems to be stopping President Moon Jae-in from ending his reliance on his perspective and beliefs in favor of evidence and facts.The bias is a psychological term denoting a tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms one’s preconceived ideas, while finding fault with evidence that goes against them. It prevents people from considering other important information when making decisions.Moon said in his New Year’s press conference on Jan. 10 that employment indexes fell sho

Jan. 23, 2019

[Chun Sung-woo] Moon walled by confirmation bias

[Noah Smith] China’s plan to end US trade surplus is red herring

There has been an unexpected development in the US-China trade war. Chinese trade officials apparently offered a huge concession earlier this month: a promise to completely eliminate its trade surplus with the US by 2024. The offer was off the record, but it’s still a huge surprise, especially given the haphazard and clumsy way that President Donald Trump has chosen to fight his trade war.　Why is China making this proposal? One possibility is that the government is afraid that the trade war is h

Jan. 22, 2019

[Leonid Bershidsky] Europe has a China problem, too

The US push to “decouple” its economy from China’s is causing ripples in Europe. The Federation of German Industries, the most influential industrial lobby group, has proposed a vision for keeping Europe’s important economic relationship with China alive and preventing the country’s state-owned and state-supported firms from competing unfairly.　As President Donald Trump has intensified his war against the established rules of global trade, the European Union has increasingly found itself on the

Jan. 22, 2019

[Kim Seong-kon] Society that invites a Mona Lisa smile

Leonardo Da Vinci’s monumental painting “Mona Lisa” is one of the most widely discussed paintings of all time because of its subject’s ambiguous smile. People have argued that depending on the viewer’s distance and angle, her smile looks different. Sometimes it looks happy, other times sad. Some people find the smile to be deriding and sarcastic, while others perceive it as a smile of condescension, like someone who knows everything. That is why Mona Lisa’s smile always refers to an enigmatic sm

Jan. 22, 2019

[Kim Seong-kon] Society that invites a Mona Lisa smile

[Tim Culpan] Whatever happened to ‘Don’t get in a car with strangers?’

On the morning of March 26, 2018, my colleague Yoolim Lee ordered a Grab ride in Singapore. Within hours, she was lying in hospital with a fractured vertebrae and a vertebral artery dissection.　Her story, published in the Jan. 19 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek, is the result of what happens when a deeply personal incident collides with journalistic curiosity. Lee’s tale also brings to the fore something about the ride-hailing industry that’s been sitting in the subconscious of many executives

Jan. 22, 2019

[Lee Jae-min] No plan in sight for fine dust

Here we go again. Public concerns escalate, agencies issue advisories, and ominous news reports flood media outlets. And then we get one final piece of advice: Wear masks. That is pretty much it -- nothing further happens. When the next fine-dust blanket hits the country a couple of weeks later, I can almost guarantee the cycle will repeat. This is too lame for a country that inches closer to a fine-dust disaster with each passing year. When fine dust levels soared to new heights last week, clea

Jan. 22, 2019

[Lee Jae-min] No plan in sight for fine dust

[Aryeh Neier] Human-rights movement needs America

These are disheartening times for international human-rights advocates. Even those of us who have promoted the human-rights cause for decades, and experienced many setbacks along the way, are deeply alarmed by recent developments around the world.The latest was the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s president on Jan. 1. Before launching his election campaign, Bolsonaro, an apparent admirer of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, joked about rape, expressed his disdain for lesbian, gay,

Jan. 21, 2019

[Aryeh Neier] Human-rights movement needs America

[Ivo Daalder] Britain needs a Brexit do-over referendum to get out of this mess

Britain’s holiday from history was supposed to end this week. After three years of bitter debate, Prime Minister Theresa May hoped Parliament would back the agreement for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union that she painstakingly negotiated over the past 18 months. On Tuesday, however, Parliament voted 2-to-1 against her deal, a humiliating defeat that leaves the future of Britain’s relationship with Europe as unsettled as ever.　The only real option is a do-over -- a second referendum,

Jan. 21, 2019

[Trudy Rubin] Are Trump’s gifts to Putin the work of a gullible admirer rather than a mark of collusion?

The news that the FBI opened an investigation in 2017 as to whether President Donald Trump was actually working for the Russians shouldn’t have come as a shocker.　No public evidence has yet emerged from the FBI probe or from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that the president took orders from the Kremlin. And Trump has been furious in his denials.　Yet over and over this president makes common cause with the Kremlin with his statements, his policies, the many contacts between his te

Jan. 21, 2019

[Adam Minter] Tesla doesn’t need to sell cars in China to succeed there

When Elon Musk broke ground on Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai earlier this month, he wasn’t just thinking about how many Teslas he’ll sell in China. He was thinking about how many he might be able to share.　Musk isn’t alone. Global automobile manufacturers are scrambling to develop services that will allow Chinese car owners to rent out their vehicles when they’re not driving them. According to one recent analysis, such services could hire out as many as 2 million cars in 2020, up from roughly

Jan. 21, 2019

[Adam Minter] Tesla doesn’t need to sell cars in China to succeed there

[Karl W. Smith] Revenge of the millennials

Almost every major new economic initiative proposed by Democrats -- the Green New Deal, Medicare for all, debt-free college -- has a common feature: Unlike most current social programs, it would benefit younger Americans at the expense of older Americans.Since the New Deal, America’s social insurance programs have primarily transferred resources from the relatively young to the old. Social Security was designed as a program to support those unable to work, but over time its spending came to be d

Jan. 21, 2019

[David Ignatius] What Americans are fighting for in Manbij

If you wonder what the four Americans who were killed Wednesday in Manbij, Syria, were doing there, let me describe a few images from a visit to that city last February that illustrate their mission of helping stabilize this area after the Islamic State group was expelled.Think of a covered market thronged with shoppers: Until the Americans and their allies liberated Manbij in mid-2016, the only color most women dared wear in public was black; now, a rainbow of dresses is displayed on makeshift

Jan. 20, 2019

[David Ignatius] What Americans are fighting for in Manbij

[Park Sang-seek] How to deal with a nuclear North Korea?

North Korea says it has no choice but to become a nuclear state because it is the only way to defend itself from a nuclear attack from the US. This reaction may be a justifiable but not wise counterstrategy.Let us assume that the US would resort to nuclear weaponry even if North Korea attacked South Korea with conventional weapons. The world would not condone such a brutal response. I believe that world opinion is likely to support the use of nuclear weapons only if the US-South Korean combined

Jan. 20, 2019

[Park Sang-seek] How to deal with a nuclear North Korea?

[Dylan Selterman] Climate change and the ‘tragedy of the commons’

In 2015, a student tweeted about an extra credit activity in my psychology course, igniting a discussion about the “tragedy of the commons” -- the idea that when masses of people engage in excessive consumption, it can have catastrophic environmental consequences, such as climate change. In light of the recently proposed Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, let’s revisit this idea and consider how carbon pricing can serve as an effective solution to this problem.For the class activity, eac

Jan. 20, 2019

[Michael Schuman] China built a big, beautiful wall, too. It failed.

From the moment he launched his campaign for president, Donald Trump compared the barrier he wanted to build along the US southern border to China’s Great Wall. With the US government now shuttered by the standoff over funding Trump’s wall, both he and his Democratic opponents might want to take a closer look at the Chinese fortification -- and why exactly it failed.The Great Wall visited by tourists today is the handiwork of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and was primarily constructed in the mid-

Jan. 20, 2019

[Alex Webb] If Google and LG like smart TVs, so should the privacy police

The world’s tech police have the opportunity to succeed in televisions where they initially failed with the rest of the connected world, and ensure that users retain a firm grasp on their data.Smart televisions are nothing new. Nor is the shift in the platform wars, where tech firms duke it out for primacy of their operating systems, from smartphones to the television set. But the fact that Amazon.com Inc. is developing its own smart TV indicates that there’s enough value in the user data to off

Jan. 20, 2019