The Korea Herald

[Dakota L. Wood] Shrinking and overworked US military can barely pass inspection

We place a lot of demands on our fine US military, and the good news is -- at home and in many places around the world -- it’s meeting those demands.Now the bad news: We’re wearing it out. After 17 years of continuous combat operations, it’s in desperate need of a rebuild.To be sure, the US Congress recently provided some welcome additional funding. That money has enabled the services to make progress in reducing maintenance backlogs, replenishing depleted inventories of repair parts and munitio

Oct. 7, 2018

[Helmut K. Anheier] 100 years of ineptitude

The global financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 was the greatest economic stress test since the Great Depression, and the greatest challenge to social and political systems since World War II. It not only put financial markets and currencies at risk, it also exposed serious regulatory and governance shortcomings that have yet to be fully addressed.In fact, the 2008 crisis will most likely be remembered as a watershed moment, but not because it led to reforms that strengthened economi

Oct. 7, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] No, Mr. Putin, bungled spying won‘t blow over　

The latest failures of Russia’s military intelligence service, commonly known as the GRU, expose a major flaw in President Vladimir Putin’s habitual way of dealing with public fiascos: He mistakenly believes the uproar will blow over.Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his British counterpart Theresa May said Thursday that the GRU had tried to hack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, which was testing the substance used to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his d

Oct. 7, 2018

[David Ignatius] ‘The Apprentice’ shows that Trump’s debacles are self-inflicted wounds

Reading Greg Miller’s gripping new account of President Trump’s entanglement in the Russia investigation, it’s striking just how many of the president’s difficulties have been self-created. Trump sees enemies everywhere around him; he should look in the mirror. As the book’s ironic title makes clear, Trump has been “The Apprentice” in the White House. New to government, buoyed by sycophantic supporters and his own overweening ego, Trump made mistake after mistake: He turned little problems into

Oct. 4, 2018

[David Ignatius] ‘The Apprentice’ shows that Trump’s debacles are self-inflicted wounds

[Peter R. Orszag] Why Americans are retiring later

Something significant is happening in Social Security in the US: People are retiring and taking their benefits later. These trends are at least in part the consequence of policy changes made in the early 1980s that were purposefully delayed in their implementation. Consider this: In 1997, 57 percent of US men claiming their retirement benefits under Social Security were 62, the earliest age at which one can do so. By 2017, that share had dropped to 34 percent because more people elected to put o

Oct. 4, 2018

[Anjani Trivedi] Japan’s legendary trading houses have a new story

Japan’s storied trading houses are emerging from the shadow of billions of dollars of impairments they took after the financial crisis and the end of the commodity super-cycle.Stocks of the so-called sogo shosha, the groups that drove Japan’s postwar export success -- the likes of Itochu Corp., Marubeni Corp. and Mitsubishi Corp. -- have rallied as much as 36 percent over the last year, outpacing the race to a three-decade high by the broad Topix Index. The trading companies’ free cash-flow leve

Oct. 3, 2018

[Anjani Trivedi] Japan’s legendary trading houses have a new story

[Andrew Sheng] Open society and closed minds

Why is it that in the last days of September, 10 years after the failure of Lehman Brothers, the world feels as if it is a dangerous place?President Trump’s remarkable speech to the United Nations this week was supposed to re-state the New Order that America has envisioned for the world. And all he got was a laugh. But it was an important speech, because it spelt out more clearly what everyone knew since January 2017 -- his administration is dismantling what America has stood for since World War

Oct. 3, 2018

[Andrew Sheng] Open society and closed minds

[Pankaj Mishra] China would be smart to heed Asia’s wise man

Visiting Beijing in August, Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s recently elected prime minister, startled his hosts by boldly warning against a “new version of colonialism.” He was referring to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that aims to put the People’s Republic at the heart of a global commercial web.Mahathir’s invocation of colonialism could only have wounded leaders in Beijing, for the Chinese nation-state has built its self-image on anti-colonialist rheto

Oct. 3, 2018

[Noah Smith] Why millennials are sour on economy

As Americans become more negative about the state of their society, a number of people have tried to cheer them up by reminding them of the improvements made, both inside their society and out. The Cato Institute’s Human Progress project puts out a steady stream of data about improved living standards and social indicators in the US and around the world. Psychologist Steven Pinker writes popular books about the topic. Technologists trumpet the impressive range of new goods that people can buy, w

Oct. 3, 2018

[Tyler Cowen] Six broader insights from Kavanaugh saga so far

Most news analyses are written by experts. But sometimes an event is of such importance that it is worth sampling some outsiders, and so I would like to consider last week’s Senate testimony from Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. I don’t know who “Squi” is, my day job stopped me from watching and I don’t recall the possible names of the cited drinking games. Still, the broader saga has made a big impression on me. Stepping back from the most partisan elements of the day-to-day, I see th

Oct. 3, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Death by a salesman and amateurs

In Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” the protagonist Willy Loman gets abruptly fired from his lifetime job. Frustrated, Willy expects his son Biff to succeed socially and financially. Unfortunately, Biff fails his father, as he neither enters college nor secures a decent job. Ultimately, Willy takes his own life in order to give his son Biff his life insurance policy money. It is a touching story about a frustrated salesman who sacrifices himself for his family in difficult times. Recently

Oct. 2, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Death by a salesman and amateurs

[Lee Jae-min] Still Torn Between Two Cities

Recent price hikes for housing in Seoul have fanned deep frustration among those living outside Seoul. While prices in Seoul are going through the roof, real estate markets elsewhere are struggling with too many vacancies. Local money is flocking to the Seoul real estate market in droves. As ever, people and money keep coming to Seoul.Seoul’s status as a powerful magnet for people and national resources is a chronic problem for Korea. The Seoul Metropolitan Area accounted for 49.5 percent of the

Oct. 2, 2018

[Lee Jae-min] Still Torn Between Two Cities

[David Fickling] China’s claims on trade with US don’t add up

China has marked the latest ratcheting-up of trade tensions with a misplaced history lesson.　Far from worrying about its economic role in the world, the US should recognize just how well the two nations already support each other, according to a white paper released by China’s State Council: China-US bilateral trade has a strong complementarity. The US stands at the mid- and high-end in global value chains and it exports capital goods and intermediary goods to China. Remaining at the mid- and lo

Oct. 1, 2018

[Adam Minter] Big Brother creating two Chinas

Chinese authorities, who have long tried to limit the influence of foreign media and ideas, recently marked an escalation. In the span of a few days, authorities blocked access to Twitch, the video game live-streaming platform owned by Amazon.com; ordered a purge of foreign content from school textbooks; and proposed restricting foreign programming -- especially shows on current events -- from TV and online streaming sites.One might take the clampdown as yet more evidence of the government’s hol

Oct. 1, 2018

[Noah Smith] How Japan’s Abe should spend next three years

Japan’s economy is doing well. Unemployment is at multidecade lows. Capital expenditure is up, as is return on equity. And wages are finally rising. For the longer-term, Japan also looks strong. Contrary to the popular myth that the country suffered multiple lost decades after the bursting of the bubble economy in about 1990, Japan has outperformed many other rich countries in terms of real gross domestic product per working age population since the year 2000.　It’s small wonder, therefore, that

Oct. 1, 2018

[Noah Smith] How Japan’s Abe should spend next three years

[Shirin Ebadi & Christophe Deloire] Defending democracy’s essence

On Dec. 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, affirming the view that “the will of the people” -- democracy -- should form the basis of any government. But seven decades later, the world’s democracies are in peril. After a fourfold increase in the number of democracies between the end of World War II and 2000, we are now in a sustained period of political regression. Once-open societies are veering toward dictatorship, and in many countr

Oct. 1, 2018

[Timothy L. O’Brien] Trump and politics of disruption

When US President Donald Trump gave his first press conference in 19 months on Wednesday, he was asked about the laughter that greeted him at the United Nations after he claimed that “in the history of our country” his administration had proven to be unusually successful.“They weren’t laughing at me. They were laughing with me. We had fun. That was not laughing at me,” Trump replied. “So the fake news said people laughed at President Trump. They didn’t laugh at me. People had a good time with me

Oct. 1, 2018

[Timothy L. O’Brien] Trump and politics of disruption

[Adam Minter] Marriage in China shouldn’t break the bank

Getting married isn’t cheap in China. In Da’anliu, a small farming village outside Beijing, the local “bride price” -- the fee that a groom’s family pays to a bride’s in advance of their nuptials -- recently breached the $30,000 mark. That’s extreme for a village where incomes average $2,900 per year. So, this summer, local officials decreed that bride prices and associated wedding expenses shouldn’t exceed $2,900. Violators will be treated as human traffickers.Da’anliu’s price controls went vir

Sept. 30, 2018

[Adam Minter] Marriage in China shouldn’t break the bank

[Devendra Saksena] Uncle Sam has become Uncle Scrooge

World War II left the world in shambles. Europe was devastated; all major cities had been destroyed, the flower of European youth was gone, lying in unmarked graves. Asia had fared little better; China and Southeast Asia had borne the brunt of Japanese aggression, which itself had two nuclear bombs dropped on it. Africa had been devastated by the battling armies of Montgomery and Rommel. The Japanese had come to India’s doorstep and the Great Bengal Famine had inflicted horrendous causalities on

Sept. 30, 2018

[Devendra Saksena] Uncle Sam has become Uncle Scrooge

[David Ignatius] America is living under a volcano

America watched three searing versions of reality television this week. They all demonstrated that under the glare of the lights and the stress of questioning, character reveals itself. Christine Blasey Ford was a startlingly powerful witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, in part because she had been unknown to most Americans before the cameras started rolling. Her answers were clear and concise. She described what she remembered from 36 years ago, and what she didn’t. She n

Sept. 30, 2018