Several years ago, it occurred to me that social scientists today are all standing on the shoulders of giants like Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. One thing they all have in common is that their primary focus was on the social, political, and economic makeup of the Western European world between 1450 and 1900. Which is to say, they provide an intellectual toolkit for looking at, say, the Western world of 1840, but not necessarily

Viewpoints June 29, 2016

Looking at reliable recent polls, you could come away with two contradictory conclusions: Donald Trump is cratering, allowing Hillary Clinton to run away with the presidential race. Or Trump has survived an awful month and is surprisingly competitive.I’m going presume to tell you what the state of play really is by looking at multiple surveys and extrapolating a bit.Clinton, though she remains an unpopular candidate, has an advantage of about 7 points, though it’s slightly less when third- and f

Viewpoints June 29, 2016

Few topics have spawned more commentary in recent years than unauthorized immigration, and few have generated as much pressure for a solution. But in a decision last week, the U.S. Supreme Court provided a nine-word ruling -- “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court,” it read in its entirety -- and no resolution. So a matter that has roiled American politics and government for years will go on roiling.The result of the Supreme Court action was to return the dispute over President Ba

Viewpoints June 29, 2016

Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo said Monday he would respect the central government’s decision to expand the existing airport in the port city to meet the increased demand for air traffic in the nation’s southeastern region. He made the right decision.The central government announced on June 21 that it would scrap its plan to build the nation’s second hub airport in one of the two candidate sites -- Gadeokdo Island in Busan and Miryang of South Gyeongsang Province.　Busan had sought to host the new air

Editorial June 28, 2016

The government has unveiled its economic management plan for the second half of the year amid turmoil in global financial markets following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.The focus of the plan is on creating and retaining jobs as job market conditions are expected to worsen due to the weakening economic recovery and the ongoing restructuring of ailing industries.The economy grew a mere 0.5 percent on quarter in the first three months of the year, slowing down from the 1.2 percent

Editorial June 28, 2016

Anger is clearly the buzzword of the 2016 presidential campaign, especially on the GOP side of the aisle. Google the word with Republican and, like me, you might get more than 24 million hits (vs. 606,000 when matched with Democrat).I have watched the angry storyline take hold. On roughly a dozen occasions during this campaign season, I was a CNN election-night panelist. If you watched, you may have seen my colleagues and me with our faces buried in laptops. Often we were analyzing exit surveys

Viewpoints June 28, 2016

How fitting. As the Brits cast a stunning vote to quit the European Union, Donald Trump was opening a luxury golf course in Scotland and crowing that Britain did “a great thing.”This historic victory for the British Brexiteers is part of a nationalist trend that is gripping Europe and has spread across the Atlantic. The leader of the “Leave” campaign, the blond, mop-haired Boris Johnson, is a bombastic Trump clone who defied his Conservative Party’s leader, Prime Minister David Cameron. Johnson

Viewpoints June 28, 2016

I wrote most of this column at the Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center in Tianjin, the giant port city (population: 15 million) a half-hour bullet-train ride southeast of Beijing. It’s a sleek aircraft-hangar of a building that’s hosting the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions, what the Chinese call “summer Davos.”　That all sounds pretty modern and global and connected, doesn’t it? Technologically sophisticated, too: I arrived too late this morning (lots of traffic i

Viewpoints June 28, 2016

The graft scandals involving the union of GM Korea show how corrupt some of the nation’s large unions are. It should serve as a reminder that we cannot eradicate labor corruption without reining in unions’ power and interference with management decisions like staff recruitment. The latest case at the local unit of the U.S. carmaker General Motors started with an investigation into bribery allegations over the company’s purchase of gifts for employees on major holidays like Chuseok and Seollal an

Editorial June 27, 2016

National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-gyun took helm of a legislature which had lost public trust so severely that it was often rated as one of the least respected public institutions in opinion polls. The problem was serious in the 19th Assembly and many called it “the worst-ever parliament” due to severe partisan strife that often paralyzed legislative business and involved its members’ endless series of ethical lapses. The 20th Assembly started its four-year term early this month under strong p

Editorial June 27, 2016

Raghuram Rajan’s decision not to seek a second term as governor of the Reserve Bank of India was met with shock from those of us who have been cheering on the Indian economy. While it is no secret that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had its problems with Rajan, few believed that the government would take a step that so clearly undermines India’s interests.The government never liked Rajan’s insistence on pursuing interest rate cuts gradually in order to promote price stability; instead

Viewpoints June 27, 2016