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Recently, I read some newspaper articles criticizing the economics department of Seoul National University.
The criticism appears based on the controversial economic policies of the Moon administration that are squeezing the private sector of the economy to a painful and gradual path toward disappearance. These economic policies are mostly, if not all, allegedly designed by economists trained at Seoul National University.
My hypothesis in this article is that you cannot judge an entity based on a few bad apples who are well educated. Examples abound.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) of North Korea reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un issued a personal order to promote the military ranks of no less than 103 well-educated scientists in the field of defense research who have "made great contributions to bolstering up the military capabilities for self-defense."
In inter-Korean relations, it should be North Korea that is desperate for negotiations to have economic sanctions lifted. In reality, it is the opposite.
The government here is the one begging North Korea not to use its weapons of mass destruction on South Korea. All these puzzling negotiations by leaders of South Korea are led by politicians who were attorneys, professors or other well-educated professionals.
In recent days, there is a pessimism spreading like a wild fire in that the world economy is heading toward a serious slowdown. One major reason for the pessimism is the tariff war among leading economies with controversial tariffs being designed again by well-educated financial professionals.
The world economy in recent decades has become markedly unstable because we now have too many people with too much money. Incredibly, these super-rich people seem to be greedier than those who are not as rich. Some even hired Nobel-prize winning economists to increase their wealth.
These wealthy people were instrumental in prompting the 2009 Great Recession that affected almost all areas of the global economy.
The gimmicks such as mortgage-backed securities that caused the Great Recession are still being played out with different names, which include private equity and hedge funds. Stock prices are now determined more by the wealth of the super-rich, rather than by the fundamentals of the economy.
When we review these developments, there is one common element underlying all of them: All these anti-social and destructive decisions are made by people with a high level of education.
This reminds me of a write-up by, I believe, Israel education psychologist Haim Ginott, which became the educational philosophy of some Holocaust education institutions. The full write-up is the following:
Dear Teachers,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp.
My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers.
Children poisoned by educated physicians.
Infants killed by trained nurses.
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is that teachers help students become human.
Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.
Well, we all agree that education is critically important for the future prosperity of our society. I even stated as such in the summer 1991 issue of the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives (pages 217-218) by stating that one major reason for the rapid development of the Korean economy was the aspiration for the education of children in Korea.
Unfortunately, the reality is a little complicated. No matter how hard teachers try to inject humanism into the brains of the young, there will always be learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, and educated Eichmanns. I feel sad to say, but I think it is true, that human beings are made that way. There will always be bad ones.
Let me go back to the initial premise of this article in that some are criticizing the economics department of Seoul National University that trained policymakers of the Moon administration who are doing a good job in unraveling the fabric of the prosperous Korean economy.
These policymakers, however, are exceptions rather than the norm that exist everywhere as illustrated in the above examples. The same department that produced a few bad apples also trained numerous policymakers of the past administrations who led the Korean economy to become one of the best in the world.
A couple of names who did a superb job for the Korean economy quickly come to mind: former economy and finance ministers Jin Nyum and Park Jae-yoon who studied at the economics department of Seoul National University.
Chang Se-moon (changsemoon@yahoo.com) is the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Impact Studies.
