The recent scandals at Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other banks might give the impression that the financial sector has some serious morality problems. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that: We are dealing with a drop in ethical standards throughout the business world, and our graduate schools are partly to blame. Consider, for example, the revelations about two top executives at the elite consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which has avoided public vilification des

Almost as soon as he grew big enough to walk, a boy went by himself to a local library three blocks from his house.Every summer he would devour the titles on the summer reading list. He saw it as a kind of competition, according to his father’s recollection, and always ended up at the top of the list, tied for the lead with three older girls.The boy’s name? Bill Gates, the founder of the software giant Microsoft, who ranked second with $61 billion in the Forbes 2012 list of the world’s wealthies

The ongoing move by some elderly Koreans to form a labor union should make us reflect on whether our society is making proper preparations for challenges posed by a rapidly increasing number of aged people.About 200 senior citizens gathered this week to launch a preparatory group for the envisioned union.Organizers said they hoped to establish the union by October, which would encompass jobless seniors as well as aged employees. They said the union would seek to negotiate with the government on

On July 1, Canada Day, Canadians awoke to a startling, if pleasant, piece of news: For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American. According to data from Environics Analytics WealthScapes published in the Globe and Mail, the net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, while the average American household’s net worth was $319,970. A few days later, Canada and the U.S. both released the latest job figures. Canada’s unemployment

France celebrated Bastille Day on Saturday. Like its sister republic on this side of the Atlantic, the French Republic marked its liberation from the yoke of monarchical rule. But despite the shower of fireworks, parades and speeches in praise of liberty, don’t be deceived. Just as America’s red, white and blue is the mirror image of France’s blue, white and red, liberte isn’t quite the same as liberty, especially in the 21st century.We have long known that France is, well, a foreign country. Ta

Among the chaotic and hectic environment at Apple due to the passing of Steve Jobs, people must try to look past their brand loyalty (to Apple) to fully understand that Samsung isn’t copying Apple’s designs. Does the Galaxy Tab 10 inch tablet intentionally resemble the iPad? Probably. Does the Galaxy Tab create confusion in the market place so that buyers are deceived into thinking the Galaxy Tab is the iPad? No. Fortunately for Samsung, international law regarding copyright infringement (of des

The U.S. presidential campaign seems to have time-traveled back to 1992, when independent candidate Ross Perot thought he heard the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs moving to Mexico. Perot lost his presidential bid, along with the argument against globalization. The winner, Bill Clinton, went on to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement. The resulting U.S. job losses, primarily in manufacturing, were offset by gains elsewhere, according to numerous studies. Two decades of bipartisan

The alarm is sounding for the Korean economy as the continuing eurozone debt crisis has begun to spill over to China, the engine of global economic growth and the largest market for Korean exports.Last week, China announced that its economy grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter of this year, a sharp decline from 9.5 percent a year earlier. The growth figure was the lowest since the world’s second-largest economy grew 6.6 percent in the first quarter of 2009 at the height of the global financial

A serious power struggle appears to be under way in Pyongyang as Ri Young-ho, the North’s top military official, has been removed from all his posts in a most unusual way.Ri was viewed as one of the guardians that the deceased North Korean leader Kim Jong-il picked to ensure a smooth power transfer to his heir and youngest son, Kim Jong-un.But he was stripped of all his posts in the Workers’ Party, according to a brief dispatch of the North’s Korean Central News Agency on Monday. He was a member

Looking ahead to the Olympics this month, Adam Gopnik cleverly writes in The New Yorker that “Americans become passionate about athletes we have never heard of participating in games we do not follow trying to please judges we cannot see according to rules we do not know.”Gopnik sees this fascination bred by nationalism. But within American culture, we should also be attuned to the narratives of individual excellence that dominate coverage of the Olympics. These narratives extol the virtue of si