The Korea Herald

Hiring like Google a bad idea for most companies

Mar 17, 2014

Laszlo Bock, the head of human resources at Google, made quite a splash with his announcement last year that the technology firm has changed the way it hires people. Gone are the brainteaser-style interview questions that so many candidates abhorred. But also gone, it would seem, is any concern with discovering how smart applicants really are. “GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless. ... We found that they don’t predict anything,” Bock told the New York Times.
[Jeffrey Frankel] Why the ECB should buy U.S. treasuries

Mar 17, 2014

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts ― The European Central Bank needs to ease monetary policy further. Eurozone-wide inflation, at 0.8 percent, is below the target of “close to 2 percent,” and unemployment in most countries remains high. Under current conditions, it is hard for the periphery countries to reduce their costs to internationally competitive levels, as they need to do. If inflation in the eurozone as a whole is below 1 percent, the periphery countries are condemned to suffer painful deflation.T
Democratic pageant in largest democracy

Mar 17, 2014

NEW DELHI ― Last week, India’s independent Election Commission announced the dates for the next general election. The world’s largest single exercise of the democratic franchise will take place over a staggering 37 days in nine “phases,” some a week apart, from April 7 to May 12. Some 814 million eligible voters will elect, for the 16th time, a new parliament and government, casting their ballots at more than 930,000 polling stations ― after choosing from an estimated 15,000 candidates belonging
[David Ignatius] In Syria, rebel with a cause

Mar 16, 2014

WASHINGTON ― With the Ukraine crisis, any fleeting hope that the U.S. and Russia could soon broker a political settlement in Syria has vanished. The U.S. needs an alternate strategy for strengthening Syrian moderates who can resist both the brutal Bashar al-Assad regime and al-Qaida extremists.A new Syrian opposition leader who may help get the balance right is Jamal Maarouf. He heads a group called the Syria Revolutionaries Front and is the leading moderate rebel commander in the north. I spoke
Alaska’s ‘road to nowhere’ is still a boondoggle

Mar 16, 2014

It has been said that nothing dies harder than a bad idea.Nearly two decades ago, while I was serving as U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Alaska’s Sens. Frank Murkowski and Ted Stevens wanted to build a 38-mile gravel road in their state, with 11 miles going through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. The road would connect the salmon canneries in King Cove, population 948, with a larger airport in the neighboring town of Cold Bay to expand and speed shipping.My boss at the time, President Clin
[Shin On-han] The debts we owe to overseas adoptees

Mar 16, 2014

A total of 167,000 Korean children were adopted by families in the United States, Europe and other nations after the Korean War. During this period, it seemed to be much better for them to grow up outside of Korea. I thought that it would be good for them. In fact, some of the early adoptees have become successful government officials, members of congress or famous sports stars.However, my thinking has changed through meeting the overseas adoptees and reading the books they wrote. I totally over
Obama late to the realpolitik table in Saudi Arabia

Mar 16, 2014

PARIS ― Later this month, U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Here’s hoping he decides to stay home and help his daughters with their homework instead.America’s decreasing influence in the Middle East and Eurasia might be the result of deliberate strategic policy. Or it’s simply ineptitude ― in which case it’s infinitely better for indecisive paralysis to prevail over uninformed proactivity. Either way, it’s not a bad thing.The Middle East is a mess, but what else is new
[Yu Kun-ha] Abe should throw away historical revisionism

Mar 16, 2014

Japanese officials are continuing to make contradictory remarks on historical issues, throwing their counterparts in Seoul into confusion and fueling distrust of the incumbent Tokyo government.Their inconsistent comments on such important issues as the sexual enslavement of women from Korea and elsewhere during World War II are hindering their efforts to reset frayed bilateral relations.Worse, they are reinforcing the impression that the current Japanese administration is treacherous, and is try
[Robert Reich] America’s great U-turn

Mar 14, 2014

Do you recall a time in America when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars and raise a family?I remember. My father (who just celebrated his 100th birthday) earned enough for the rest of us to live comfortably. We weren’t rich but never felt poor, and our standard of living rose steadily through the 1950s and 1960s.That used to be the norm. For three decades after World War II, America created the largest middle class the wo
Flotsam and false leads in Flight 370 search

Mar 14, 2014

One of the few facts we’ve learned for certain from the international search and rescue mission for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is that the South China Sea is very, very polluted. The disappearance is, above all else, a human tragedy for the families of the passengers and crew, and the state of the sea should in no way distract from the efforts to find them. Nonetheless, the ecological tragedy will have a profound impact on the South China Sea ― and the more than 1 billion people living in its
[David Ignatius] On Ukraine, where next?

Mar 13, 2014

WASHINGTON ― It’s still possible to imagine a fuzzy, face-saving compromise in Ukraine: Crimea would have a new, quasi-autonomous administrative status blessed by Moscow and Kiev. The problem is that few analysts think Russian President Vladimir Putin will swallow this diplomatic pill. Secretary of State John Kerry will make one more try, seeing his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in London on Friday; Kerry hasn’t ruled out traveling on to see Putin himself. But that’s unlikely to stop the pla
‘Average’ Barbie is just as fake as original

Mar 13, 2014

When I was a little girl, my favorite dolls came from Mattel and had wildly inhuman proportions. To me, they were magical and special and didn’t look the least bit strange. But once, probably when I was making a Christmas wish list, my mother let her adult perspective slip. “You mean,” she asked, with a disapproving edge, “one of those dolls with the huge heads?”Yes, I spent my childhood playing with Liddle Kiddles, whose heads were roughly the height of their torsos and twice as wide. Yet never
With peace accord unlikely, Taiwan’s future in jeopardy

Mar 13, 2014

Lien Chan, honorary chairman of the Kuomintang, met Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party who doubles as president of the People’s Republic, in Beijing on Feb. 18 to exchange views on how to further improve the peaceful development of relations between Taiwan and China. Lien urged Xi to face squarely the reality of the Republic of China. It’s the first time any leader of Taiwan mentioned the Republic of China in a CCP general secretary’s face.Xi tacitly agreed, because Lie
Spring coming soon for Asian economies

Mar 13, 2014

The chaos in Ukraine gave markets a brief scare last week, but they soon shrugged it off as a distraction amid signs of improvement in the global economy.As March progresses and the paralyzing effects of the unusually wintry weather in the United States dissipate, the clouds are clearing from the economic outlook, especially in Asia.Malaysia last week reported another double-digit jump in exports for January ― led by higher shipments of electronics, liquefied natural gas and metals ― as well as
[Juan L. Mercado] ‘Perfect storm’ threatens global food system

Mar 13, 2014

“Filipinos share one common item in our everyday existence: rice,” National Scientist Gelia Castillo wrote in her book on a cereal that makes or breaks presidents. “Rice In Our Life” reviewed three decades of studies into rice that was sown between B.C. 6,000 and A.D. 400, in the Philippines ― from Ifugao to Lucena.Rice self-sufficiency has been an upward moving target, “always out of reach, even as we calculate we are only three percent short,” she wrote. “Seared deep in the psyche of Filipino