[Editorial] ‘Knowledge economy’

Many people still do not know exactly what the Ministry of Knowledge Economy does, three-and-a-half years after it came into being in a government reorganization at the beginning of the Lee Myung-bak presidency. Watching this ministry’s officials scurry for damage control under public wrath over the nationwide power outage last week and its minister making profuse apologies for the disaster, people are again dismayed by the seeming irrelevance of the title, “knowledge economy,” to what they are seeing now.

In a press conference Sunday afternoon, Minister Choi Joong-kyung said he was ready to resign to take responsibility for the mishap that put vast areas of the nation into hours of power outages. In total absence of prior warning, power was cut at general outposts in the Demilitarized Zone, operation rooms of general hospitals, busy intersections in cities and in hundreds of thousands of industrial workshops. People were trapped in apartment elevators and laboriously drafted documents disappeared from computers.

These were the realities of the knowledge-based society that Korea was supposed to be. Minister Choi attributed the catastrophe to an underestimate of power demand and production capacity, poor decisions by officials at the Korea Electric Power Corp. and false reporting through oversight channels.

The creation of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy through the integration of former Ministries of Commerce-Industry-Energy, Information-Communication, and Science-Technology was aimed “to assemble traditional industrial know-how, cutting edge R&D, and strong pro-business policies,” according to the MKE Website. Expectations that this combination would help attain synergies, spur innovation and upgrade the nation’s economy, however, met disappointment, particularly with the inefficiencies in the numerous state-invested enterprises under the ministry’s control, including KEPCO.

On his visit to KEPCO head office in Seoul the day after the blackout, President Lee compressed public anger in his 35-minute lambasting on the company officials and their supervisors at the ministry. “You eat well and sleep well… with the best salaries… and you just cut power to hospitals, elevators and small enterprises, without even making a phone call to the weather bureau to estimate power demand beforehand under this unseasonable heat. I am ashamed of you, and you should be ashamed of yourselves!”

We wonder if the president by now regrets initiating the government restructuring, including the merger of three ministries to form a new one for convergence of their missions. If it fostered creativity with greater independence of respective component functions, the merger undoubtedly resulted in what the president termed the depletion of sense of responsibility and a thinner system of central oversight.

Remedial steps will now be taken: Compensation will be made for individuals and organizations that suffered from the indiscriminate power blackout; an inter-ministerial committee will make a thorough inquiry into what caused the power cut and who was responsible for it; and a new power distribution system will be worked out to make sufficient advance warning to the public and to spare essential places from any blackout.

Reports of losses will be received at KEPCO branches across the country and a compensation committee will examine the degree of damage and decide the proper payment. Yet, the committee will apparently experience difficulties in measuring these amounts, and turning them into sums of money. How can they compensate for the hours office workers sat idle before their computers waiting for the power to flicker back on and for the panic people felt stuck in a dark elevator?

Difficult though that may sound, these are the tasks the Ministry of Knowledge Economy should do well to prove it is essential for an advanced industrial society. Earlier this year, the government formed the National Science and Technology Commission, effectively to carry on the business of the former Ministry of Science and Technology ― which was abolished in the restructuring in 2008 ― after mounting complaints from academia and industry. Recurrence of a man-made disaster such as the one on Thursday could invite calls for the disintegration of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy ― it hardly deserves its name.