Professor Kim Tai Yoo giving a lecture at Woodang Workshop. Photographed by Lee Arim.

By Lee Arim (alimlee96@korea.ac.kr)

On May 18, the College of Political Science and International Relations (PSIR) held the 13th Woodang Workshop in the Inchon Memorial Hall. For this year’s workshop, Professor Kim Tai Yoo (Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University), who is well-known for his book Country without Retirement, has been invited to give a lecture on the “Fourth Industrial Revolution and Double-Cropping Society.”

During the lecture, Kim claimed that the reason why Korea was under the Japanese colonial rule and remained underdeveloped until the 1970s was because Korea had been excluded from the First Industrial Revolution. Based on this rationale, he argued that the Korean government needs to implement effective policies in order to benefit from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In order to do so, the “fluid” younger generation would have to work on “single-crop” fields, on productive industries such as technology or manufacturing. In the meantime, the “crystallized” older generation should be switched to “double-crop” roles, like supervisory and administrative positions, in their latter part of their lives.

In response to Kim’s lecture that prioritized the vitalization of private companies, one of the students in attendance asked for his stance on the newly-elected President Moon Jae-in’s pledge to create 810,000 jobs in the public sector. Kim answered, “Moon’s policy is not necessarily wrong, but a successful Fourth Industrial Revolution in the private sector is a prerequisite for such policies to succeed. The country cannot be sustainable without private companies making enough profit to finance the extra government spending on the wages of civil servants.”
출처 : 고려대학교 고파스 2025-07-31 10:02:34: