The Kyunghyang Forum was established by The Kyunghyang Shinmun in 2016 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of its publication and has since served as an arena to discuss and plan for future challenges faced by Korean society. The Forum is now in its seventh iteration in 2022 and is entitled The Age of Great Transformation: Roads to a Sustainable Future.

It has become clear that our world in the 21st century is headed in a direction that is unprecedented in history. COVID-19 has threatened the survival of humanity and drove our global community into crisis over the past couple of years. Airlines and logistics industries have collapsed while the service sectors of travel, tourism, and education have been hit hard. In addition, a great number of self-employed small business owners have incurred losses beyond repair. As a result, the many governments of the world have unleashed an exorbitant amount of money to minimize the loss. This, in turn, has resulted in global economic bubbles, as these funds have flowed into the real estate and financial markets, resulting in inflation and further polarization within societies. The price of raw materials, such as crude oil and grain, has also risen dramatically, leading to fears of stagflation, under which prices continue to rise amid an economic downturn. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only heightened the uncertainty in the global economy, as it served as a reminder that war is still a potential threat that may occur anytime and anywhere in the 21st century. In the meanwhile, the bond of inter-governmental cooperation that is necessary to fight against the global climate crisis has been weakened significantly.

This year’s Kyunghyang Forum will be highlighted by the Right Honourable Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997-2007. After his opening address, he will be joined by SONG Min-soon, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea, for a discussion. The forum features three keynote addresses, starting with Jason Schenker, Chairman of The Futurist Institute, who rose to Korea’s bestseller list with his accurate insight into the post-pandemic era in his book, The Future after COVID. He will be followed by Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestselling books, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) as well as Collapse (2005); and Fareed Zakaria, world-renown political commentator and host of Fareed Zakaria GPS for CNN Worldwide. Professor Diamond and Dr. Zakaria will, then, be joined by KIM Ji-yoon, former host of MBC’s 100 Minute Debate, for an in-depth dialogue.

The afternoon session will feature Daniel Susskind, a Fellow in Economics and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, who wrote about labor in the post-4th industrial revolution in his book, A World Without Work. The session also features Nick Srnicek, a lecturer in Digital Economy at King’s College London and author of Platform Capitalism. As the third presenter, we have Daniel Waldenström, Professor at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics, who is an expert on the distribution and taxation of income and wealth.

The final session will feature a special presentation from Guy Standing, who is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, in addition to being founder member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network. And finally, the Forum will end with a scintillating discussion among the presenters, as moderated by SUNG Tae-yoon, professor of economics at Yonsei University.