Making economics as a discipline of “Korean social science” means to modify
the mainstream economics to be more usefully utilized to understand, explain,
and make forecasts about Korea’s economic phenomena as well as to make
government policies to improve its welfare. For this, economists in Korea face
two problems. First, the mainstream economics relies on mathematics too much
to understand the whole picture of economic phenomena. Second, since Korea
has its own culture and history unique and different from those of US and
Britain, that are the birth and nurturing places of mainstream economics,
mainstream economics does not tend to fit in Korea’s economic phenomena. To
solve the first problem, we put an emphasis on pluralism and critical thinking
not only for research of economists but also for education of students. For the
second problem, self-sustaining habitat, that generates researchers and students
committed to ‘Korean economics’ continuously over time, should be constructed
to study Korea’s unique and critical economic problems in a focused and
consistent manner. For this, proper incentive mechanisms should be structured.