Anna Jiwon Park has been covering the politics at The Korea Times since the summer of 2024, when she joined the press pool for the Office of the President in Korea. Prior to that, she spent about five years reporting extensively on financial markets, regulatory authorities and the financial industry. She joined The Korea Times in 2019 after spending eight years as a broadcast journalist at Arirang TV, Korea’s leading global broadcaster, covering politics, defense and culture.
G20 Sherpa ambassador highlights importance of understanding statistics
Ambassador for International Cooperation on G20 Affairs Song In-chang
By Anna J. Park
By Anna J. Park
Ambassador for International Cooperation on G20 Affairs Song In-chang, who is also an elite public official with expertise in economics and international finance, strongly advises the public to become savvy with statistics.
His interest in statistics grew after realizing that a solid understanding of statistics is a precursor to drawing up beneficial policies, which in turn contribute to the betterment of society.
Witnessing various cases where the public does not fully understand the complexities and implications of statistics, including public poll results during elections, health statistics regarding COVID-19 outbreaks as well as sometimes manipulated economic statistics, also prompted him to dig further into statistics.
As a result of his passionate research on these matters, Song recently published a book, which he co-authored with Choi Sung-ho, an economics professor at Kyonggi University.
“An understanding of statistics is an essential requirement to thrive in the data-flooded era,” Song highlighted during a recent phone interview with The Korea Times. “It is experts who produce statistics; however, it is when the general public properly understands and utilizes them that more beneficial statistics are produced and faulty ones will disappear,” he added.
The cover image of Song's book on statistics
He stressed that people should beware of those who warp statistics for their own benefit.
“There are many people around us who manipulate and distort statistics for their own benefit. They're just like Procrustes from Greek mythology. Believing that his bed size is most perfect, he made his guests to fit into it, either by stretching their limbs or amputating them. We should always be critical of whether statistics we meet every day have been manipulated for the Procrustean bed,” Song said.
Born in 1962, Song graduated from Seoul National University majoring in economics and started his career as a civil servant at the finance ministry when he was 25 after passing the high-ranking civil service examination in 1987. He earned a Ph.D. in economics at the University of York after earning master's degrees in economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University.
He also served at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).