The 2003 film The Road Taken is a Korean movie that tells the life of Kim Sun-myung, who was recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s longest-serving prisoner. The director of the movie, Hong Ki-sun, stated, “I wanted to emotionally depict a person who held onto a single dream and shook hands with the truth.” Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the world he dreamed of and the truth he sought, it is heartbreaking to wonder, “Why did he have to have just one dream?” His life cannot be seen as one where he made his own decisions. He was deprived of the opportunity to find his own dream and truth as he lived. However, as American politician William Jennings Bryan said about a century ago, destiny is not a matter of chance, but always a matter of choice.
The protagonist of the movie, Kim Sun-myung, was born in 1925 into a wealthy family in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi Province. During the Korean War, he received ideological education under the control of the North Korean People’s Army and became a communist, believing in the ideology that “communism is a thought where everyone can live equally well.” He eventually joined the war and was captured by the United Nations forces, sentenced to life imprisonment, and lived in prison as a leftist ideological criminal. At that time, he was a 25-year-old bachelor. During his 45 years in prison, he was encouraged to write a statement of conversion renouncing his ideology, but he chose to uphold the values he believed were his conscience. When he met his mother, who had waited for him until she was 94, after 45 years, she passed away two months later, leaving him with grief. In 2000, he went to the North he had chosen, along with other unconverted long-term prisoners. By then, he was a 75-year-old bachelor.
Our lives are a series of choices. From trivial choices like the time we wake up in the morning and whom to have lunch with, to life-changing decisions such as choosing a career or a spouse. These choices can be autonomous or forced. Most of the choices given to us in our daily lives are free, but sometimes our lives are determined by choices imposed upon us, knowingly or unknowingly. Of course, even within those forced choices, we can make different decisions. This is not without sacrifice. Among these forced choices are societal institutions, such as whether a society chooses democracy or communism, which can determine the lives of its members. The religion chosen by a country can also decide the way its citizens live.
Choi In-hun’s novel The Square, published in 1961, also deals with war prisoners, similar to the movie The Road Taken. When many prisoners were captured during the Incheon Landing Operation in September 1950, they were separated and housed in Busan, Gyeongbuk, and the Geoje Island POW camp. This facility could accommodate up to 132,000 people, including 150,000 North Korean soldiers, 20,000 Chinese soldiers, and 3,000 female prisoners and volunteer soldiers, sometimes holding up to 173,000 people. According to the Geneva Convention of 1949, war prisoners should be released and repatriated without delay after the war. However, these prisoners were given a special choice. The US proposed the principle of voluntary repatriation, asking the prisoners their free will and repatriating them to where they wanted to go. They could return to the North, stay in South Korea, or go to a third country. Among the prisoners at the time, 76 chose to abandon their homeland and go to a neutral country. The protagonist of The Square, Lee Myung-jun, was one of those who chose a third country. However, he fell from the ship heading to India and committed suicide. The novel The Square ends there, but MBC pursued these 76 prisoners in a documentary titled 76 Prisoners. They live as the first generation immigrants in India, Brazil, and Argentina, accepting the consequences of their choices. Although fictional, actress Lee Young-ae also appears as the daughter of one of the 76 prisoners who chose a third country in the movie Joint Security Area JSA. She plays a Swiss female major investigating a murder case at Panmunjom.
The direction of one’s life can change depending on the first book one reads upon entering university. A person who first encounters Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and another who first meets Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving will have different perspectives on the world from that moment on, as they start interpreting the world with their existing knowledge. Although these two books provide deep insights, they do not explain the whole world. The conscience or belief that Kim Sun-myung, the protagonist of The Road Taken, adhered to was something he acquired at the age of 25. This was not a grand narrative like ideology or ideology, but what if he had thought a little more about others’ perspectives? If he had recognized that people with beliefs opposite to his were also staunch, he might have realized that his beliefs were not complete. The French novelist Andre Gide, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, said, “To make the right choice, one must look not only at what is to be chosen but also at what is to be rejected.” The reason why the choices and decisions made by individuals under the conditions imposed by society and history in the movie The Road Taken feel so poignant lies there. If the process of evolution is seen as a series of choices, once you choose the wrong path, it is difficult to return to the right path. You become a prisoner of history. This is especially true if you cling too much to past experiences. Therefore, choices require cold rationality rather than emotion.
In Forrest Gump, Gump tells people at the bus stop, “My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” Our lives are a series of choices. We face countless moments of choice as we live. Unlike the box of chocolates in Forrest Gump, our lives are even more uncertain. While each chocolate in a box may have a different flavor but all are sweet, the box of life includes bitter and painful flavors. Choices are decisions that inevitably occur when you meet someone else. When you desperately want something, you can enter a world of fantasy where you can get anything. This desire in our fantasies is endless. However, when we meet others, we inevitably have to make choices. This is because there is no such thing as a condition-free reality. The conditions that limit our desires always appear when we consider both ourselves and others.
In economics, such conditions are found in the scarcity of resources. Economic problems arise because human desires are infinite, while the resources to satisfy those desires are scarce. The reason we must make choices stems from this scarcity. Companies have to choose which products to produce because the resources for production are limited, and we spend a lot of time shopping because our money is limited. Even wealthy people have to make choices. No matter how much money one has, if it is insufficient to satisfy people’s desires, economists call that resource scarce. Resources and money are relative.
Time is also a very limited resource. The reason we have to choose whether to sleep longer in the morning or get up is because time is scarce. The limitation of time prevents us from living through all possibilities. This is why we cannot avoid making choices. One choice becomes a constraint for the next choice because the conditions given to us change due to past choices. How should we choose? Fortunately, many people have pondered this question and prepared answers under the name of academia. Decision science, psychology, and economics are among these fields. Originally, economics was the study of choice, but it seems to have taken the name economics because it mainly dealt with economic problems. Perhaps it is because the quantitative judgment on choices is clearer in economic issues. However, it is clear that economics can help with everyday choice problems and is the most closely related discipline to our daily lives, as it deals with the issue of choices we face every moment.
Economics textbooks usually start with the following three simple assumptions. First, human desires are infinite. Second, resources are finite. Third, to satisfy our infinite desires with finite resources, humans must make choices. However, the uncertainty of the future does not allow us to make perfect choices. There is a word in English, “Proactive.” This word is used to mean looking ahead and acting or taking measures in advance. This word becomes the first habit in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, appearing as “Be Proactive,” meaning to lead your life. Here, proactive means the opposite of reactive. Instead of reacting when the environment acts on us, it means choosing and acting in advance. If my decision is reactive, I can blame the person or environment that influenced me, but if I choose the result myself, I must take responsibility. Choices, therefore, must consider not only the current situation but also the future, and since choices are what we must take responsibility for, we need to remember this word. Coincidentally, the authors of Smart Choices summarize the thinking method for choices as Proact. That is, choices are made through a process of defining the Problem, setting Objectives, considering Alternatives, evaluating Consequences, and making Trade-offs.
As in school days, accurately identifying and organizing the problem is half of the solution. Conversely, a wrong start can lead to wrong decisions. A well-organized problem consists of given constraints and goals. It means we should not approach the problem with just one goal in mind. Because we need to achieve the goal while satisfying the given conditions, resources, and constraints. To understand these given conditions, we have already discussed methods of thinking such as organizing, reducing, compressing, and decomposing. Defining the problem is none other than knowing yourself and knowing your enemy. We often hear that we need a vision or goal to succeed. What is the difference between vision and goal? Above all, goals must be specific. Vision, as the root word implies, is seeing a successful state. Goals are visible milestones towards that success. Goals should be SMART. Although it can be understood as being wise in setting goals, it is worth recalling McKinsey’s SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Time-limited. Goals must be detailed, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and have a clear timeframe.
As we gradually organize the given conditions and goals more concretely, we find alternatives. So where and how can we find principles for better alternatives? One way is to trust our intuition, provided we have sufficiently trained it. In daily life, we do not always analyze the choices we face, nor do we always need to. Analysis itself involves a certain cost. Often, we make choices based on intuition and experience. In fact, instinctive and intuitive choices often yield satisfactory results. This is the result of entrusting many parts to our unconscious through experience and training. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink emphasizes the usefulness of intuition based on similar reasoning.
However, in any case, principles for choices are needed, and economics proposes marginal analysis as the principle. While there are situations where we must make an all-or-nothing choice, most decisions involve more or less. For example, the choice of whether to sleep an hour more on a tired morning is more common. The term marginal refers to the boundary of land, meaning the land next to the land we currently have. The term used in economics is not much different. A marginal choice is deciding whether to farm the land next to the land we are already farming. At this point, we should compare only the costs and expected benefits of the additional land. This is marginal analysis.
Consider a holiday when you have to work. Suppose your family complains, asking if family or work is more important. Most would think family is more important. However, marginal analysis does not consider the intrinsic value of family versus work. Instead, we should consider the value generated by working on that holiday compared to spending time with family. This is marginal analysis thinking. Therefore, if work is deemed important at that moment, the correct answer should be, “Of course, family is more important, but marginally, work is important at this moment.” Of course, it is challenging to first explain the concept of marginal to our family, but we are always paying a price for our choices.
Marginal analysis ultimately compares additional costs and benefits. So, we must ask ourselves, “What are the costs and benefits?” Economics calls the tool for comparing costs and benefits cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis is a simple method for examining the losses and gains from choices, including investments. Most debates in forums emphasize intrinsic value over marginal value, resulting in emotional battles, but they should focus on the marginal costs and benefits derived from cost-benefit analysis. Most intrinsic issues are subjective values, like “Apples are tasty” versus “Bananas are tastier,” and thus not subjects of debate. The issue of whether building a canal is good or bad should be about the benefits and the costs involved. Such problems do not always align intuition with the correct answer. Uncertainty about the future and the evaluation of the degree of risk must be considered, as benefits are usually visible while costs are hidden. In fact, there are rarely cases where one choice is entirely superior to another. If it were, the other options would not be alternatives.
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