Rifkin vs Yergin: Who Is Right?

September this year, Daniel Yergin, the founder and chairman of IHS CERA (Cambridge Energy Research Associates), published "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World."
About two weeks later, Jeremy Rifkin, the author of "The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream," published "The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World."
If Daniel Yergin is the Business-As-Usual (shale gas, inevitable nuclear, and cutting-edge renewable energy),

can Jeremy Rifkin be an elitist anti-corporate alternative (distributed renewable energy and smart grids, as planned in Europe)?

Who do you think is right? (Or, are they all wrong?)

If you haven't had a chance to read the books, let us talk about it after watching the videos linked below.

Yergin's interview with UC Berkeley: http://youtu.be/f-KtX9OPtsQ

Rifkin's keynote speech at Canada's Evergreen Brick Works Forum: http://youtu.be/LRl8ki3FH2c

Sources:

Rifkin, J. (2011). The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Yergin, D. (2011). The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. New York, NY: The Penguin Press.

What Made South Korea the Saddest Country in the OECD?

In my previous posting, I found South Korea's suicide death rates were the highest in the OECD.
I tried to figure out possible causes of the grim facts.
Among some seemingly suicide-related sad statistics, I found one statistically meaningful evidence.
It is the "wage dispersion" in the country. Wage dispersion is the ratio of the wages of the 10% best-paid workers to those of the 10% least-paid workers.
As you can see from the figure below, the wage dispersion has been increasing over the 15 years' span from 1994 to 2008.


It is highly correlated with South Korea's suicide rates. In a simple linear regression, the square of the correlation coefficient between the two variables was 0.8648.

Then, what is causing the ever-increasing wage dispersion in South Korea? I'll find the answer when I'm free of some duties.

Data sources:
Statistics Korea. (2011). Annual Report on the Cause of Death Statistics. [Data from http://j.mp/Cause_of_Death]

OECD. (2011). Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising. Paris, France: OECD Publishing. [Full-text from http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264119536-en]