North Korea: a Land of Milk and Honey
Bulgogi! Kimchi! Galbi! Kamsahamnida!
The competing vendors shouted at the top of their lungs as parents, children, seniors, monks, soldiers and foreigners meandered shoulder to shoulder throughout the packed grocery store.
No aisle is left unattended. On both ends stand young women in mini-skirts and gogo boots gleefully extolling the selling points on the product du jour.
Taste test? Don't mind if I do, as I follow the other patrons in feasting on a buffet of mouth-watering beefs, porks and pastries.
If there is one generalization that is universal about Koreans, it's that they are passionate. And today they are passionate about shopping.
And while the history of 20th century Korea is filled with schisms, stigmas and sorrows, the peninsula offers outsiders a chance to see the outcome of two passionate experiments: pure socialism versus relatively free-markets. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (7)
Book 'em Danno
"And because socialism cannot calculate, because central planners have no organic pricing mechanism to determine how to distribute the sickles and scythes, millions of its residents still live at the brink of starvation."
Come now, Tim. Didn't Bryan Caplan say that it is overwhelmingly an incentive problem rather than one of calculation? (even though Caplan granted the impossibility of econ calculation under socialism)
Published: October 6, 2008 2:12 PM
Ball
Uh, yea, and Caplan is wrong. Isn't a gun to the head incentive enough?
The reason why, for example, the Soviet Union didn't collapse immediately is because:
1) They abandoned the moneyless economy after two years, after which the New Economy reforms were enacted.
2) They based their internal accounting on market prices literally gleaned from the Wall Street Journal. This is not unlike how a vertically integrated company calculates production, as explained in Man, Economy, and State.
Published: October 6, 2008 4:29 PM
Deflationnist
Reply to Ball,
In other words, socialism "worked" because it used money and copied Capitalism.
Published: October 6, 2008 5:28 PM
Krazy Kaju
The bigger reason why socialism worked was because managers created a black market to more efficiently allocate resources. Without those black markets, the USSR would have collapsed.
Published: October 6, 2008 7:31 PM
gene berman
In comparing the two Koreas, it's even more illustrative to note that, historically, North Korea was the dominant
industrial, commercial, educational, and cultural portion of Korea, while the southern portion was almost exclusively rural and agrarian. The difference between the two was so pronounced that Korean nationals who'd fought in the Japanese armed forces and become our POWs overwhelmingly (9-1) chose
to be repatriated to the north. This was going on as late as the mid '60s. Even Seoul is somewhat of an anomaly; though it was below the 38th parallel and therefore in South Korea, geographically, it's simply the southermost the northern urban centers.
By and large, the north had all the economic resources---minerals, hydro-capable rivers, forests, and almost all of the educated classes of people--before the division. It is, perhaps, the most dramatic illustration of the plain and evident differences of the opposing economic systems of "planning" and "anarchy."
Published: October 7, 2008 1:33 AM
Tim Swanson
Gene, that is a really good point. I briefly discussed that in one of the footnotes (#10), but it really deserves many more articles:
As you said, not only did the South have very little industrial capabilities after independence but the vast majority of fighting during the civil war took place there -- in fact Seoul changed hands three times and was pretty much gutted.
A book called "North Korea Through the Looking Glass" discusses the aspect regarding assistance from the USSR. That despite decades of free loans and subsidies, the North would eventually be unable to pay for the millions of gallons of oil needed to run the Soviet-built factories. And similarly, around the same time ('89-'91) the North defaulted on the loans from Japan. Lots of free stuff and support, yet their zealous belief in central planning doomed them.
Published: October 7, 2008 3:38 AM
Michael Smith
Another reason why socialism appeared to work for a time in the Soviet Union was the vast amount of material aid provided by the west, especially by the U.S. See, for details, the illuminating book, "East - West = Zero" by Werner Keller.
Published: October 7, 2008 7:02 AM