From what my parents told me, during the communist Bulgaria people have been quite happy with the "jobs assignment" process.
After graduation from college and if they are not going to continue their education they were given a list of available positions so they can pick few and they are placed according to their grades if there is a competition for a given position.
On the other hand, the less meritocratic positions(like blue collar jobs in factories) were often subject to placement-by-bribery. Many would like a position where they can steal stuff for themselves.
The seemingly meritocratic system gave them feeling of security but obviously the system was not working that well so the communist state collapsed and when it did, my parents lack of sense of the capitalist system left them in a limbo state. Those stealing, bribing folks did quite well in the communism-to-capitalism transformation period but many well educated people could not adopt and moved to well established capitalist economies where the meritocracy existed(at least they were finding jobs based on their credentials). However, at least my parents, never grasped the idea of entrepreneurship. They just don't have the basic instincts for doing a business and they failed miserably when they tried to start one. They are still working for other people.
If the North Korean government fails, probably the turmoil will last for generations, until new culture emerges through a new generation of young people who can have an idea about how a capitalist society works.
PS: We were from a discriminated minority, so maybe it was easier for the native Bulgarians however the North Korea seems to be much worse even than the last days of the communist Bulgaria.
I wholeheartedly concur. It was the same here in Romania.
Interesting anecdotes:
- my parents (who studied EE) worked in a "research institute". Most of the research was taking electronics from the west apart and figuring out how they worked so that they can be manufactured in the "eastern block"
- my first computer was a HC80 computer which was a ZX Spectrum clone
- many big "western" companies were here trough local partnerships (Citroen -> Oltcit, Renault -> Dacia) just like IBM and Coca-Cola worked with the Nazis. Money trumps ideology always :-)
Yeah quite often they sold a couple of examples that where then ripped off - Rolls Royce found that out the hard way as the the Pilots in Korea shot down by MIG 15's with knockoff Jet engines
In Bulgaria the system was not working - probably in other communist economies - because the was a lot of free riding or maybe not.
Tales say[1] say that let alone the social aspects of communism, where 1 guy was needed they used to put 4. Say a guy needs to transport 2000 kg of potatoes. You needed 1 driver, 1 mechanic to check the car, 1 guy to mount/unmount the potatoes and 1 count them.
However, in Bulgaria communism felt apart after the USSR. So I am not sure what was and wasn't working. In order to deeply understand the dynamics of a complex social-economic system such as communism you need to stuck to hard-facts. Otherwise you risk to perpetuate myths like: "Communism doesn't work but Capitalsm does". Truth is that every system has it's positive and negative sides. If someone, a government or population, can cope with the bad aspects (say lack of optimization in communism and rules that apply for everyone in capitalism) you stand a chance of having something that works for the large part of the population.
What I personally dislike about communism is the lack of freedom, which is not inherently connected with capitalism in books, but in real life whenever applied, good luck getting out of there without a few thousand deaths.
[1] My family was running a business in Bulgaria from 1995 until know. I still own a company in BG.
I'm an american currently teaching Undergrad level CS in pyongyang.
Most of the students here know that they want to work at one of the two government research labs: Korean Computing Center, or Pyongyang Information Center. One of the Seniors told me he thinks he has an 80% chance of getting a job where he has access to the internet and an email address for communication.
Many of the anecdotes in the article fit with what I've seen here. I've been told that the going rate to get in to the top high school in pyongyang is about $5000US. One of the government liaisons working at the university studied Malaysian in college, and got told that there were too many Malaysian speakers when he graduated and was assigned to our university instead.
I think the main takeaway is that everything here is based on connections and who you know.
Your first sentence blew my mind. I've read lots of incredible things on HN (billion dollar acquisitions, drones that ship products, self driving cars), but for some reason this comment steals the show.
Too many questions flooding into my head... for starters, how are you online right now?
The campus has internet access for professors and graduate students. There is an egyptian joint venture company in pyongyang that provides both wired and cell internet access.
$5000 to enter a top high school? It shows how little currency there is there! In some US cities $5K won't pay for the admissions consultant, let alone the first 3 months of tuition!
And yes, it seems fascinating that someone from NK could write on a public forum. I would think that it's very censored, no? But is that just my view of a situation that I know nothing about?
Fascinating. This article (esp the part about young people not even thinking about their future knowing its already decided for them) reminds me of the novel 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro. Great novel but one of the criticism directed at the novel is "why are certain characters so passive towards their condition", "why don't they do something about it"? An instilled sense of duty is indeed a very powerful motivator.
Every time I read about life in North Korea I'm reminded of "Meeks," a spooky little novel by Julia Holmes. Nothing in the book says it's about North Korea, but I think she must have been inspired by it.
Having just watched <I>Catching Fire</I> last night (I read the novels a couple years ago), and reading this piece this morning, I can't help notice the similarities between DPRK and Panem. Careers that are decided for you, fear-based policies, total control of the press and communication..
The difference is that in the movie, there's a sub-plot of all-out revolution, but in real life, the only thing we hear about that are in the dreams of North Korean ex-pats. I wonder how realistic revolution is, and how it would play out if it actually happened.
Central planning/socialism really is a problem. North Korea would benefit greatly from a superior system of organizing the means of production. Their centrally-planned food system, for example, isn't working very well.
Central planning is THE problem. You have one institution deciding what everybody should produce and at what price to sell it. If you start with a very poor and underdeveloped country you can achieve some quick improvements since you can concentrate massive amounts of work into very important and visible projects. But that only makes it worse since more people start to believe that central planning is good. Soon enough the complexity of it becomes mind boggling. There is no way to do the planning in a straight mathematical form so socialist principles come to "help". Principles like "everybody is guaranteed a job". And then you end up with a vegetable farm at 1000 meters over sea level. "Smart" managers produce a certain product in huge quantities that can never be sold only because the central planning committee decided that its price should be higher than a more useful product. The system develops thousands of local minima and becomes frozen. After some years there is no way to move it without a huge shock from outside.
Ironically, though it is true that there are powerful arguments that a socialist country can't efficiently calculate prices due to nonconvexities in production constraints, the same exact argument also refutes the efficient market hypothesis.
Think of it this way: if you're going to be using computational arguments against central planning ("there is no way to do the planning in a straight mathematical form"), you've got to remember that you're really just talking about an algorithm that computes a set of prices. Markets implement such an algorithm by breaking down a economy into parts that are only weakly coupled, and solving the pricing problem within that particular market. There's no technical reason that a central planner can't do the same. The central planner faces the same issues with nonconvexities as the market does, but you can at least match the same set of prices.
Yeah. It's long seemed to me that the empirical argument against socialism/communism was the flawed implementation of central planning for price-setting in the last century. This seems like a strange rhetorical bent to hear from professionals who work in algorithms and frequently see the short-sighted local minima produced by capitalism.
Market solves a different task - it's calculating prices at the given moment of time. The central planning has to produce a function that will give the price for every moment of the plan's duration (the USSR had 5 year planning term). If communists really knew how to do the later they could have used that knowledge to peacefully take over every capitalist country in the world.
"There's no technical reason that a central planner can't do the same."
As another commenter indicated, this is not necessarily both possible and efficient to do with any known model of a computer. Also, to the extent that market economies provide consumer and elite wants and preferences as inputs, they are morally superior to command economies that provide only the elites' wants and preferences as inputs.
As cscurmudgeon asserted, not indicated. Yelling loudly doesn't an argument make, especially when it's clear you've not bothered to think about the problem.
Consider: if no model of a computer can solve price setting, how can the market? Is the market some kind of hyper-computer? (If you think the answer is yes, I encourage you to publish this work, as it'd instantly upend both economics and computer science.)
The market is effectively a distributed computation. It does this by splitting up the intractable problem of solving prices across an entire economy into multiple loosely coupled optimization problems. This allows for a parallel computation to happen. We call these individual computations "firms" and "organizations" and "individuals." There's no technical reason a command economy can't do the same, unless you have a definition of command economy that amounts to "anything that uses a stupid method to calculate prices."
The latter part of what you say is on-the-mark, but it has nothing at all to do with the computability of prices. Simple tip: just because someone points out a basic error in a critique of command economies doesn't mean the person thinks command economies are great.
On the other hand there's plenty of research indicating the relative efficiency of command economies over free market economies. Do you have any evidence to back up your claims?
I am not sure what you mean by "relative efficiency". But in term of economic development I think the best example is Yugoslavia's. In the early fifties Tito with help from Edvard Kardelj implemented a system of self governance for enterprises. It worked way better than central planning. See for example Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management
The problem is that socialism and totalitarianism are separated only by degree. Socialism, by definition, uses government force to take resources/freedom/time/opportunity from some people and redistributes those goods to politically favored groups.
There is some truth to that. NK is only nominally socialist, however, its actual ideology is 'Juche', military-focussed totalitarian isolationism with a massive cult of personality around essentially a royal family of dictators (even having a dead former leader assume a nominally powerful position forever - the Eternal President!)
Edit: Social coordination of the means of production, as opposed to coordination by market forces, is in fact the definition of socialism. Whether it's done by a state or various small groups doesn't matter - both are just variations of socialism. Both are about economic planning.
So it's not really the ideology that is the problem, but the implementation of the ideology. We've seen this before. "Communism hasn't really been tried before".
It's pretty sickening the number of people on HN that continue to defend the ideologies of these murderous regimes.
And yes, in a way this guy is defending the N. Korean regime.
I'm not defending it. I'm just saying socialism isn't its issue, in fact it cannot be since NK is socialist only in name. Its real ideology is "Juche".
>Basically, people in North Korea do not have the freedom to choose their occupations. Once you’re assigned a job from the government, it is your lifelong job.
The tour guide I had described in some detail the previous job he'd had - just weeks before becoming a tour guide. He worked at the zoo and was tasked with coordinating the exchange of animals with other countries.
He gave me the impression that he requested to become a tour guide too, in order to improve his English.
In a place with such tight information controls, why either of you would assume any of these people had any idea what the lives and information access of the others were like is beyond me.
I don't think it's any kind of contradiction to suggest that both of these things are true: That many people aren't given a choice, and that those who are do not necessarily know about the fact that others are not.
> Actually, most of the people working in those organizations are children of party officers or executives of wealthy foreign currency-earning organizations.
I expect he had connections and/or was able to bribe his way towards becoming a tour guide. Tourism, after all, is a foreign currency earning industry.
Not so much different than in some periods of old USSR - depending on time and place/sub-SSR, at times it was much more liberal, at times it was exactly like that.
I can't help but sing the article title (which, in case it changes, is "How do you get a job in North Korea?") to the song from The Sound of Music, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?".
Well, now you claim that NK is actually socialist. I dont really think you can find a normal definition of socialism that fits north korea, any more than its a democratic nation. It claims to be both (The full name is Democratic People's Republic of Korea) but I don't think you can claim its anything other than a autocratic dictatorship.
Well I would argue that there are several countries more socialist than NK (for example Denmark where I come from).
Socialism will properly not work in its pure form, but then again pure capitalism without any restraints would very likely evolve into a nasty place (for example if there was no anti thrust laws there is a big risk that the free market would cease to exist).
Denmark and all other industrialized nations on this planet are capitalist. They may have some socialist leanings such as providing myriad welfare services, but their governments allow private entities to own property and to control the means of production, therefore they are capitalist.
A country is not either capitalist or socialist, its a matter of degrees. Some parts can be capitalist some parts can be socialist. Some countries go more to one end of the spectrum than others.
You can have private ownership of the means of production but that don't automatically give capitalism, capitalism also requires a market economy. You can have private ownership of the mean of production without having capitalism.
>Capitalism generally refers to economic system where the means of production are largely or entirely privately owned and operated for a profit, structured on the process of capital accumulation. In general, investments, distribution, income, and prices are determined by markets.<
What if distribution, income and prices are largely determined by the state but investments are not?
Denmark allows private entities to own property, so it's capitalist. Denmark's largest oil company is state-owned, so it's socialist [0]. Or, maybe more nuance is required.
Denmark, like most of the rest of Scandinavia, has a mixed economy. A large portion of the economy is privately owned, but a large portion is also publicly owned. It is neither purely capitalist, nor purely socialist.
um you might want to do a bit of research from sources other than fox news it is possible have both a capitalist free market and a socialist government as many European countries prove.
I did not claim opposite. NK does not have a free market nor a liberal government, period. Dont know about the exact category of their government but their economical system seems like text book Socialism to me.
Besides, IMHO Only rich countries can afford Socialist governments, otherwise it ends up in misery.
Not as we define them. As we define it, a job is an exchange; the employee puts in work and they get back money and the like. What they have (as described in the article) is a legal requirement to be at their assigned place of work and do their assigned task, without getting back money and the like. That's more akin to slavery.
It seems that a lot of workplaces don't even have any work for the assigned workers to do (e.g. factories are out of raw materials), and no salary to pay, so the "employees" just go freelancing elsewhere. This is worse than slavery. With slavery, at least there's a general expectation that the master will feed his slaves.
North Koreans are getting the worst possible form of communism (indentured servitude in a micromanaged economy) and the worst possible form of capitalism (must earn your own survival, no safety nets whatsoever) at the same time. That's crazy.
There are two giant economies that border NK, China and Russia, that do not economically embargo NK. But as is always the case with socialist workers' paradises, it's always the fault of external villains that they have any remaining problems at all. Surely it can't have anything to do with the internal policy of forcibly transferring decision-making power from the people to the political elite in Capital City.
Not really - their government takes all the aid and money, while also punishing defectors (just people escaping to China or SK) by death or imprisonment of their families. Embargoes do little for most of the population.
After graduation from college and if they are not going to continue their education they were given a list of available positions so they can pick few and they are placed according to their grades if there is a competition for a given position.
On the other hand, the less meritocratic positions(like blue collar jobs in factories) were often subject to placement-by-bribery. Many would like a position where they can steal stuff for themselves.
The seemingly meritocratic system gave them feeling of security but obviously the system was not working that well so the communist state collapsed and when it did, my parents lack of sense of the capitalist system left them in a limbo state. Those stealing, bribing folks did quite well in the communism-to-capitalism transformation period but many well educated people could not adopt and moved to well established capitalist economies where the meritocracy existed(at least they were finding jobs based on their credentials). However, at least my parents, never grasped the idea of entrepreneurship. They just don't have the basic instincts for doing a business and they failed miserably when they tried to start one. They are still working for other people.
If the North Korean government fails, probably the turmoil will last for generations, until new culture emerges through a new generation of young people who can have an idea about how a capitalist society works.
PS: We were from a discriminated minority, so maybe it was easier for the native Bulgarians however the North Korea seems to be much worse even than the last days of the communist Bulgaria.