How do you get a job in North Korea?
nknews.org
nknews.org
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
Too many questions flooding into my head... for starters, how are you online right now?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596784...
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of what they said was clearly lies. This rang true though.
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.
There are no "actually socialist" nations because socialism "doesn't work" in reality. In reality, socialism's endgame is North Korea.
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).
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.
If you take the definition of market economy from wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_economy)
>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?
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.