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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad they're considering doing this.

However, it's going to cost a lot more than $500 billion to raise per capita GDP by ~7 fold. It'll cost $500+ billion in the first ten years in just welfare support, security, education, infrastructure, disarmament, healthcare, job training.

$50 billion per year in net drag is perhaps even far too low of a number. There are 24 million people in the north. That's a mere $2,000 per year per person. It's going to cost a lot more than that to start bringing them up to speed. I think you could easily spend $2k per person, just on the person - not counting several expensive things I listed previously.

South Korea should plan for $2 trillion over 20 years. They'll intentionally under-shoot the numbers, to avoid freaking out the tax paying public, and the cost will end up ballooning far beyond the public relations numbers.

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> There are 24 million people in the north. That's a mere $2,000 per year per person.

No, it's $20,000 per person, which, if spent wisely, is more than enough to give someone a decent education.

Esp. considering that NK's GDP per capita is ~$1800.

And even if they do (impossibly) increase GDP/capita to 10,000 with that amount of money, North Korea would still be way, way, way poorer than South Korea. I wonder at this point whether reunification as was done in Germany is even possible, given the dramatic (and growing) difference between the two states. Perhaps some sort of confederation will be done.

" cost a lot more than $500 billion to raise per capita GDP by ~7 fold."

That's a good point, but remember that North Korea, in spite of being the most backward and poor nation on Earth, is full of Koreans. A strong creative drive and high levels intellectual life and potential talent and a flair for protest and organizing reform will do a lot for a nation. Most nations would be lucky to unify with 15 MM Koreans, no matter how poor. Within a generation of getting freedom, I expect them to be doing well.

Remember that it only took RoK twenty years to go from a brutal dictatorship among the poorest in the world to the 1st world nation it is.

What is so special about Koreans that your comment couldn't have used "humans" instead?

I think they would have a hard time adjusting....look at the defectors who cant fit in in south

That's a real potential problem, as is the lifetime impairment of childhood malnutrition. But I expect defectors from any regime to be the kind of entrepreneurial misfits that never quite fit in and demand their environment adapt to them.

If you look at the post WWII economic performance of South Korea, and North Korea until ~1980 or so when their leadership started to impede them, it is clear the peninsula has what you might call very high levels of latent human capital, seeing as how just about all of their physical capital had been destroyed.

A ridiculously strong work ethic, leading to the longest working hours in the OECD if not the world?

http://www.vagabondjourney.com/south-korean-work-hours-highe...

Obviously working long hours isn't necessarily optimal for productively, but the average Korean certainly works harder than the average human. (And I'd wager this extends to the North too.)

RoK is South Korea?

Yes, Republic of Korea.

My expectation on the cost being far too low, was taking into account that South Korea is an excellent nation and that they may be better at fixing eg North Korea than a lot of other countries in their situation might.

Most countries in the world would simply not be able to fix North Korea, or pay for it. It would be a perpetual disaster, with the North falling back apart, languishing from quasi-dictatorship to quasi-dictatorship.

The difference between South Korea lifting itself up over 20 or 30 years, and what's going to happen with North Korea, is responsibility and imbalance. South Korea is going to end up assuming immense responsibility for the well-being of the people in the North, rather than the North existing as its own country; and the South will be massively rich by comparison, that imbalance will draw out very large sums of subsidization in the process of bringing the North up to speed to the South's standards --- there was no such scenario with the South when it originally climbed up out of poverty, no stark comparison amongst their own people essentially. It will be viewed as very unacceptable to have the people of North Korea with a per capita GDP of $10,000 after 20 years, while the South perhaps has a $50,000 per capita GDP at that time. Many in the North will not want to stay there in those conditions, and by moving to the South they will generate a significant new financial burden. Either way, it's going to be very expensive.

$2000 per person per year is probably pegged to the current gdp per capita of $1800. By doubling, the policymakers may hope to put an attainable goal on growth.

USA would happily pay $50B/year for 10 years to end this North Korea madness.

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