Why North Korea Fails?

In this episode, we explore why the 20th-century hardline socialism kept producing shortages, purges, and dictators instead of workers’ paradise. From Marx’s promise of human liberation to Kim Il-sung’s transformation of a workers’ state into something closer to a cultic monarchy, this is the story of how bad incentives, internal party warfare, and personalist rule turned utopia into a machine for lies, fear, and ration queues. Subscribe, unless you are currently busy falsifying grain statistics for the revolution. OP Song: Aloha Oe by Kim Kwang Suk & Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble ED Song: Burning Wish by Moranbong Band Reference: Carothers, Christopher. Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Carothers, Christopher. “The Rise and Fall of Anti-Corruption in North Korea.” Journal of East Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (2022): 147–168. https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2021.38. Guriev, Sergei, and Daniel Treisman. “How Modern Dictators Survive: An Informational Theory of the New Authoritarianism.” NBER Working Paper no. 21136, 2015. https://doi.org/10.3386/w21136. Kornai, János. Economics of Shortage. 2 vols. Amsterdam and New York: North-Holland, 1980. Kornai, János. “The Soft Budget Constraint.” Kyklos 39, no. 1 (1986): 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1.... Kornai, János. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Lankov, Andrei. From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945–1960. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Martin, Bradley K. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. Svolik, Milan W. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 04:43 The Origin of Socialism 16:24 Nobody Works 28:34 Comrades Purge Comrades 39:12 One Man’s Rule 47:51 Final Thoughts