Orostan wrote:Debate Proxy 1 wrote:South Korea was the fastest industrialization in history. North Korea actually industrialized even faster than the Soviet Union did, but you can see what "brain drain", undoubtedly accelerated by Kim's purges, ended up doing to its economy today. It leaped ahead of SK during the Syngman Rhee years, but Park Chung Hee turned the situation rapidly around.
Arguably, SK, for all its faults, still does have better health-care, education, and quality of life than NK.
NK and SK were similar until the seventies, with NK actually ahead of the south. This only started changing when massive amounts of foreign capital came into South Korea while the North was becoming increasingly economically isolated. I can’t contest you on that claim that NK industrialized caster than the USSR did but if they did that’s great for them.
SK has edges over its northern neighbor but I’d hesitate to call if a better society. For what North Korea has to work with they do a very impressive job at providing for their people.
We can agree there.
One can wonder, maybe look at, what went wrong in NK for it to lose its initial progress edge. I do have my theory how it happened.
There aren't many people in the world who actually know how to build industrial machinery. Stalin understood that; a big part of Soviet industrialization was paid for by sending state-requisitioned grain to capitalist countries, notably the U.S. before the Cold War. The U.S.S.R. did prioritize education very highly, probably for reason of raising up minds who could understand such machines.
The D.P.R.K. had a sort of "thaw period", if you can call it that, where there was more freedom of thought than today. No criticizing the government, of course, but the infrastructure was pretty much allowed to be developed by the people, and the state more or less stayed out of it. Korea also had the advantage of a previously educated population.
But a major concern for communist parties, at least if they haven't gotten addicted to wealth themselves, has always been trying to keep inequality in check. Left to themselves, people tend to develop black market-type of habits; even without the protection of laws, black markets have inequality.
If you start finding that the scientists, engineers, etc., become a threat to state ideals, it's either the economic growth they lead or the political ideal that gets sacrificed. This is one factor that could cause what Fidel Castro referred to as a "brain drain".
One could refer to Marx, and note his remarks on society progressing in stages. Stalin himself had written on the subject of closing the gap with the capitalist world, if I recall this right, so as to speed Russia past the capitalist stage and produce an economic base that will support a socialist superstructure.
But if forced to choose between economic progress and equality, that could be a really big snag for reaching socialism, and we have yet to see a socialist project that managed to surmount them; one would expect a better, more humane society not to revert to capitalism unless some really powerful economic forces were at work.
