24 ms·

How do you get a job in North Korea?

134 points by CrazedGeek 13y ago

theshadow 13y ago
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.
- skyraider 13y ago
  Sense of duty, or the realization that you are powerless to resist the iron grip of the state? Maybe both..
- allochthon 13y ago
  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.
anotherfadjs 13y ago
At least they have jobs.
- EliRivers 13y ago
  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.
  - kijin 13y ago
    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.
    - anotherfadjs 13y ago
      Maybe just maybe because of all the embargoes by the rest of the world?
      - meepmorp 13y ago
        Maybe it's because of specific decisions on the part of the government to provide resources to the military before anyone else in society.
      - jotm 13y ago
        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.
      - SiVal 13y ago
        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.
- crusso 13y ago
  You could say the same thing about African slaves in the Antebellum US.
acheron 13y ago
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?".
TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
NK's problem isn't so much socialism as it is a horrendously managed totalitarian state and poverty.
- skyraider 13y ago
  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.
  - asimeqi 13y ago
    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.
    - scarmig 13y ago
      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.
stevetursi 13y ago
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.
- justaman 13y ago
  Welcome.
PeterisP 13y ago
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.
crdoconnor 13y ago
>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.
- deliminator 13y ago
  > 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.
- jonknee 13y ago
  Why do you assume the government tour guide of North Korea would be honest? I'm sure it was a fascinating tour, but not one rooted in accuracy.
  - crdoconnor 13y ago
    Equally, people who run away from North Korea might also be tempted to bend the truth, most especially when they're being paid to write about it. A lot of what they said was clearly lies. This rang true though.
    - mildtrepidation 13y ago
      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.
mrtksn 13y ago
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.
- atmosx 13y ago
  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.
notdrunkatall 13y ago
It baffles me that some people still support socialism.
- walshemj 13y ago
  NK isn't Socialism
  - afsina 13y ago
    What ever the system they have, it has a lot in common with Socialism. It sure is not free market capitalism.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      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.
      - afsina 13y ago
        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.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      What does the NK system have in common with, say, Germany's?
- te_chris 13y ago
  I'm baffled by the nuanced analysis of the pitfalls of socialism you've presented.
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
willscott 13y ago
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.
- __pThrow 13y ago
  How did you get to NK, and ... why?
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    Whilst I can't speak for the OP, I got there on an aeroplane and left on a train. The means of getting there are pretty standard :)
- lunaru 13y ago
  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?
  - willscott 13y ago
    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.
- mathattack 13y ago

134 points by CrazedGeek 13y ago

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.

skyraider 13y ago
Sense of duty, or the realization that you are powerless to resist the iron grip of the state? Maybe both..
allochthon 13y ago
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.

anotherfadjs 13y ago

At least they have jobs.

EliRivers 13y ago
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.
- kijin 13y ago
  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.
  - anotherfadjs 13y ago
    Maybe just maybe because of all the embargoes by the rest of the world?
    - meepmorp 13y ago
      Maybe it's because of specific decisions on the part of the government to provide resources to the military before anyone else in society.
    - jotm 13y ago
      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.
    - SiVal 13y ago
      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.
crusso 13y ago
You could say the same thing about African slaves in the Antebellum US.

acheron 13y ago

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?".

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago

NK's problem isn't so much socialism as it is a horrendously managed totalitarian state and poverty.

skyraider 13y ago
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.
- asimeqi 13y ago
  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.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    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.

stevetursi 13y ago

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.

justaman 13y ago
Welcome.

PeterisP 13y ago

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.

crdoconnor 13y ago

>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.

deliminator 13y ago
> 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.
jonknee 13y ago
Why do you assume the government tour guide of North Korea would be honest? I'm sure it was a fascinating tour, but not one rooted in accuracy.
- crdoconnor 13y ago
  Equally, people who run away from North Korea might also be tempted to bend the truth, most especially when they're being paid to write about it. A lot of what they said was clearly lies. This rang true though.
  - mildtrepidation 13y ago
    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.

mrtksn 13y ago

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.

atmosx 13y ago
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.

notdrunkatall 13y ago

It baffles me that some people still support socialism.

walshemj 13y ago
NK isn't Socialism
- afsina 13y ago
  What ever the system they have, it has a lot in common with Socialism. It sure is not free market capitalism.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    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.
    - afsina 13y ago
      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.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    What does the NK system have in common with, say, Germany's?
te_chris 13y ago
I'm baffled by the nuanced analysis of the pitfalls of socialism you've presented.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago

willscott 13y ago

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.

__pThrow 13y ago
How did you get to NK, and ... why?
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Whilst I can't speak for the OP, I got there on an aeroplane and left on a train. The means of getting there are pretty standard :)
lunaru 13y ago
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?
- willscott 13y ago
  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.
mathattack 13y ago