Barbara Demick -- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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It is so sad how much death, sickness, and misery ca be caused by a
government controlled by those acting with bad intentions and
obsessed with wrong=headed ideas.

A comparison between (1) Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Turkey vs. (2)
Kim Il-sun and North Korea is stark.  Both produce dramatic, huge,
and far reaching changes, but ...  One, in Turkey, produced a modern
functioning economy and a democratic government that responds to the
needs of its people.  The other, in North Korea, produced a country
with almost no economy at all and a government that responds to its
people with repression and propaganda, causing them to starve, to
suffer, to remain uneducated, and to miss out on the benefits of
modern technology, economic productivity, and the arts and
entertainment.

The stories in this book are heart-warming and bring a bit of cheer
with their endings, but only because they are about a few
individuals who managed to escape.  Imagine the misery and
desperation of all those left behind.  And, even for those who have
escaped (defected), their stories are no lived-happily-ever-after
ones.  Adjusting to a advanced economy after living in a backward
one is not easy.

It is always possible to claim that a planned economy could produce
acceptable results, even in one run so incompetently and so
selfishly as that in North Korea.  OK, Cuba does not seem to have
produced such great results either.  There is no way to disprove
such a claim, nor any other claim of the form that X would be Y if
only Z.  Still, capitalist systems seem to produce better results
and much higher standards of living, although there are problems with the
distribution of those benefits and the disparity of benefits and
lack of them.  Some capitalist systems do seem to leave behind large
sections of there populations.  And, we do seem to have a fair share
of booms and busts, economic shocks, recessions, etc.

Still, perhaps one of the benefits of reading this book is the
lessons it teaches in the way of thankfulness for the benefits and
living conditions we enjoy in our own society and an appreciation
for just how much worse things could be.  We need to be reminded of
this, especially now, during a severe economic recession.

This book is worth reading, not just because of what you will learn
about a place that we know so little about, but also because of some
of the thoughts it is likely to push you to think about, such as:
(1) There but for the grace of god or chance go I.  (2) How can
single person or a small group of people or a misguided ideology
cause so much suffering, misery, and death, and loss?  (3) How are
other/some advanced societies better and worse, for example: the
U.S. where we've created so much wealth and yet have so many people
without health care coverage, not receiving acceptable educations,
living in poverty, etc. so, is that disparity an inevitable result of
a capitalist economic system.  And, most importantly, what can we do
to help those in our own societies who need help most.

10/23/2010

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