Tips to grow your North Korean Startup

This is the sad truth of places like Cuba or North Korea. Everything is forbidden to the point that eating is difficult. So people get corrupted and the guards, etc. just want their part.

None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.

I don't know about DPRK but I have been to Cuba for a 2 weeks vacation, so I had time to go out of the default tourists spots.

What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out.

The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially, you have right to rent a room and you have right to ride a taxi but there are strict limits on how much you can do it. So what more entrepreneurial people do? Simply distribute the business ownership to their friends and relatives on paper and keep growing and running their enterprises.

Also, there are two different types of shops and businesses: Locals only shops, locals only restaurants, locals only buses that are at very poor quality and I believe they are free or heavily subsidised and there are better quality versions that have prices similar to the European countries(prices way beyond a person with a salary can afford). So who do you think eats at these expensive restaurants? Yes, tourists - but also people who have access to tourists and people who work for the government.

One day a wandered around my casa particular in Havana and ended up in a place with very nice houses quite close to governmental buildings. I took some photos, enjoyed the place and ate at a restaurant. Then I noticed that the restaurant got very busy with military personel and well dressed people. Those were definitely not tourists, those were people from the nearby governmental buildings having a dinner after work.

Very interesting experience overall. Almost completely positive, full of life lessons about so many things including classes in the society where they are not supposed to exists. I'm also convinced that consumerism is not the only way to a happy life and abundance and excess are not necessarily the answer. The first week was hard, the second week I was completely happy to have only 2 options for beer and 1 option for chocolate.

You missed to clarify that tourists use pesos convertibles which are artificially tied 1:1 to USD (1USD, 1 convertible) and that are basically what casas and taxi drivers accept. But you can totally go to local restaurants as a tourist (we did it a few times during our 3 weeks stay). And yeah, it can be sad to see how people lives there, and many try to flee but as you said makes you think about the real, deep impact of consumerism.

Serious question, not trying to start a debate. How does abject poverty in an openly communist country make you think about the "deep impact of consumerism?"

Well one thing about going to a poor communist country is you still notice that a lot of people are doing regular people things like sending their children to school or dance lessons, having weddings, playing music, dancing, and drinking alcohol. The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy.

Cuba is not really in abject poverty so much as they have a command-control economy (so some things are subsidized to be much cheaper than in our economic system, and others aren’t) that is pretty corrupt. They are definitely not a rich country on average or at p50, just not in abject poverty. According to some sources I found on Google their nominal/PPP GDP is actually pretty middling, which is likely due to what I mentioned about a lot of high-standard-of-living services being available despite low availability of goods.

The shortages of things are definitely bad. But the lack of variety in consumer goods really isn’t, and is probably what the parent comment was pointing out. There are not a million different things to buy as seen on TV/Instagram, but that in itself doesn’t appear to have a huge impact on life.

> The corollary to random consumer goods being in constant shortages is that other things are much more “affordable” than they’d be in a market economy.

No way for their wealth, to begin with, and why you should choose how people choose? They are animals?

Everything that is cheaper than its possible price is literally being paid by someone, with their labour or by others. Free things, literally, do not exist. And things below real price, do not exist. For that to exist someone along the way has to pay it with time or money or forced by slavery. Please keep in mind this every time someone talks about free. Free means "someone else pays". And someone else pays is as selfish and inconsiderate as if I went to you and I demanded from you an arbitrary effort on the basis that you owe me something for nothing.

Lots of things in the US are subsidized too. We still have taxes that pay for “free” things like using public roads.

I am just describing the structure of the Cuban economy where market forces are less involved in how many of something gets produced for consumption. I don’t think it’s great either because it leads to food shortages. Just pointing out (having been to Cuba myself) they aren’t in abject poverty and in some ways punch above their weight for their economic reality (and what someone might think knowing how often they have goods shortages) due to some activites being prioritized over others.

The market is the will of people. Any alternative thing is going to be more incorrectly adapted to the demand from people.

The market is one-dollar-one-vote. If you start with an equitable distribution of wealth, then sure, it's the will of the people. But if you start with wealth being disproportionally skewed towards a very small class - as is the case in every real-world developed economy today - the result is oligarchy, not democracy.

The problem with mainstream economic right is that it ignores that, or assumes that markets will eventually equalize naturally somehow. The problem with mainstream economic left is that it wants to strangle the market instead of freeing it from oligarchy.