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Beyond that, what are their plans for the future? How does its government function and what is the general opinion that the DPRK's people have of their country?
Most importantly, where can I read about this sort of thing myself?
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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GenZedong
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Well of course, you're not going to be spending your entire salary on eating out. Consumer goods and other things are going to be pretty expensive, as well as everything else that's non-essential. For example, a packet of cookies at Daesong Department Store is 750KPW, which adjusted for purchasing power and salary would be equivalent to like 40 dollars for an American middle-class family. Stuff like smartphones which have foreign parts are extremely expensive due to the fact that the KPW doesn't convert to foreign currency very well.
But I guess due to the lack of landlords leeching unnecessary value off of tenants in the DPRK, people would have a decent amount of spending cash compared to a minimum wage worker in the US.
Also, the 80k figure I gave is based on the most reliable source I could find, which is based on a South Korean study interviewing 1,000 DPRK defectors. However, this study only goes up to 2011 and I don't know how the currency has changed after that. Wage information on the DPRK is so hard to get because of all the conflicting sources, I see sources going from 5,000 KPW (Generic US Media) to 30,000 KPW (NK News) to 80,000 KPW (The South Korean study).
About pricing, you can learn more about the pricing of some goods by watching the SAO Documentary series or checking out DPRK 360 at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.214181025372400.1073741832.211159445674558, where they eat food in Pyongyang and you can see some pricing labels.
I’m going to guess this is what’s happening. The United States is such an evil country that they basically bribe their populace to not care about the war crimes they commit, but the US capitalists and landlords still can’t resist exploiting its citizens for profit, leading to even the most oppressed and imperialized socialist country having better quality of life, by virtue of them just actually caring about their own population.
I can’t say that’s it’s actually that much better than your average USian, especially because expensive tech goods are super easy to get here in the US compared to most countries, I imagine, but I do think that based on what you described, “saving up” for expensive consumer goods like that is legitimately reasonable in North Korea, as opposed to the United States, where your entire earning is dumped into your landlord’s pockets every month. Of course, actually saving up could still be impossible despite that, given issues like “the amount of money a phone could cost due to sanctions and the cost of international trade is more than a regular person could make in an entire lifetime”, but the fact they’ve put something together like this at all just shows the power of socialism when faced with adversity.
Just a quick tidbit, but although pricing on phones is hard to come buy since foreigners can't buy them, the Samjiyon tablet (a mid-high range tablet by DPRK standards) costs about 30,000KPW. Pretty expensive, but with some saving up it's a reasonable price for most Koreans.