How Kim Jong Un "Accidentally" Fixed North Korea's Economy

Never let a good crisis go to waste. And from the outside, that seems to be exactly the advice North Korea is running with. From the outside looking in, it now seems like the Hermit Kingdom is home to one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Satellite data, which we can use to track overall

output, shows that the country is now about three times brighter than it was three years ago. Pyongyang built more new homes last year than Chicago or Los Angeles, for what that's worth. And for the first time in its history, there seems to be a very real push towards modernization and potentially even

liberalization. On the ground, reports have noted a huge uptick in smartphone usage, food delivery apps, luxury residential precincts that share their name [music] with intercontinental ballistic missiles, domestic smart TVs with inbuilt advertising, and so many new luxury cars lining the streets of

the capital that the country is starting to experience a problem it has never had before, traffic [music] jams. It really puts the dystopia in Mark Fisher's boring dystopia theory. But what's really going on here? North Korea has in the past been one of the most dysfunctional and impoverished countries

on the planet, relying effectively on foreign aid and black market trade to keep few lights on. So, this recent boom has really only been enabled by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Alongside China as something of a plausible deniability intermediary, the two heavily sanctioned states have formed something of a

mutually beneficial arrangement. [music] North Korea provides munitions and fighting men to Russia, Russia provides natural resources to China, and China provides essential components of economic development to North Korea. If it wasn't for the war of aggression and the authoritarian governments it was

enabling, it would almost be an ideal case study of mutually beneficial [music] economic cooperation. If the reports are true, this has the potential to massively increase living standards for some of the most oppressed and impoverished people on the planet. And that is worth exploring separate from

everything else. But it's also worth finding out how stable this little arrangement really is, and what could happen if it all falls apart. So, how are we actually measuring the supposed economic miracle? Does it actually have the potential to benefit the people of North Korea long term? And finally, what

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