Jessie grew up in North Korea. One day when she was like eight her family needed matches, so she picked a bunch of wild raspberries and sold them at market for the rough equivalent of a nickle. People didn’t buy them so much because they were good raspberries for the price but because she was eight. (I guess similar to lemonade stands.) With the leftover money she got a peach for her mum. Seeing her mum’s happiness at the peach she decided to make a lot of money to keep making her mum happy. So she kept that kind of thing up. One time she walked six hours each way to buy purer alcohol than people in her village were drinking, then sold it on. She was still small at the time so she could only carry 5kg of it. Also started smuggling between NK and China, I suspect that came a bit later.
NK has a weapons program, which raises the question where did that money come from? It used to be in an economic race with SK, but now SK’s economy is like 50x higher. NK is the only country to have had a peacetime famine in an urban, literate population.
When Kim Jong Un came into power, he said he was going to improve the economy and build weapons. For the economy he started turning a blind eye to capitalists (“dongju”?) like Jessie, who had always been operating illegally. He allowed people in to give business lessons. They weren’t allowed to discuss certain things, but if you talk about trading between a fictional “big island” and “small island”, everyone knows you mean China and NK. Some people were even allowed out of the country to learn business. One person was excited to see an ATM. But then the profits from this sort of thing went into the weapons program, which is awkward.
And because the capitalists were still in a legal grey area, they could have their stuff seized. Jessie’s uncle reported her. She lost everything and was lucky not to go to prison. So she smuggled herself out using her connections from smuggling goods. Now she’s in South Korea, but not really planning to go into business again. Her mum is dead now, and that was a lot of her motivation.
Planet Money: The capitalists of North Korea
Jessie grew up in North Korea. One day when she was like eight her family needed matches, so she picked a bunch of wild raspberries and sold them at market for the rough equivalent of a nickle. People didn’t buy them so much because they were good raspberries for the price but because she was eight. (I guess similar to lemonade stands.) With the leftover money she got a peach for her mum. Seeing her mum’s happiness at the peach she decided to make a lot of money to keep making her mum happy. So she kept that kind of thing up. One time she walked six hours each way to buy purer alcohol than people in her village were drinking, then sold it on. She was still small at the time so she could only carry 5kg of it. Also started smuggling between NK and China, I suspect that came a bit later.
NK has a weapons program, which raises the question where did that money come from? It used to be in an economic race with SK, but now SK’s economy is like 50x higher. NK is the only country to have had a peacetime famine in an urban, literate population.
When Kim Jong Un came into power, he said he was going to improve the economy and build weapons. For the economy he started turning a blind eye to capitalists (“dongju”?) like Jessie, who had always been operating illegally. He allowed people in to give business lessons. They weren’t allowed to discuss certain things, but if you talk about trading between a fictional “big island” and “small island”, everyone knows you mean China and NK. Some people were even allowed out of the country to learn business. One person was excited to see an ATM. But then the profits from this sort of thing went into the weapons program, which is awkward.
And because the capitalists were still in a legal grey area, they could have their stuff seized. Jessie’s uncle reported her. She lost everything and was lucky not to go to prison. So she smuggled herself out using her connections from smuggling goods. Now she’s in South Korea, but not really planning to go into business again. Her mum is dead now, and that was a lot of her motivation.