It doesn’t take a genius to realize that North Korea has undergone rapid marketization. And the market for goods isn’t the only change: as labor is increasingly bought and sold, its price is determined by the supply and demand equilibrium.

The North Korea of 1958-1961 liked to describe itself as the ‘country of exemplary socialism.’ They were of course referring to the Leninist-Stalinist model of state socialism, which in North Korea was taken to its logical extreme.

Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was a place where the state bureaucracy enjoyed absolute control over everything from steel production to the sex