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North Korea tried autarky. And you might expect them to pull it off. They're homogenous. They have no short-sighted capitalists. And they have an industrial policy. Yet they still depend on China in practice. Why didn't it work? https://t.co/WQKzoPiYZR This is partly tongue-in-cheek, but partly a real question. After all, North Koreans are not dumb. Next door China became strong under a nominally communist system. And South Korea's success, and the success of the Korean diaspora, shows that North Korea coulda been a contender. But they're not. Why? (1) The obvious answer is because they're unreconstructed Stalinists, and of course I'd agree! But an intrinsic part of that Stalinism is not just an end to capitalism domestically, but an end to free trade with other countries. (2) OK, so could you do an internally capitalist autarky, which blocked all foreign trade with outsiders, yet practiced capitalism internally? I dunno. It's not obvious such a political entity can compensate for skills and materials located elsewhere on the globe in today's economy. (3) Maybe only China has the 1B+ scale to maybe pull off "internally capitalist autarky" in the modern global economy. And even they have an enormous demand for natural resources that's led them to sign deals with dozens of countries from Africa to Latin America. (4) Also, if you exert enough state control over an internally capitalist system by setting prices and imposing tariffs and doing "industrial policy", it becomes increasingly less capitalist. (5) And note that North Korea's juche policy sounds very similar to the rising economic nationalism. Namely: that North Koreans should only depend on goods made by North Koreans. And that even their next door neighbors were a potential threat. (6) In general, my view is that if you try to plunge a complex economy set up as the global hub of a financial empire into overnight autarky, the results won't be good. It's similar to taking a banker who's ordered takeout for the last 50 years, blocking all roads to his house, and telling him to farm or die. You may not get the farm part.