My co-worker believes the DPRK is a uniquely evil and incompetent state that is in a constant state of famine. They are the most failed and corrupt state.
I told him that DPRK has been incredibly fucked over historically and has been punished on every front for the crime of existing.
Does anyone have any good info I can arm myself with? Or help at articulating something that might get through. He's very much a 'facts and logic' type of lib.
:kim-salute:
I'm just gonna copy and paste a :reddit-logo: comment I made (that got downvoted to shit on a nominally "socialist" sub lol)
A lot to unpack there but let's just go for this
Would love you to expand on this. Compare them to other similarly developed countries:
In malnutrition rate they have a rate of 1.65 compared to an average of 14.55 for other low income countries. They're actually right with upper middle income countries when it comes to that.
Their infant death rate is 11.6 which ranks among more wealthy caribbean and central american countries, well ahead of countries with similar GDP per capita.
Life expectancy is 72.89 years, not amazing but hanging around some of the higher african and caribbean countries.
The idea of North Korea as if it is in some sort of constant state of famine comes almost entirely from the "Arduous March" in the mid 1990s. There was a large famine where 500 to 600k died which was caused by a confluence of loss of aid from the USSR, floods destroying crops, and admittedly mismanagement on the part of the DPRK. Since then they have experienced periods of food shortages, but there is nothing that points to the idea that they have prolonged malnutrition like some other countries.