A standard legal income in North Korea is from $12 to $36 per year.
That seems like it can’t possibly be true. Where is this statistic actually coming from? I can find a bunch of other unclearly-sourced estimates like $50/month, which is more more reasonable.
(Looking for actual papers I find this, which cites an estimate of $1700 purchasing-power-parity-GDP/year/capita. The paper itself estimates per-county wealth via radiance as seen from satellites, and gets “around $790 per capita and 60% poverty rate”. It’s pretty unclear how this can be price-adjusted but it’s not “100 eggs per year” low, at least.)
I have no idea how statistically solid the article’s estimate is. It goes into enough detail that I assumed it was reliable, which might have been a bad assumption, and I looked at some other sources more or less at random and they all roughly corroborated what it said. I do think that the published figures for what a normal “official” salary range in North Korea, and roughly what the black-market exchange rate of dollars to won and rough goods prices, are visible enough numbers that it’s not crazy to think that someone from the outside could know what they are.
Actual income levels from illegal free-market activity there is no way to know, so I didn’t try to estimate, and none of the sources I looked at made any attempt to claim they knew what the value was, which I counted as a point in their favor.
I’m not convinced by the paper. I don’t think GDP is too useful a metric for estimating poverty in a personal-impact sense, and even that aside, I’m not real convinced that measuring the literal brightness of a country from space is a good way to get anything more than somewhere in the same mega-ballpark distance of the answer. Especially when you’re dealing with an exceptional outlier and then applying a calculation you arrived at from measuring non-outliers to it.
That seems like it can’t possibly be true. Where is this statistic actually coming from? I can find a bunch of other unclearly-sourced estimates like $50/month, which is more more reasonable.
(Looking for actual papers I find this, which cites an estimate of $1700 purchasing-power-parity-GDP/year/capita. The paper itself estimates per-county wealth via radiance as seen from satellites, and gets “around $790 per capita and 60% poverty rate”. It’s pretty unclear how this can be price-adjusted but it’s not “100 eggs per year” low, at least.)
I have no idea how statistically solid the article’s estimate is. It goes into enough detail that I assumed it was reliable, which might have been a bad assumption, and I looked at some other sources more or less at random and they all roughly corroborated what it said. I do think that the published figures for what a normal “official” salary range in North Korea, and roughly what the black-market exchange rate of dollars to won and rough goods prices, are visible enough numbers that it’s not crazy to think that someone from the outside could know what they are.
Actual income levels from illegal free-market activity there is no way to know, so I didn’t try to estimate, and none of the sources I looked at made any attempt to claim they knew what the value was, which I counted as a point in their favor.
I’m not convinced by the paper. I don’t think GDP is too useful a metric for estimating poverty in a personal-impact sense, and even that aside, I’m not real convinced that measuring the literal brightness of a country from space is a good way to get anything more than somewhere in the same mega-ballpark distance of the answer. Especially when you’re dealing with an exceptional outlier and then applying a calculation you arrived at from measuring non-outliers to it.