who dies first

Reading Nothing To Envy, Barbara Demick’s account of starvation in and escape from North Korea as told to her by some people who underwent it, gives you a creeping sensation of an experiment at work. Isolate a territory. Seal its borders. Produce or otherwise obtain enough food for 90% of the population to survive. Who dies? 

The general answer given to this is “the lower orders”, but in Demick’s account that only seems to be true up to a point, at least outside the armed forces. Senior managers and well connected functionaries starved in their offices, convinced that Something Would Be Done. Lower status people, perhaps because they were basically eking out their lives anyway, got wise earlier. Status within the system played a part, but selection for survival often seemed to be a matter of brute genetics, basic personality traits, sheer luck and particular habits of behaviour imprinted on individuals by the kind of functions they were required to fulfil. Ideological loyalty likewise seems to have had nothing to do with it. What seemed to count here was early realization that your opinions about the regime and whatever principles you had attendant on those opinions were irrelevant. 

Old people died first. They eat less, but are more susceptible to the kind of diseases that flourish when malnutrition trashes the immune system. Then children die. Arguably the best trajectory for a child was to live in a household where parents sacrificed their own food for their child’s sake. That way the parents would die when the child still had enough energy left to scavenge, something which they would have had a chance to learn on the foraging expeditions that began to take the place of work as the country ground to a halt. 

Then it was men, whose bodies store less fat. Large, muscular and active men died first, since they tended to burn energy quicker. Your best chance of survival as a man seemed to lie in being the kind of dreamy character who forgets to eat because his nose is in a book. It tended to mean that you conserved energy but retained enough independence of mind to judge when the time came to try and shift for yourself. 

Your best chance of all, other things being equal, was to be a woman in, perhaps, late youth or early middle age. Aside from genetic advantages around fat storage and metabolism rate the sheer drudgery of women’s life in North Korea, the constant repetitive round of domestic tasks plus full time low level jobs in offices and factories, seems to have rammed home a kind of metabolic habit of economy selected for by the starvation environment. Strong men curled up and died in enervation and despair but strong women always kept enough back to do whatever had to be done next, which increasingly became focused on pulling together the resources to convert into energy for the next job that had to be done. Women led family foraging expeditions, converted the results into something like food and established unofficial markets in which to sell it. Women also comprise a large majority of the 100,000 or so North Koreans who have succeeded in getting to China (comparatively few make it to South Korea). And so it went on. 

And so it still does. For now there seems to be just enough food around to keep the newly culled population at its present level, though the regime’s attempts to stamp out independent economic activity through crackdowns on markets and currency reform may alter that. What happens if this tips the country back into starvation? Last time everybody starved in a more or less orderly manner. Ms Demick makes no mention of cannibalism, for instance. But according to Mrs Song, one of her interviewees, “the kind, the simple and the good hearted died first.” The bad guys are always the wise bet in any given political situation, but there is a possibility that the Kim dynasty might regret its experiment in genetic engineering.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

When I was working in Russia in the 90s we were affilitaed with an "International Scientific" centre....you've got to have some sort of "krisha" to be able to function there. One member of this institution was from North Korea. His wife, back home, died in the famine.

Being a sufficiently elite that you were the rep to an international institution certainly wasn't enough to protect....which seems to validate what you've got above.

[ajay]

Women also comprise a large majority of the 100,000 or so North Koreans who have succeeded in getting to China

Being cynical, there may be other reasons for that, to do with the economics of the human trafficking business and what work its passengers end up doing.

[jamie]

There's apparently a marriage trade for women going to China, amongst ethnic Koreans and Han, amongst whom Korean women have a good "wifely" type reputation. But I think it would be much easier to suborn women into prostitution within China than to smuggle them out of NK in large quantities for that purpose. As Demick describes it, people still get across in ones and twos and once they hit the PRC side of the Yalu they're usually on their own. China has a massive population and huge wealth inequalities, which tends to mean that demand and supply could largely be balanced internally.

Of course, that doesn't say what happens to women who get to China and find themselves stuck there.

[Matt L]

So the DPRK is an experiment in post-industrial Malthusian economics. With a little social-Darwinism thrown in for good measure.

[jamie]

And more! I don't think the Kims deliberately set out to starve a tenth of their population as such. It was more a kind of utterly depraved indifference to the consequences of not changing the system once Communism collapsed and they could no longer rely on having the whole juche edifice subsidised by the Eastern bloc.