hen one thinks of Friedrich Hayek, North Korea is not usually what comes to mind. But maybe it should.

In the mid-1990s, it was easy to assume North Korea's destiny was to go the way of the Communist bloc: either they would collapse, like the Soviet Union and East Germany, or they would follow the example of the People's Republic of China (and later, Vietnam)—a one-party state that carried out market reforms while seeking foreign direct investment and outside technology.

After all, North Korea was even less developed than other communist states, like the Soviet Union, and certainly less than East Germany, whose people abandoned a socialist model when they got a closer look at their West German counterparts.