Fun fact: until 1960s, North Korea had a higher GDP per capita than South Korea. Somehow I can't find any definite source on the web, but here's one phrase I found:
> By the beginning of the 1960s, North Korea's economic development was much more impressive than was South Korea's and would remain so until at least the mid-1970s. (...) As these data make abundantly clear, without foreign aid, the DPRK could not have achieved its ambitious post-war reconstruction.
Another fun fact: even with all the help from the US (for which I'm grateful), South Korea went though an unbelievable amount of death and suffering all the same, and our first president was a first-class mass murderer who would have been quite at home in the company of his Northern counterparts. So, yeah, somehow we ended up all right (after decades of tyrants and struggles), but the history is a lot more complicated than good guys saving half of the population from bad guys.
Another fun fact is that a lot of the modernization and economic expansion experienced by Korea up to the end of WWii came about from the at times brutal colonization of the Korean peninsula by Japan which transformed an agrarian subsistence society into a more urban and the second most developed country in Asia after imperial Japan itself.
https://books.google.com/books?id=D1dOCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA191&dq=d...
> By the beginning of the 1960s, North Korea's economic development was much more impressive than was South Korea's and would remain so until at least the mid-1970s. (...) As these data make abundantly clear, without foreign aid, the DPRK could not have achieved its ambitious post-war reconstruction.
Another fun fact: even with all the help from the US (for which I'm grateful), South Korea went though an unbelievable amount of death and suffering all the same, and our first president was a first-class mass murderer who would have been quite at home in the company of his Northern counterparts. So, yeah, somehow we ended up all right (after decades of tyrants and struggles), but the history is a lot more complicated than good guys saving half of the population from bad guys.