Ukraine hasn’t been invaded and overrun by its neighbors?
This is something you think is happening or will happen?
The difference is that the hypothesized country need not be communist.
If the country was communist, what would happen is productivity would cease growing and everything would get more expensive. Standards of living would drop because everything imported or manufactured would get more expensive. There should not be mass starvation just a huge increase in poverty. After a while most of the young people would want to emigrate.
This sound more South American than North Korean.
Let’s get back to the notion that increased productivity is bad, because it reduces the demand for labor.
Does anyone actually believe this? In their own life? Does anyone throw out their washing machine, because it increases their productivity in washing clothes, and that’s bad because it means there’s less work for them to do around the house? Do they smash the pipes that bring fresh water to their home, because that way they’ll always have work carrying jugs of water on their head?
This is crazy talk.
What exactly is the point of all this work?
But it has to be an authoritarian government, otherwise how do you keep people from buying cheap foreign goods on the open market? And you have to have draconian enforcement to keep the black market in foreign goods under control.
Of course the major problem is that the serfs in this country will be so unproductive economically that they won’t have the money to buy many foreign goods, no matter how cheap they are. If you’re a dirt farmer scratching a living out of the ground with a sharp stick, the few surplus yams you manage to put aside for trade every year aren’t going to buy you many iPhones.
Oh God, yes. I’d say most people do, since they don’t really put much thought into it.
No.
In theory, people believe in nonsense like “the machines will make everyone unemployed” or “the Chinese will make us all unemployed because trade is bad.” In real life, though, nobody behaves as if it’s true because of course it’s not.
Does that means people believe two different things? You bet it does. People are not as rational as they believe themselves to be.
[QUOTE=Nava]
Or, if you prefer the much-older Greek, autarchy.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry to nitpick, but the word you’re looking for is “autarky,” which is pronounced the same but is a totally different word. “Autarchy” is a very, very different concept from what this thread is discussing.
First, the country in question would need strict draconian measures as noted above. Isolating yourself from the rest of the world would likely require literal walls around the entire country to keep black market goods from coming in. Second, you would also need the walls (and guys with guns guarding them) to keep you’re fellow countrymen from leaving. The more educated members of the population are not going to want to stay just to have full employment at a (likely quite a bit) lower standard of living. As others have noted above, the closest real world example is North Korea, and we all know how that’s turned out.
Bhutan. Very close to what you describe. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/bt.html
Why do you assume as a condition of your question, that the fictional country must maintain a Western lifestyle? Most of the 7 billion people on the planet don’t have that now. Roughly 1 person in 7 lives in the West.
There are some quite pleasant countries with simple needs for each household. Third world to you and I but not dangerous and with decent people.