The Korean War began in June 1950 when North Korean forces invaded South Korea, shattering the uneasy peace between the two territories created after Japan’s surrender in 1945. The invasion and retreat divided families as well as a country: Hwang Pyŏng-Wŏn remained in the South, while his brother was taken north. Their separation lasted fifty years, and the war’s aftermath became the starting point for two sharply divergent institutional and economic paths.

Division and the outbreak of war

As the Second World War drew to a close, Japanese colonial rule in Korea collapsed. Within a month of Japan’s unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945, the peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel into two spheres of influence: the United States administered the South, while Russia administered the North. The division preceded the war, but the resulting political separation became the setting for the conflict and for the different systems that followed it.

In June 1950, the North Korean army invaded the South and initially advanced far enough to capture Seoul. By autumn, however, North Korean forces were in retreat. The change in military fortunes was also a moment of personal rupture for the Hwang brothers: Hwang Pyŏng-Wŏn hid and avoided conscription into the North Korean army, stayed in the South, and worked as a pharmacist. His brother, a doctor treating wounded South Korean soldiers in Seoul, was taken north as the army withdrew.

A separation that lasted fifty years

The brothers did not meet again until 2000, when the two governments agreed to a limited family-reunification program. Their reunion in Seoul made the political division tangible in everyday details. Hwang Pyŏng-Wŏn’s brother had become a doctor in the North Korean air force, a comparatively good position within the military dictatorship, yet his circumstances remained markedly poorer than his brother had expected.

The exchange between them revealed the constraints reaching into ordinary life. Hwang Pyŏng-Wŏn’s brother had no personal telephone; his daughter, who worked at the Foreign Ministry, had one, but calls could not be made without a code. He declined money because he feared the government would demand it if he returned with it. Even the coat he wore to the reunion had been borrowed from the government, so he could not take his brother’s coat back with him. Although he said he lived well, Hwang Pyŏng-Wŏn thought he looked thin and unwell, and recalled that he seemed nervous at their parting, as if someone might be listening.

Two institutional paths

The book places this family reunion against the vast difference in living standards that had emerged by the end of the twentieth century. South Koreans had living standards comparable to those of Portugal and Spain; North Korean living standards were closer to those of a sub-Saharan African country, at about one-tenth the South Korean average. The account also contrasts life expectancy: the average North Korean could expect to live ten years less than a South Korean. Satellite images offered a visual counterpart to these measures: the North appeared almost entirely dark at night because of the lack of electricity, while the South was brightly illuminated.

These differences were not ancient and, the book emphasizes, did not exist before the end of the Second World War. After 1945, the two governments organized their economies in radically different ways. South Korea’s early institutions were shaped by Syngman Rhee, an anticommunist leader educated at Harvard and Princeton who became president in 1948 with significant United States support. The country was not a democracy under Rhee or his successor, Park Chung-Hee. Yet both governed a market economy that recognized private property; after 1961, Park used state power to channel credit and subsidies to successful firms.

North Korea followed a different course under Kim Il-Sung, a former anti-Japanese communist partisan who established himself as dictator by 1947 with Soviet support. He introduced a rigid centrally planned economy under the Juche system, outlawed private property, and banned markets. Restrictions extended beyond economic activity into other areas of life, with exceptions for the small ruling elite around Kim Il-Sung and, later, his son and successor Kim Jong-Il. The account connects this institutional arrangement to continued economic stagnation.

War’s longer significance

In the South, investment-supporting economic institutions were accompanied by public investment in education, which produced high rates of literacy and schooling. Companies drew on that educated population and on policies favoring investment, industrialization, exports, and technology transfer. South Korea consequently became one of East Asia’s rapidly growing “Miracle Economies.” By the late 1990s, roughly half a century after the division, growth in the South and stagnation in the North had produced a tenfold gap between them; the North Korean economic disaster had also led to the starvation of millions.

The war is thus significant in the book not only as the military conflict that separated the brothers, but as a turning point in the history of a once-united country. The sharply contrasting outcomes are presented as evidence against explanations based on geography, culture, or leaders’ ignorance. The decisive contrast lies in the institutions built on either side of the 38th parallel, and in the incentives and opportunities those systems created—or denied—to their populations.