Liberty in North Korea, quick cost-effectiveness estimate

This is fantastic!

I wish we had a lot more posts that worked through charities' cost-effectiveness claims in this way — even charities that are very unlikely to be competitive with standard "top choices", and even if the estimates include a high degree of uncertainty (as long as this is communicated).

As a community, it seems good for EA to routinely "keep in touch" with a wide range of areas, for a few reasons:

1. We're less likely to miss a genuinely strong opportunity from outside our usual focus areas.
2. We're able to provide useful information to people interested in specific areas (even a highly uncertain analysis > having nothing but the charity's claims to work from).
3. We get lots of practice in building, reading, and discussing models of the world, and are constantly exposed to many different methods of evaluation.

Saram is an organization in the area that I trust. You can for example get in touch with Nicolai Sprekels (nicolai.sprekels@saram-nk.org), who is an expert in the area.

I’m much less up-to-date here, and I don’t know this particular organization (afaik, there are several that help escapees), but the ones I looked into back in the day weren’t able to help people escape from NK but instead helped them flee from China to South Korea. The northern border is the one that most escapees manage/d to cross, but China tries to catch them and returns them to NK if they can’t escape from China before that happens.

If escapees leave families behind, the families often claim that the person has died. So they don’t suffer consequences at first, but if the person is then returned from China, it becomes clear that they lied, and the escapee and three generations of the family are sent to concentration camps or killed. So helping them to escape from China saves the whole family from that fate, which increases the cost-effectiveness estimate.

So if this is still true and true of this organization (Nicolai may know more), this flips the sign of points 2 and (separately) changes some other points subtly, because the organization doesn’t affect who or how many people escape in the first place.

Point 4 is probably a very small effect because of how few people escape compared to the general population, and how little power they have to organize or even move around in the country. The people who escape are probably mostly from the north because few people who are not from the north can travel there. Conversely, to influence something in the country politically, you’d probably have to be in the top caste and in Pyongyang.

Point 5 is potentially important. They may execute people in particularly public, gruesome ways in response to rescue attempts to deter foreign organizations.

very speculative

Say you're hit by a car tomorrow and die. An angel comes down, and they don't quite offer you a second chance at life, they just offer you a day of life, with none of your current memories, as an average middle class person in South Korea.

Do you accept? I probably would, I expect the median South Korean to have a net-positive existence.

But here's the catch: you also have to spend a day as an average political dissident in North Korea. Would you take that trade? I definitely would not. I think the disutility of the second scenario far outweighs the utility of the first.

So what would the ratio have to be? I.e How many good days in SK would you have to get in return to accept a single day living in NK? It's hard to say without a better sense of the conditions in each play, but I would genuinely guess something like 10:1. In other words, putting very rough guesses on the utility of each scenario:

• Middle class in South Korea: 10
• Muzak and potatoes: 0
• Political dissident in North Korea: -100

In this view, you're not just "saving a life", you're preventing a huge amount of suffering.

I'm not sure how exactly this compares to GiveWell's evaluations, or what degree of disutility they expect to prevent with interventions. Dying is bad, getting malaria and then dying is probably really horrible.

I'm not advocating running out and donating to LiNK for all the reasons mentioned by OP, but this is the chain of reasoning I would pursue more rigorously if I wanted to seriously evaluate their efficacy.

LINK argues that people who escape often send back money and information that can improve the life of their family and destabilise the regime

$13K per escapee is actually pretty impressive for a charity in the developed world. (If we could rescue all 25 million North Koreans for that low price, it would cost only 20% of one year of South Korea's GDP! But of course we could not really do this... IRL there would be sharply diminishing marginal returns to attempting the rescue of many more people.)

I would expect that the biggest charitable gains related to North Korea would probably be found among "hits-based giving" strategies devoted to various tail-risk scenarios that could play out:

• Working for the peaceful reunification of the peninsula under a benevolent, liberal government.
• Preparing for the inevitable influx of refugees and economic shock (a la German unification) that would impact South Korea and China in the aftermath of anything from a best-case reunification to a total collapse of the North Korean government.
• Trying to support resistance or reform efforts within North Korea.
• Trying to lobby the North Korea policy of relevant powers: SK, USA, China, Russia, Japan, etc.
• Preparing to mitigate the humanitarian catastrophe that would ensue if a hot war ever occurred (perhaps advocating that the South Korean government construct more civilian bomb shelters, stockpile more food and medical supplies, etc).

Lots of organizations in South Korea (including the government/military) probably already do work in many of these areas. But there are probably some scenarios that are relatively neglected, considering their probability & impact.

On the other hand, like the Israel/Palestine situation, North Korea is a famously intractable diplomatic puzzle, without any obvious no-brainer solutions. The actors with the most power to dictate the situation (North Korea itself, followed perhaps by China) are pretty opaque in their inner workings, and probably beyond the power of EA to easily influence. That leaves all the more-tractable options in a stance where they are basically watching, waiting, and hoping that they will be well-positioned to help when whatever happens, finally happens.

I looked into LINK earlier this year and had the vague impression that they are not funding constrained since newer security rules during COVID have added too many barriers to attempting rescue.

Note that LINK is on every.org, so for a short time you can get a donation up to $100 matched (and double your cost-effectiveness estimate).

I’m so excited this is being investigated as an intervention. I had lived in South Korea for quite some time and did a lot of research on the welfare of North Korean refugees. The majority of refugees were women, and most women found they could make the most money as prostitutes. Other options were usually abysmally low paying staff in a restaurant. Discrimination against North Koreans in the south is a problem. They’re living a “safer” “more stable” life than in North Korea, with no firing squad or hard labor prisons for dissidents, but with prostitution as the most appealing option to survive is less than ideal to say the least. more assistance to find gainful employment and public education is necessary. There is progress but there are many bumps in the road still. The famous woman now living in Chicago, Yeonmi Park, is very very lucky and a rare success story.

The argument that allowing the most creative to leave is bad is often used in anti immigration arguments. I think it's clearly wrong there. Those leaving send a strong signal to the regime, they send back money and they improve their own lives. I think the same is true here. I think it sends either no signal or a positive one that people can and want to leave and it's good for those people.

I've updated the considerations since I misunderstood what they did. Denis Descher pointed out that they probably rescue North Koreans who have already escaped into China, and their website confirms this.

This is a great write-up, succinct but with all the relevant info. Thanks!

Less cost-effective: Those who flea North Korea are likely rebellious, anti-authoritarian, and brave. By accommodating these people in fleeing, are we reducing the chance of internal pressure in North Korea that could topple the regime and result in these benefits happening for the whole population?  

If we include descendants as 'more cost-effective', then we should include them in the 'less cost-effective' column when calculating the possibility that someone who leaves, had they remained, could have had an impact on earlier freedom in North Korea.

Reading more about Liberty in North Korea, here are some questions that I have which may be helpful for assessing the impact of a donation to LiNK:

• Does Liberty in North Korea have room for more funding for more trips? If so, to what extent does marginal funding allow more people to travel to Southeast Asia with the help of LiNK?
• Without Liberty in North Korea, what is the chance that a North Korean refugee would still be connected with someone to help them travel to Southeast Asia? If the trip costs something (as opposed to how LiNK rescues are free), how does this affect the quality of life for the refugee? Should we think of LiNK is helping people travel to Southeast Asia earlier or for free, rather than at all?
• What is the chance of getting caught during the journey and getting sent to prison camp in North Korea? How long will they stay there? How many of their family members will be punished if they get caught?
• By staying in China for an additional duration of time, what is the chance of getting caught and returned to North Korea?
• What is the quality of life for a North Korean when in North Korea, inside a prison camp in North Korea, in China, in Southeast Asia, or in South Korea?
• To what extent does offering free travel from China to Southeast Asia encourage additional people to try escaping from North Korea? What is the welfare impact for someone who attempts to escape North Korea?

I don't at all understand point #7. Are you saying that people who unsuccessfully try to escape NK get sterilised?

The net effect is: there are fewer North Koreans within the country, but more North Korean diaspora? It seems very likely to me that having escaped North Koreans would do much more to damage the regime than having the average rebelliousness of the population go slightly down, since advocacy is driven by escapees (e.g. Yeonmi Park). 

What is the relevance of population ethics? That slightly more future people will exist under this intervention?