I'm not really very well-informed on this, but I've formed an opinion anyway. North Korea remains more-or-less stable for two reasons: 1) the state leverages traditional Korean communitarianism to get buy-in from groups that would otherwise resist (mostly the "bureaucratic class" and/or the low and mid-ranking military); 2) the economy is much more pre-industrial (i.e. feudal) than people have been thinking – many (if not an outright majority of) North Koreans are existing in an essentially pre-industrial society based on subsistance agriculture.
I have formed these opinions partly just through reflection – I read articles about NK often, but I can't really point to specific articles that caused me to develop the above view. If I run across something specific in the future, I'll try to remember to add them to this post or some future related one.
The below graph (from Brad Plumer at Wapo's Wonkblog) is an interesting summary (and never forget that before about 1960, North Korea was more industrialized than the South – a legacy of Japan's colonial industrialization policies for the peninsula and the fact that the North had at least some coal).
[broken link! FIXME]
Mientras tanto… what I'm listening to right now.
Dënver, "Olas gigantes." This is a Chilean music group. I think the diaeresis (or "umlaut") on the "e" is just a playful bit of typography, as opposed to symbolizing anything, although there are some native languages of Chile that use the double-dotted diacritic on certain vowels to indicate laxness or centralization in their orthographical systems, and the word "dënver" has a certain Mapudunguny look to it (I studied the native language Mapudungun at Univ. Austral de Chile in 1994) – but Mapudungun itself doesn't use "ë". I don't know if the group's name has something to do with the American city of Denver, either.
Letra
Dijiste vamos a nadar,
nunca he visto olas tan gigantes,
dijiste qué nos va a pasar.
Y que todo va en bracear,
y hacías con los brazos
de manera circular.
Entonces nos lanzamos a nadar
y las olas explotaban
como si nos odiaran,
y nos golpeaban sin piedad,
y yo braceaba y braceaba,
no servía de nada, daba igual.
Es que yo en ti confiaba más,
yo sólo seguía sin más
tu físico espectacular.
Así que simplemente me dejé llevar
y ahí vi como pasabas,
toda doblada tu espalda
y no vi más.