Pre-registration

From a comparable (arguably DPRK-favoured) 1953 armistice starting point — same ethnicity, language, pre-colonial institutional inheritance, and a Japanese colonial industrial capital stock disproportionately located in the North — the Republic of Korea's market economy with state-directed industrial policy and export discipline, versus the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's autarkic central planning under Juche, produced by 2023 a canonical divergence that pattern-matches >=7 of 10 pre-registered extreme-outcome metrics, each drawn from a different publisher or methodology family. The canonical-case claim is that no other peacetime country pair separated for a comparable duration from a comparable starting point has produced a divergence of this magnitude across this many independent outcome channels. A refutation (<=3 metrics met) would indicate either that the consensus DPRK-ROK gap is materially overstated, or that the framework's institutional-quality coding of market-vs-planned autarky is overstated.

Falsification criterion — what would disprove this

test:      multi_metric_canonical_case_pattern_match
threshold: metrics_met_korea_pair >= 7

Method

Template

multi_metric_checklist

Sample

2 countries · 1953 – 2023

Evidence type

canonical_case_multi_metric

For each of the 10 canonical metrics, the evaluator fetches the specified data source(s) and evaluates the threshold expression. Because 10 metrics are selected from 12 candidates documented in the claim, the specific 10 scored here are the ones pre-registered in this file. Support if metrics_met >= 7, refute if metrics_met <= 3, inconclusive in the 4-6 range. Benchmark check: no other contiguous ethnically-identical country pair separated >=60 years from comparable 1953 starting conditions should match >=4 of these thresholds (the FRG/GDR pair is the only credible peer and is the subject of its own canonical-case hypothesis).

Data

● ready  · ● pending  · ● reconstruct-needed

Detailed result card

Strongest opposing argument

Every hypothesis ships with its charitable opposing argument. The framework earns credibility by handling objections at their strongest, not weakest.

Notes

Methodological rationale: a single-estimator causal test on the Korea pair is weak because (a) the comparator DPRK is a single data-censored entity with no donor pool, (b) the treatment bundle (autarkic central planning + sanctions + Juche ideology) is not separable into policy levers with independent counterfactuals, and (c) the cross-country ratio outcome is identifiable from many orthogonal measurement stacks (national accounts, demographics, anthropometry, trade customs, remote-sensing, patent registries), making a pre-registered 10-metric pattern-match epistemically stronger than any single panel/DiD/synthetic-control estimate. The steelman (Chang / Amsden developmental-state critique, sanctions confound, planning-vs-autarky conflation) is NOT addressed by the multi-metric test — it concerns attribution across sub-channels within the bundled treatment. The canonical-case hypothesis only claims that the bundle produced the observed divergence; it does not claim that any single sub-channel (e.g. "markets alone") is necessary or sufficient. Attribution within the bundle is the subject of separate, narrower hypotheses (e.g. developmental-state HCI-drive effect, sanctions-loss counterfactual for DPRK post-1990). Supersession note: this hypothesis supersedes the v1 descriptive specification for framework-validation purposes. The older specification remains in the corpus for provenance but should be downgraded to 'candidate' in future runs.