SEOUL -- No wonder economics is known as the dismal science. While everyone else is celebrating the love-in at Pyongyang between the two Kims, economists here in Seoul have been sitting down with their pencils and calculators. They just called in to say that their estimate of the discounted future benefits of the likely outcome of the faltering steps toward unification are likely to be smaller than the opportunity cost of the South Korean funding that would be required. They have a point.

The United States may have decided to drop the word "rogue" when referring the regime in Pyongyang, and the military in South Korea will no longer refer to it as the "northern puppet regime," but a few glasses of champagne shared before world television viewers (but not starving North Koreans who may wonder were the money for the champagne came from) have not changed economic fundamentals.

North Korea is a bankrupt country with a discredited hardline communist regime that cannot feed, clothe or house its people adequately. Millions of North Koreans are being kept alive by (or more cynically, in order to conveniently dispose of) the agricultural surpluses generated by interventionist U.S. farm policies.