I hate living in a Third World country (The USA)
ah yes because third world countries are inherently bad and horrible to live in & it’s an awesome gotcha to compare the US, the richest nation in the history of the world and unambiguous leader of the First World, to one
The idea that the US is the richest country in the world, is primarily based on the sheer size of its economy and total household wealth. However, when using other metrics like per capita income or GDP adjusted for cost of living via each individual state which is its own country in its own right, smaller nations often rank higher than the United States. Also, the political and economical plight in the US doesn’t diminish the suffering in other countries, just like their suffering doesn’t diminish ours. To be a human is to suffer and find joy in everything.
no that’s totally true- the US does have a lower standard of living than a lot of places & is really dealing with a lot of rising fascism rn and for a while that’s led to a ton of suffering. I’m largely objecting to the rhetorical use of Third World as “worse” (which OP very likely apologized for/clarified! thanks!) since First/Second/Third World is not an economic grouping nor does it have anything to do with standard of living. It came out of the post decolonisation / Cold War context wherein the “First” and Western world were aligned and the Third Worldist countries were neutral between the Soviet Union and the US. Plus the third world generally had fairly radical leanings, which is part of the reason the West transitioned to the developed/developing/underdeveloped language after funding and facilitating a number of assassinations of more radical leaders- a joint effort to splinter the formation of a Third Worldist, progressive bloc. So it really rubs me the wrong way both when third world is meant to imply poor/bad AND when the US or other Western / First World countries are called Third World as they simply never can be, ideologically & historically
I really appreciate the context you’ve given, especially about the Cold War alignment and how the terminology wasn’t originally economic at all.
I’d love to hear more, though, about the bit you mentioned regarding post Cold War shifts and how that fed into rhetoric around First, Second and Third World language. Do you see that as a deliberate reframing to preserve hierarchy in a subtler way? Or more of an ideological drift that kept the same power structures intact? Do you feel it continues to racialise poverty and political instability in a way that benefits Western narratives?
I’m genuinely interested, because there’s clearly a deeper historical thread here and I want to understand it properly so if you have any books or articles on it I’d be interested in the links!
hahaaaa yeah I have a lot of thoughts because it’s my field of study and also because I’m from a third world country but presently live in the US and watch a lot of my liberal friends do this sort of “the US is third world” to try and dismantle American exceptionalism and I’m like nooooo
but yeah I do think it’s partly to racialise poverty but the other big piece is that colonialism via settling/gunboats became unwieldy, unpopular and expensive to maintain but did not become unprofitable and so there was a big shift during the Cold War to find a new way of maintaining similar power structures which gave rise to the Bretton Woods agreement and the Washington Consensus with the WTO + IMF + World Bank that developed this sort of development model for the world. Then it wasn’t a question of political leanings and progressive internationalism but a purely scientific question of economics to “develop”
I’d recommend reading The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad and and this article my friend wrote- https://proteanmag.com/2025/04/18/bandungs-ghosts/
