First time seeing this and it feels so offensive. I'm somewhat okay with the term developed and developing countries, though not too much [1]. But this just feels discriminatory.
Don’t bother trying to learn the new shibboleths. By the time the majority has accepted them, they’ll be outdated and the progressives will have moved onto another set. Before ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ we had ‘first world’ and ‘third world’.
First World were countries aligned with the United States, Second World were countries aligned with the Soviet Union, and Third World were countries who were "neutral" or not aligned with either major superpower. Many Third World countries were newly independent, and were economically struggling but also wanted to assert sovereignty. Many were given aid packages to attempt to court them to one side or the other. The terms are outdated because of reality, not because of "progressives".
We didn't, though! At least, not for that purpose. When India's PM Nehru said to the UN, "We are the third world," it was a profound statement that had absolutely nothing to do with economics. "Developing" and "developed" were introduced to the public conscious as a desperate attempt to stop the ignorant masses (including, at one point, me) from ruining a useful descriptor.
Offensive how? "Developing" and "things aren't so bad" are offensive because they obfuscate imperialist relations. That's the position of the theorists who use "Global North"/"South", anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...
I haven't read the link you posted because I want to expand on my initial reaction.
A layman who is not familiar with the reasons behind Global North/South would not think about imperialist relations. I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
Global North/South makes no sense at all, again from a layman's perspective. From the original story:
> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’
When I see Australia in the southern hemisphere being characterised as "North", I think that the creator of this term is discriminating against countries they consider inferior. There is no room for growth here. A country being characterised as "South" will always be as such, because intuitively we know we can't switch geographies.
> I'm somewhat okay with "developing" because the term is easier to understand: some countries are less developed than others. Plus the terms are fluid. If a country becomes developed enough then they switch labels.
"Developing" what, and to what end? The term itself sounds absolute, where in fact it implies a relative order, but doesn't give away what (arbitrary) properties you include in the comparison.
Take Gross National Happiness or the Happy Planet Index, for example. You could very well call countries with a low but slowly rising GNH "developing countries". USA is 122/152 in the HPI, which sounds about right, and probably not "developing" but declining.
The point is that the imperial West defines what is "good" and "bad", and from that point of reference uses terminology that implies an absoluteness; as another example, as if "long life" is a universal goal of humanity, when in fact other cultures prioritize community over individuals. (There's no point in valuing a "long life" when you believe in reincarnation.)
To discriminate between developed and developing countries also means you assume some countries are somewhat "finished" where others can play "catch up", which is not how global economies actually work: Capitalism requires winners and losers.
I come, rob your house, take away most of what you have, and call you "savage". I then give you "development aid", telling you how to spend it and make you dependent on my services and "assistance", calling you "developing". How does that feel? Are we interacting on eye level, or am I looking down on you?
Sure, you turn my home into a warzone and I have to flee, plus I may buy into your propaganda of a better life, so surely that's a good indication of... what? Developed vs. developing?
Good governance helps a lot even if you had previously suffered invasion, we’re occupied or were a colony: see Taiwan (invaded, occupied), Panama (invaded), USA (colony and invaded subsequently).
It’s doable but people will have to want it. It doesn’t come free and it doesn’t come by listening to charlatans like Marx and his peddlers who promise utopia at no cost but the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. From then on it should be all roses in a land of milk and honey. No, sorry, it takes lots of work, delayed gratification and multi-generational effort to get to a good place like Singapore did or even Chile relatively speaking. You need someone with strong singular vision a a populace willing to follow it through. Why even Salvador after decades of civil war is able to overcome its difficulties and now enjoy great personal safety -the best in the western hemisphere. A country doesn’t have to stay stuck in a bad place.
This perspective ignores the relationships and influence of other players inside and (even more) outside of the country. It is not "someone with strong singular vision". Specifically, historically, if the USA does not want you to prosper (because your independence threatens their objectives), you will not.
Right, in my experience it's a distinction that's offensive to the "Northern" camp that thinks about the disparity in terms of each country's independent "growth"/"progress"/development". It also offends "would-be Northerners", i.e. comprador/petty bourgeois individuals located geographically in the "South", for similar reasons. To complicate matters, dependency theorists were themselves petty bourgeois apologists of the Non-Aligned Movement. It's just that times have changed, just like how "American Indian" is preferred by the older generation because "Native" and "Indigenous" are impositions of liberalism, even though the newer generation may prefer the latter labels.
Personally I don't care what language is being used as long as the real conditions are being brought to light. Persecutory investigations into psychology on these matters are dead ends. The successful adoption of "Native" and "developing" did not liberate.
As an Australian, I do find it a bit perjorative for countries north of us (many of them in the northern hemisphere!) to be deemed the "global south", while we are excluded despite actually being the only inhabited continent entirely in the south. It just reminds one that nobody cares about the southern hemisphere, and that northern hemisphere types think anything south of the mediterranean is "south".
North/South doesn't have anything to do with it, anyway, as you alluded to. What people actually want to talk about is whether a country is a former colonial master, a former settler colony or a former extractive colony (or possibly multiple of these, as with e.g. the US).
Why? Because we are a small fraction of the population and economy of the planet.
How? Most of the population in the southern hemisphere is in ex-colonies from the north; our cultures are thus full of concepts that don't really work but we make do. Simple things like all the holidays being inappropriately aligned to the seasons, or the constellations in our skies being afterthoughts in the system, or of course maps being north up without a second thought.
> What are "developing" countries developing into? Nice white western ones like the global north? Nope. That one is the worst of the choices.
The way to think about it is along economic, social, and infra/tech dimensions, and are not coupled to culture or ethnicity (your "white western").
Specifically, developing countries:
- Economic: low income, underdeveloped industry
- Social: lower quality of life, limited access to basic services (jobs, food, clean water, education, healthcare, housing)
- Infra/tech: poor infrastructure, limited access to technology
Furthermore, the following countries in Europe ("white") can be considered developing: Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, etc. while Japan is not developing (and not "white western").
Some countries have a high HDI (e.g. in Africa you can think of Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Morocco, Botswana, etc.) but can still be considered developing on other dimensions.
In the Middle East, counties like Qatar, UAE, Israel, Kuwait, and Bahrain can be considered developed (and not "white western").
I said "somewhat okay" in my original comment to mean developing/developed classification is better than the Global North/South. Not that it's good or should be widely used. I wanted to communicate that even that bad classification is "better" than Global North/South which I'm hearing about today for the first time.
"Economically developed" doesn't imply race: you are the one bringing white up... Or perhaps you are projecting your bad impressions onto others?
Developing is a fine word, with little taint.
You remind me of a lady who objected to me saying "retarded" who then righteously lectured me about not saying retarded, and she proceeded to give an example of her having a friend in a wheelchair as to why the word was offensive. I couldn't even start to tell her just how grossly disgusting her comments were.
Parts of reality suck, but denying reality sucks even harder - especially if you think you are helping less developed peoples.
I also love that Singapore is both 'developing' on this list and int the Small Island Developing States list, despite it easily being in the top 10 of most developed countries in the world.
Yep, living in a de-industrialised, undiversified economy, second most southern in the global north I can only wish by kids had access to a Singaporean education.
Regional politics is complicated. Australia needs to be in the ASEAN group. We have common interests in regional security and stability and have complementary capabilities and resources. But its convenient to label us as outsiders and characterise us as imperialists or American agents (which sadly we sort of are but give us some options). Doesn't matter that we are right here and 20% of our population originated from the asian countries to the north of us. For some reason we are on the imperialist side.
Such grouping is based on dubious theories. For example, China is classified as a "developing economy" (red), even though it is one of only three countries with the independent capability to send humans into Earth's orbit using its own launch systems and spacecraft.
Only because their population is so huge. Their Dollar GDP is about 2/3 that of the USA and is 4.5x that of Japan. In a sense it’s set of highly developed urban industrial zones that also has a massive underdeveloped rural area.
GDP PPP is being used to compare countries productivity more often now. Australia has high GDP but low productivity as most is sunk into expensive, unproductive real estate. Every country has their rust belts and undeveloped rural areas.
Sure, and I'm not arguing that designation is wrong, just that people have a tendency to package up a lot of assumptions with the developing country status that don't necessarily apply. It's a technical designation that needs to be taken into context.
My wife is Chinese and last year we went to my father in law's home village in Hebei and stayed with his brother and his family. They have a really nice bungalow they moved into about 10 years ago in a compound right next to the decaying remains of their former house. Almost the whole village has been rebuilt in the last few decades. Hardly anywhere in China is anything like the way it was 30 years ago.
Growing up in Shropshire in the 70s and 80s there were plenty of people in the little villages and isolated farm houses that lived like it was still the 1800s. France too in the early 2000s. Development is never evenly distributed.
True, that's why they use aggregate measures like gdp per capita, to get the big picture. And China's one is still quite low. Compared even to Britain (which is not a rich country, below average in Europe), though of course there are a lot of people in China doing better thatn somd in Europe.
Sending humans to orbit while leaving millions of other humans starving on Earth is not a sign of great economy. China undoubtedly made a lot of progress in recent decades, but it also started from a very low point. Its GDP per capita has improved greatly but still way lower than most Western countries.
a simple solution is to have emergency contacts written in your wallet, with the added benefit of letting bystanders call for you when you are incapacitated.
If you guess at random, that's 25% probability to get the right answers, which gets you 7/28 points in average. I got 14/28 by trying hard and I still hate the result, but it's also true that the questions were largely impractical: noone parses dates like this in a real production app. We always validate the date format first. So noone should feel bad at their results.
Anyway, after the experience trying to automate something with Google Sheets and wasting 4 hours just to discover that months start at 0 (in the context of parsing string dates and creating Date objects)... yep, no more JS for me.
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