Particularly when comparing a middle class non-American to a middle class American. Rich non-American vs poor Americans is another story.

32 comments

  2. I honestly don’t think I’ve heard anyone share this sentiment in the 37 years I’ve been on this planet.

  3. Idiots who have never been to third world countries do.

    Fortunately very few of us are actually that stoopid

  4. Mostly young teenagers. They just need some correction, just a ‘hey things aren’t as good here as X, but they’re still far better than Y.’ Lots of teens struggle with conceptual duality like that, but once you iron it out, they become exponentially more educated of their own accord.

  5. That isn’t exactly true. It is more that large sections of our cities are not allowed to enforce basic laws, and we made it very difficult to prosecute people for crimes. NY did the stupid thing of eliminating bail, which has led to a large rise in petty crimes.

    Drug use has become more rampant, and it has caused an increase in homeless people and despair. That has a third world feeling to it. The garbage on the streets and rats add to the effect.

  6. In a country of 330 million people, there’s statistically going to be a minority extremists who post crazy stuff online. Yes, there’s some people who think that, but understand that it’s a miniscule minority.

  7. I think a lot of people rightfully think we’re not living up to our full potential in a lot of respects, but the only people I’ve seen use the “third world” line are:

    Foreigners who haven’t spent any time here

    Leftist students and commentators trying to be provocative

    Disillusioned young people who haven’t traveled internationally beyond their school-sponsored trips to Western Europe (if that).

  8. This is something angsty teenagers and those who never grew up say *online* while having absolutely no frame of reference.

  9. Plenty of them on reddit do. I’ve been to actual third world countries and am grateful I was born here

  10. Some do. Their opinions are usually formed by other people telling them what to believe, not from actual personal observation or life experience, though. I’ll always admit our standards could be much higher and we’re behind on some fronts, but you’re either a willful idiot or a naive child if you actually believe that “third-world in a Gucci belt” nonsense.

  12. Only the vast array of morons that infest this site and other forms of social media believe in such trite.

  15. It’s hyperbole. I’ve never left Texas and say it jokingly as a way of saying for a country at the top we could be doing better

  18. No. I’ve repeated this joke as a meme, but anyone who genuinely believes that one of the wealthiest countries in human history (literally the primary country the concepts of “First World” and “Third World” were based around) is a third world country is a moron of unprecedented caliber.

    Now Mississippi specifically…/s

  19. There is a pandemic of malaise in America, we’ve seen it reflected in statistics and studies and we’ve seen it in our own lives. Many people around the world have far less than we do, less material wealth, less health, less security and safety, and even shorter life expectancies meaning less longevity, and yet a lot of them are more psychologically well, and happy, than we are. So what’s up with that!?

    Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have a lot of theories and hypothesis, in fact they have for some time, and much of the commentary on our current social state was written in [checks notes] the first millennium BCE!?!? (That can’t be right, can it?)

    Nope, I got that right.

    Buddha, Seneca, Lao Tzu, philosophers all across the ancient world spoke of the phenomenon the modern world is struggling with today: Desire.

    Hold on, wait, I know where I am, I know what that sounds like, but hear me out on this.

    Desire is a state of wanting, and wanting is a result of lack, of absence, and there is more to lack today than there ever has been before, especially in America.

    We first start off with physiological needs like food, shelter, and medicine. In less developed parts of the world there is still a lack of those things, an absence, and so people desire for the fundamentals, and having those fundamentals fulfilled and supplied they find some degree of happiness, survival is a thing to be desired, and so surviving is fulfilling. By contrast here in America most of us have had most of those needs filled, we have shelter, we have food, we have medicine, and so we move on to desiring other things, the things we don’t have.

    A child in Africa might desire a cellphone because he has no means to communicate otherwise, a child in the United States may desire an iPhone 12 because he already has an iPhone 10 and it just doesn’t cut it anymore. If you give the African child a Nokia 3310 from the year 2000 he may be overjoyed, if you give the American kid an iPhone 11 he’ll be heartbroken.

    Sadly this experience isn’t limited to children. We all desire, we all want, and we all want the things we don’t have; if you have a Geo Metro, but really want a Ford F-150, and you can only afford a beat up old Dodge Neon, then buying the Neon probably isn’t going to feel too good even though it’s technically an upgrade over the Metro.

    A really good example of this is the recent move to start farming insects for food. There are parts of the world where calories are what people lack, nutrition and macronutrients are what’s absent and what’s desired. If the choice is between eating a plate of well seasoned grasshoppers, or dying from starvation, I’ll be delighted to eat the grasshoppers thank you very much.

    Now let’s do America dialectically:

    > “I’m hungry.”

    > “What do you want?”

    > “I don’t know.”

    > “Do you want burgers?”

    > “No, we had burgers yesterday.”

    > “Do you want Chinese food?”

    > “No, I’ve still got some leftovers in the fridge.”

    > “Do you want pizza?”

    “Oh, pizza would be nice!”

    > “I’ll call Pizza by Alfredo.”

    > “I hate Pizza by Alfredo, they get the sauce wrong.”

    > “Okay, I’ll call Alfredo’s Pizza Cafe then. You want a large meat lover’s supreme?”

    > “Actually I’m trying to cut back on the meat and the gluten.”

    > “Alfredo’s Pizza Cafe doesn’t have a gluten free option….”

    > “Great, now I need to find a new pizza place.” sigh “Fine. I’ll just make some waffles or something. It’s such a pain in the ass to find somewhere good to eat, it’s not even worth the fight!”

    When there’s more to have, there’s more to lack.
    When there’s more to lack, there’s more to want.
    When there’s more to want, there’s more reason for disappointment when you don’t get it.

    Here in the America, by and large, we don’t want transportation we want a car.
    And we don’t want a car, we want a coupe.
    And we don’t want a coupe, we want an electric coupe.
    And we don’t want an electric coupe, we want a Tesla electric coupe.
    And we don’t want a Tesla electric coupe, we want an original condition 2008 Tesla Roadster.
    And we don’t want an original condition 2008 Tesla Roadster, we want an original condition 2008 Tesla Roadster in red. (Black would be very disappointing.)
    While other people in other parts of the world would be elated for a bus stop.

    Here we run into the inevitable catch/22: Global capitalism has created more prosperity and a greater increase in material quality of life than any other economic system yet discovered, and it has done so on the back of desire. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing from an objective point of view, it’s simply a fact of life: Demand exists, capitalism rises to meet that demand, one is a logical result of the other, if humans had no desire there would be no capitalism, the two are inexorable.

    But the reciprocal is that the more things capitalism produces the more things there are for us to desire, and the more there is for us to desire the more there is for us to think we lack, and the more there is for us to think we lack the more empty we feel even when we get the things we want. Worse, as soon as we get what we want, there’s a new thing on the horizon that will be better, our good thing won’t be good for long, soon it will be average, then below average, then worthless.

    As an example of the above, consider the technology subreddits: One of the most frequent questions asked on the AMD, Intel, and Nvidia subs is “Should I get this top of the line chip today, or wait six month when the new GTRX 9000 XKS drops? I don’t want to get a new component if it’s just going to be outdated in a year.” even in the present moment we’re looking toward the future, comparing what is to what could be, comparing today’s good to tomorrow’s better, and since there will always be something better we’ll always be comparing, we’ll always think we lack something.

    Buddha, Seneca, and Lao Tzu all admonished against desiring, when those desires don’t get fulfilled we experience suffering, when those desires do get fulfilled we replace them with another desire, and another, and another, always looking for the next new, external thing to fill that lack. This never ending treadmill of desire is the basis for global capitalism, it means that demand will always exist, there will always be room for growth, there will always be markets, more desire means more sales, more sales mean more profits, and profit is desirable, too.

    After reading all of this you might conclude that I’m condemning capitalism, and I’m not, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m writing this from an LED illuminated mechanical keyboard, trust me, I’m as capitalist as anyone on this forum, I’ve also got a twenty page long Amazon wish list, I desire things too, I’m right here in the froth along with you. No, I didn’t write this in an effort to condemn capitalism, I wrote it in an effort to remind folks that we know what’s going on, we have for more than two millennia, the suffering we’re seeing in the America was predicted by philosophers all across time and all across the earth. The more there is to desire the more there is to feel like we lack, and we have more to desire today than we have at any point in human history, both as individuals and as a species. We knew this was coming, what we do about it, that’s the part I don’t know.

  20. Only the idiots. And by that I mean serious idiots. The kind of credulous rubes who swallow overblown political rhetoric and take it as the gospel.

    Spend an hour in Central America or Africa. Heck, even in relatively prosperous African countries such as Botswana or South Africa. Drive past the shanty towns and you’d never make that argument again.

  21. To be fair, there is some extreme poverty in the US, because of very high inequality. When I was working in underprivileged communities, I have heard it said that some people in the US live like in a third-world country, and I think it’s accurate; and I can see how upsetting it can be when you think of how wealthy the country is, how more could be done somehow, even though of course it’s not simple. I think it’s also fair to say that more people live in poverty in the US than most non-poor Americans would think (almost 50M people if I’m correct).

    But I’ve never heard anybody say that middle-class Americans live like (or worse than) middle-class people from a third-world country. There is decent buying power and pretty solid quality of life here, comparatively, if you don’t live in poverty. It sounds like a pretty ignorant thing to say.

  22. I think most people in this subreddit are not the people that are living in those circumstances and think few are.

    Different states and demographics have very different standards of living.

    Black people in Mississippi have the same life expectancy as North Korea and lower than the Dominican Republic and Belarus.

    (it’s difficult to be poor in a rich country. so imagine a poor person in Mississippi trying to get a bad teeth fixed, a broken leg, or buying home. What’s cheap in “3rd world” countries is expensive here making it difficult for poor people)

  24. Americans, particularly those Americans under the age of about 40, have shockingly little perspective about things like this. And many of the loudest, angriest, and most prone to accuse others of lack of perspective due to political ideology or not living in big cities like they do, are actually the *least* contextualized as a result of certain cultural and education (and generational changes) over the past 20 years.

    Alas, these also happen to be the folks who dominate internal online complaints about the US.

    Anyone who was alive during the Cold War, or is old enough to have been an adult during 9/11, is fully aware of how lucky we have it to be living here in the United States.

  25. I mean some of the most abject poverty on Earth is found in the American South. People in Poland live longer than people in every Southern state. Texas has less doctors per capita than most western nations.

  27. No. Even the most destitute here have homeless shelters, food banks, and kind strangers who will give them a couple of bucks. There are entire populations of people in other countries that are starving and dying from diseases that a dose of antibiotics would cure.

  28. The UN said Alabama has the worst poverty in the developed world and Mississippi had that whole water crisis, West Virginia also ain’t doing too hot either

  30. I have been to some actual 3rd world countries where people have no electricity, no plumbing, no access to clean water living in dilapidated shacks. I can’t believe any American would compare their situation to that.

  31. No I don’t believe that the majority of Americans live in the third world, even poor Americans in section 8 housing and making the majority of their income off of disability or child benefits or SNAP definitely have it way better than most people in other countries even in Europe.

    Most houses and apartments in the United States are huge compared to those you getting the rest of the world especially East Asia, and the overall situation in terms of what you get is far better than most of the developed world. Hell I’ve met a lot of people in Europe and East Asia that don’t even know what a clothes dryer looks like.

  32. I was able to visit a Soviet country when I was younger. I’ve visited slums and third world countries since. Countries where you still shit in an outhouse. Don’t drink the water. Don’t ride the elevator because it has a giant hole in it. Rolling blackouts, if they have water.

    Our poor people have air conditioning, running water, toilets, big screen TVs, smartphones…what other countries would consider luxury.

    There is a desire by some people to feel like they’ve had a tough life. They want to prove they’re edgy and tough.

    They have no idea how lucky they are.

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