AHC US Third World Country In Terms Of Living Standards?

Alex1guy

Centralen said:
Mississippi is in no way comparable to Moldova or Rwanda.
Click to expand...

People want to believe the "third world" is arid deserts, militias on beat up pickups and tin pot houses held together with corrugated iron, but you don't need recent civil conflict and mud huts to have third world conditions.

About 5 million people in the US have been identified last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council as living in "3rd world conditions" or absolute poverty (defined as "conditions characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information) with almost 60 million living below the poverty line.

Remember that the US is a massive country and sadly despite it's immense wealth and power, plenty of people live in almost Dickensian levels of poverty for various reasons both institutional or otherwise.

https://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1

I agree that having such standards define the US post 1945 is really hard barring nuclear war or some sort of civil war wrecking everything, but millions of people in the United States have it really, really rough and that shouldn't be ignored or hand-waved.
 
Last edited:

Centralen

Alex1guy said:
Actually about 5 million people in the US have been identified last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council as living in "3rd world conditions" or absolute poverty (defined as "conditions characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information) with almost 60 million living below the poverty line. You don't need recent civil conflict and mud huts to have third world conditions.

Remember that the US is a massive country and sadly despite it's immense wealth and power, plenty of people live in almost Dickensian levels of poverty for various reasons both institutional or otherwise.

https://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1

I agree that having such standards define the US post 1945 is really hard barring nuclear war or some sort of civil war wrecking everything, but millions of people in the United States have it really, really rough you can't ignore that. You have the ultra rich and you have the ultra poor.
Click to expand...


On a whole host of objective measures, Mississippi is better off than Moldova and Rwanda. Yes, there is poverty in the US, but we need to understand how much worse people have it in other countries.

Look at GDP per capita. In Mississippi, it is $31,881. In Moldova, it is $2,289 and in Rwanda it is $784. If you don't like GDP per capita, look at HDI. In Mississippi, it is 0.866. In Moldova it is .700 and in Rwanda it is .524. These are very large differences. Acknowledgement of poverty in the US can't come at the cost of minimizing poverty abroad by saying it is comparable to US poverty. US poverty and poverty abroad are vastly different, and in many countries it is much, much more intense.
 

Alex1guy

Centralen said:
On a whole host of objective measures, Mississippi is better off than Moldova and Rwanda. Yes, there is poverty in the US, but we need to understand how much worse people have it in other countries.

Look at GDP per capita. In Mississippi, it is $31,881. In Moldova, it is $2,289 and in Rwanda it is $784. If you don't like GDP per capita, look at HDI. In Mississippi, it is 0.866. In Moldova it is .700 and in Rwanda it is .524. These are very large differences. Acknowledgement of poverty in the US can't come at the cost of minimizing poverty abroad by saying it is comparable to US poverty. US poverty and poverty abroad are vastly different, and in many countries it is much, much more intense.
Click to expand...

Of course the GPD of Mississippi is higher than that of Rwanda, one is a US state and one is a post colonial African nation that suffers endemic issues with corruption, violence, ethnic conflict and lack of infrastructure. My point wasn't to say that Mississippi is third world and barring some massive break-down in the US, it likely never will be. But a GDP average reflects the fact that far more Rwandans live in extreme poverty on average in their country (60%) where as the total US population living in similar conditions is about 1%.

Again, definition used by the UN is "conditions characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information" and the simple fact is, millions of Americans have been recognized as falling into this category.

I admit they don't have the other factors that further hinders populations in third world nations such as near constant civil strife, a totally ineffective government, ethnic cleansing, tribal divisions or non-existent infrastructure etc but my point was that according to an internationally accepted definition, there are is a fraction of people in the US live that in third world conditions of extreme poverty that they can't escape. America however, unlike other countries, has the power and money to try combat that which I'd argue is the biggest difference.
 
Last edited:

BeyondTheBorg

Reds! but instead of a Syndicalist/DeLeonist model, the UASR follows a more conventional Marxist-Leninist model of (authoritarian) socialism, becoming exactly what detractors expect "Soviet America" to be. It collapses into civil war, genocide, and kleptocracy sometime late into the 20th Century.

I have no idea what the impact of a realistic Back In The USSA would be on the rest of the world, though. The timeline could go in very different directions depending on whether there's still a USSR or not.
 
Last edited:

WarPlanInfrared

Just wait a few decades - more of the wealth will be hoarded in big city centers and gated communities, more jobs will get shipped to wherever they can get the cheapest and most pliable workforce and American workers who lost their jobs can't even "Learn2Code" because public spending cuts, including to education, continue, preventing the maintenance and expansion of infrastructure. And I'm nott getting into the climate change fun.
 

Arkenfolm

WarPlanInfrared said:
Just wait a few decades - more of the wealth will be hoarded in big city centers and gated communities, more jobs will get shipped to wherever they can get the cheapest and most pliable workforce and American workers who lost their jobs can't even "Learn2Code" because public spending cuts, including to education, continue, preventing the maintenance and expansion of infrastructure. And I'm nott getting into the climate change fun.
Click to expand...

That just sounds like Brazil which is not a third world country in terms of economic indicators.
 

Deleted member 109224

The poorest and most "backwards" parts of the US are, at the worst, at the development levels of Eastern Europe.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top