The United States is a Third World Country

The term “third world country” started out like Trump’s phrase “shithole countries.” It referred to countries that did not align with either the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. during the cold war. Over time it has morphed into meaning countries that struggle to meet basic human needs. We often think of refer to them as “underdeveloped” countries with a tinge of patronage, as if the people there are lesser like inept children, and not peoples regularly trampled on by western countries. But by the first definition Switzerland was a third world county by not siding with the U.S. or U.S.S.R. during the cold war, and under the new definition the US could be considered one.

The modern definition of third world countries is nations “with high mortality rates, especially infant mortality rates;” “unstable and inconsistent economy;” “massive amounts of poverty;” “and in some cases have fewer natural resources than other nations throughout the world” [though I disagree with this part as the U.S. repeatedly put dictators in power—and removes them—in Latin America and Africa in order to gain access to their abundant resources]. “These countries often have to rely on more industrialized countries to aid them and help stabilize their economy.”1

Mortality

The United States often a leader in creating definitions for other counties, ranks 33rd of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Countries in infant mortality, life expectancy at birth, and total health spending. “And the U.S.’s infant mortality rate has not improved at the same pace as other OECD countries…The average rate of infant mortality among OECD countries was 4.0 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2021.” In the U.S., overall infant mortality the rate is 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, and 10.5 deaths per 1,000 live births among black infants.”2 This might not be as low as the most impoverished countries, but it’s not good for a so called “first world county.” The line between first and third world is shifting.

As for Adults, it’s better to live in more developed countries. Compared to so-called peer countries, the U.S. life expectancy is 3.7-5.2 years less for both men and women.3 We fare the worst in nine health domains: adverse brith outcomes, injuries and homicides, teen pregnancies and STIs, HIV and AIDS, drug-related mortality, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease, and disability. And the increase of law enforcement, killing alleged drug runners, and ozempic proliferation isn't actually helping. We’re less healthy because we have poor healthcare, more stress, more children raised in poverty, and less education.4

Economy

The economy is a funny metric because it is so easy to manipulate statistics to prove it is going whichever way the person talking wants. It’s also a measure of capitalism. However, economic instability is rather easy to spot: unpredictable sings in growth, changes in employment and prices (inflation/deflation), market volatility, recessions, job insecurity, credit crunch, financial market crashes or bubbles, etc. Sounds kind of familiar doesn't it? The Federal Reserve called the period from 1980-2007 “The Great Moderation.” “A welcome period of relative calm after the volatility of the Great Inflation.”5 The “Great inflation” lasted from 1965-1982 during which there were four recessions and two energy shortages. Before that the Employment Act of 1946 directed the U.S. federal government “to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” However, in 1944 the U.S., U.K., France, China, and the U.S.S.R. agreed to a global monetary system that “provided for a fixed rate of exchange between the currencies of the world and the US dollar, and the US dollar was linked to gold.”6 The problem was that the U.S. didn’t have enough gold to back the dollars held abroad, creating a credit crunch for the federal government. Before that was the Great Depression, and before that the country experienced great depressions about once a decade. In a paper for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard college, Frank Veneroso, call the state of the U.S. economy “Pathological.” “Today’s orthodox economic and financial theories deny that unfettered financial markets will embark on such perilous disequilibrium paths despite the obvious fact they do so and have been doing so in recent decades more frequently and to greater extremes, both in the United States and around the world.” Veneroso points out that there are two schools of economic theory. The first says that economic agent’s maximization of their own self interests drives markets toward stable equilibrium positions. Of course, this has never been proven out. The second school takes into account the falibility of humans and says that “lasting stable equilibrium positions in a free, unfettered market economy” is not possible. That economic agents will always “embark on disequilibrium paths.”7 Given the U.S. Federal Government’s penchant for deregulating industries, the U.S. economy has never been stable for long and will not ever experience a prolonged period of stability without a major value shift.

So, using economic stability as a measure of country class order would actually leave socialist countries on top and capitalist countries on the bottom. Unfortunately, neoliberal capitalist countries can’t help but destabilize governments and exploit the resources of countries they deem “third world.” Either way, by their own definition the U.S. economy is rarely stable and therefore another tick mark in the “third world” column.

Poverty

Poverty is an interesting measure of a class ranking of countries created by western/industrialized/neoliberal/capitalist countries because it’s like a bully who steals his victim’s money calling them out for being poor.8 But when the lens is turned back towards ourselves it turns out we’re tipping the scale. Each country measures their internal poverty their own way. Most countries, including those in the E.U., use relative standards based on actual expenses. This is considered the most accurate measure by international poverty researchers. The U.S. in contrast uses a static fixed threshold that does not reflect current costs. “Typically, a relative measure is calculated relative to the median income. The most popular and conventional relative measure is to say a person is poor if their income is below 50 percent of the median. Using that measure with data from the LIS, a family of three would be poor if their income was below about $34,000 in the United States in 2018 (after incorporating all taxes, tax credits, and welfare transfers). An absolute measure is calculated based on a timeless or uniform set of needs. For instance, one could calculate an absolute measure based on the cost of a basket of necessities like food and shelter. According to the U.S. official poverty measure (OPM)—which is considered an absolute measure—a family of three would be poor if their pretax cash income was below about $20,780 in the United States in 2018.”9 This explains why so many people in America aren’t poor enough for assistance, but also can’t pay all their bills.

According to the Borgen Project, “[Third World] countries usually lack economic stability because of the lack of a functioning class system. Usually, the country will have an upper class and a lower class. Without a middle class to fill the gap, there is almost no way for a person to escape poverty because there is no next step for them on the economic ladder. This also allows the wealthy to control all the money in the country. This is detrimental to the economy of the country, and both increases and helps to sustain the poverty running rampant throughout the country while allowing the upper class to keep their wealth to themselves.” In America, our current president is a Billionaire known for not paying his employees10 and scamming11 his followers, and he let a trillionaire lay off 212,000 civil servants in 2025 alone.12 Not surprisingly, with 924 billionaires13, “the growth in income for the middle class since 1970 has not kept pace with the growth in income for the upper-income tier. And the share of total U.S. household income held by the middle class has plunged.”14 In other words, the rich are richer and the middle class is poorer.

While the United States as an industrialized nation doesn’t rank on the UN’s Multidimensional Poverty Index—which measures deprivations at the household and individual level in health, education and standard of living—the poverty in the U.S. has gotten the United Nation’s attention. In a 2018 report, “the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty called attention to the tremendous scale and consequences of poverty in the United States — and particularly in the U.S. South.”15 And a study by MIT economist, Peter Temin, “shows that the United States has regressed materially to a third-world nation for most of its citizens.”16 The number of people falling below 50% of median household income is on the rise. Using a relative standard, as opposed to the set standard, “poverty rates rose between 1967 and 2024 ( from 15.1% to 18.2% , an increase of 21%), suggesting that more families are falling behind relative to the “typical” household.”17 Of course this is the measure before our current President’s various policies created mass inflation, hiring freezes, layoffs, and rising medical costs.

Resources

As I mentioned in the definition above, defining a country as third world due to lack of resources could be suspect given our nation’s propensity to claim foreign resources for ourselves. The U.S., Europe, China, and Russia have treated Latin America like our own natural resource piggy bank since it was discovered. Venezuela is just the most recent example.18 However, the United States ranks second in the world for natural resources behind Russia with an estimated $45 trillion. With coal, copper, gold, oil, natural gas deposits, lead, molybdenum, phosphates, rare earth elements, uranium, bauxite, iron, mercury, nickel, potash, silver, tungsten, zinc, petroleum, natural gas, timber, and arable land we are set for the extractive industries. However, while the US government and therefore the people do own around 640-650 million acres of land, nearly all the extraction is done by private companies for corporate profit as opposed to nationalized extraction in which the profits go back to the people. (There are about fourteen tribes and Alaska where natural resources are owned by the people.) In the American west nearly all the mineral and water rights are claimed by private individuals. If the people owned these resources, the economy would work for us rather than us slaving for it.

“Third World,” in recent years, has come to define places in which the people lack basic necessities like access to water, shelter or food for its citizens.19 In the American West, there is not enough water to go around, and most of the water rights are owned by individuals and are being bought up by investors who intend to sell the water to municipalities at a profit.20 In Southern Colorado, President Trump just vetoed a bill that would have helped provide clean potable water to 50,000 people. People whose water supply currently is unstable and often irradiated.21 In America, water is not a human right.

As for shelter and food, “an estimated 18.8 million people, or 6.1 percent of the U.S. population, live in low-income and low access tracts and are more than 1 mile or 10 miles from a supermarket.” Given we shop for our food, this means a lot of people don’t have access to food. Thirteen and a half percent of households in America are food insecure.22 It may not be as bad as the “starving kids in Africa” commercials, but that is a lot of hungry people for a “first world” country." The U.S. has a shortage of 4.7 million homes, creating housing crises in many cities and rural areas, which has a direct correlation to increased homelessness. For example, in Sacramento rents have gone up 47% causing a 144% increase in homelessness.23 And now the current president is ending long-term housing programs. This will cost communities exponentially more over time than housing people. But for this essay, what matters is that homelessness is at an all time high, and approximately 22.4 million renter households, nearly half of renters, are housing-cost burdened, meaning their housing costs more than 30% of their wages. The 2025 “Housing Wage is $33.63 for a modest two-bedroom apartment, which is more than four times the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.”24 And with housing prices on the rise, most of those renters will not be able to buy a home adding to the shrinking of the middle class.

Human Rights

Human rights seems like a valuable metric for the quality or class of a country. Unfortunately, “the leader of the free world” doesn’t rank well on most charts. The Global Rights Project (GRIP) at the University of Rhode Island and the CIRIGHTS data project ranked the U.S. 59th and gave us a “D” grade. They measure human rights in four categories:

• Physical integrity: the right of citizens to not be unnecessarily harmed by state agencies

• Empowerment: the right to live and speak freely

• Worker rights: the right to decent-paying and safe work

• Justice rights: the right to fair laws

Torture, police killings of civilians, obstacles to unionization, child labor, and unsafe work environments were their notable detriments to American human rights.25 And this was measured before ICE started killing civilians.

The UN Ranks the U.S. high on the Human Development Index, but dinged us 11.3% due to inequality in the distribution of each dimension across the population.26 But Amnesty International’s 2024 Human Rights Report on the U.S. lists eleven categories in which the U.S. is impinging on our human rights: Sexual and reproductive rights, Refugees’ and migrants’ rights, Freedom of peaceful assembly, Right to a healthy environment, Excessive use of force, Death penalty, Arbitrary detention, Right to life and security of the person, Unlawful killings, Discrimination, Gender-based violence.27 Not great for a “first world” country.

In America, América Greg Grandin quotes U.S. Senator from Idaho Frank Church in pointing out how the U.S. government has allowed corporations to “Latinize” America, not in our skin color or language, but in our loss of human rights and the flow of money from the people to the now billion/trillionaires. Our government treats us like we are a third would county. Of course, the United States can’t technically be a third world country no matter how we rank because we write the definition. But, the U.S.’s obsession with free-market capitalism has turned the United States into a third world country where we citizens, no matter our political affiliations, “can’t expect…housing, health care, education, [or] control over natural resources.”28