Thursday, March 30, 2017

A Label I'm not Fond of

Can we do away with the label "Third-World Country?"  What it really means is that a democratic country's main form of income comes from agriculture.  "Third" sounds really bronze medal-y, like it needs to improve.  Head's up, folks, but the US (and other "First World Countries") don't provide enough food for the people who live there!  Without these third-place countries, y'all would probably start crumbling...or starving.  How about "Agriculturally-Driven Country?"  It's much clearer about one's position without confusing anyone about how "good" a country is.  I think I'm going to use that from now on.

1 comment:

  1. Probably most folk don't know this (you probably do, but I don't think it was ever common knowledge), but the terminology is actually a bit antiquated simply on account of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The First World were countries aligned with America, the Second World countries aligned with the U.S.S.R., and the Third everyone else. I remember back in the early '90s, Political Science departments and the literature they taught were tending towards referring to former Third World countries as "the Global South." No doubt some may find some kind of pejorative in that term as well. I recommend you adopt the term "Got No Truck with Neither Trump nor Putin Country." (But perhaps that's a bit unwieldy.)

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