![]() "That's the Fourth World," Farmer says, referring to parts of the United States and other wealthy nations where health problems loom large. It has pockets of deep urban and rural poverty, says Paul Farmer, co-founder of the nonprofit Partners in Health and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Who is to say which part of the world is "first"? And how can an affluent country like Saudi Arabia, neither Western nor communist, be part of the Third World? Plus, the Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore.Īnd it's not like the First World is the best world in every way. This 1-2-3 classification is now out of date, insulting and confusing. "This 1-2-3 classification is now out-of-date, insulting and confusing." The remaining nations, which aligned with neither group, were assigned to the Third World. The Second World was the so-called Communist Bloc: the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and friends. The First World consisted of the U.S., Western Europe and their allies. Thinking of these three factions, French demographer Alfred Sauvy wrote of "Three worlds, one planet" in an article published in L'Observateur in 1952. None of them were squarely in either the Western or the Soviet camp. But there was another group of countries. It was Western capitalism versus Soviet socialism. More than half a century ago, the Cold War was just starting. Here's what I learned from talking to many, many experts. Third World? Developing world? Global south? Low- and middle-income countries?Įvery label has its problems - and, as it turns out, an interesting back story. (See: " Why Goats? Why Soda?")īut that naming struggle was nothing compared with figuring out what to call the parts of the world we cover. Our blog was born in 2014, and I'll let you in on a little secret: We had a really hard time coming up with our name. The question of what to call "the developing world" is a developing debate.
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