First world problems

Venezuela: First World or Third World country? Apparently, you can transition from one to the other, with perhaps a brief stop in the second. Ocasio, are you listening?

The luxury of still having a home and a coffee pot allows me, occasionally, to sit at the table early in the morning and ponder some of the mysteries of life. For instance, if there’s a “First World”, and a “Third World” (currently falling deeper in the abyss during this global shutdown, I read this morning), what’s the Second World? I’ve wondered about that from time to time but finally Googled it and by gum, there is such a thing: the former communist countries. Matt Soniak at Mental Floss explains:

Today, people use the terms First or Third World to rank the development of countries or the strength of their economy. This is a pretty recent development, and veers away from the original usage of the terms, which were coined during the Cold War as part of a rough—and now outdated—model of geopolitical alliances.

The Cold War and the creation of NATO (a military and collective defense alliance formed by the U.S. and its western allies) and the Warsaw Pact (a defense treaty between several communist states in Eastern Europe) roughly divided the major world powers into two spheres with differing political and economic structures—east versus west, communist versus capitalist, the U.S. versus the USSR—with the Iron Curtain in between them.

In 1952, the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term “Third World” to refer to everyone else, the countries unaligned and uninvolved with either side of the Cold War division. With the naming of the Third World, it followed that the Cold War blocs should get numbered, too. The democratic, capitalist countries within the Western sphere of influence became the “First World." The communist-socialist states that were part of or allied with the USSR became the "Second World."

At the end of the Cold War, the three worlds model (not to be confused with Mao Zedong’s differently structured Three Worlds Theory) took on more of an economic context, rather than a geopolitical one. The First World now usually refers to Western, industrialized states, while the Second World consists of the communist and former communist states. The Third World still encompasses “everybody else,” mostly in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and tends to be a catchall for “developing nations” that are poor, less technologically advanced, dependent on the “developed countries,” or have unstable governments, high rates of population growth, illiteracy and disease, a lack of a middle class, a lot of foreign debt, or some combination thereof.

(Most of) the readers of this blog are smarter than me, so y’all probably already knew this. Now that I do, however, I can turn my attention to other weighty matters, such as how a thermos bottle knows whether to keep a liquid hot, or cold.