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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's because I've only just run across it, but this 'global north' / 'global south' thing is super weird. If you mean 'rich countries' / 'poor countries' why not say that, rather than link it to something like latitude which is only nebulously related to what you're actually trying to say?

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Rich and poor country is relative, too. Compared to 50 years ago, there are almost no third world countries anymore. I believe Hans Rosling shared some data about this in his book Factfulness.

I would say almost no completely third world countries, but there are large parts of many, if not most countries that are very much severely underdeveloped or riddled with systemic corruption (third world by the classical definition), This is sometimes even found in the middle of some of the worlds most highly developed nations (cough, cough, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc). To what percentage of a country's human-inhabited area these third world tracts extend is essentially based on how pervasive or deeply rooted bad government and systemic daily corruption are. But i'd argue that in any country where the percentage of underdevelopment goes over 50% you can loosely claim third world status.

Also, don't be fooled by the main business/living hubs of the glittering major cities of the world into thinking that most places are now mostly first world: Sure, you can travel from Bangkok to Delhi to Cairo and then Mexico City and in all of them spend days inside an urban area that's remarkably comparable to a normal European or U.S city's. However, these bubbles only represent a small fraction of the totality of these places, and much of that total outside of said bubbles is very, very different in how it looks and works compared to how the majority outer parts of most first world cities look or work. This without even going into any detail about difference in the countryside and smaller provincial towns that aren't specifically tourist hubs.

> these bubbles only represent a small fraction of the totality of these places,

You are substantially under-estimating the size of the urban population of these countries if you think that the major cities only represent a "small fraction."

These bubbles I mention represent only a portion of the cities themselves. I'm not at all referring to the whole populations and areas of many third world countries' large cities. I'm aware of how urbanized many developing countries have become.

I partly speak from personal experience here too. The city I live in has a largish core urban zone that's fairly tourist-friendly, clean and highly, fashionably modernized and cultural (but with a charming colonial aspect).

Since the city in general has well over 15 million inhabitants, this "bubble" area itself contains well over a million people, easily, but it's just a small fraction of the rest of the city, which is very much what you'd call a dangerously third world place in terms of crime, corruption, administrative ineptitude and barely functional infrastructure.

Yeah, there's lots of phrases that can be unexpected when you first run into them - so I can get how you'd find it confusing.

I don't just mean 'rich countries'/'poor countries.' First, because that is not necessarily as simply true anymore - the economic relations are much more complicated. Second, that is a value judgement about how countries ought to develop.

You can read up more about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_South

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