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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

The US is first world on a technicality: the first world is defined as countries that were allied with the US during the cold war. If not for that, it'd be classified as developing.

It's common to mix up developing/developed and third/first world because they were largely aligned during the cold war. But there is one first-world developing country.

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The biggest economy in the world and the richest country to have ever existed is not a developing country, although it is quite unequal. What you've stated is political rhetoric that you want others to accept as fact.

Many developing countries have extreme inequality. What would it look like if the whole world's reserve currency accidentally ended up being the South African Rand?

The US is not so allied with its long-time allies as it used to be. Allies tend not to threaten to invade and take over other allies.

The behavior of the us is so stupid and self-destructive I'm constantly amazed that the average trump supporter doesn't see it. But the failure of the political resistance to him is the real surprise. If your buddies have the majority in the house and the senate there nothing you can do?

This is not true. However, because of the massive inequality, I often found it easy to use a sentence I saw somewhere: "the US is a South American country that happened to become successful".

Why do yo think the US should be classified as a developing nation?

There’s a definition independent from 1st/2nd/3rd world [0] and the US’ income seems to clearly make it developed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country

Who made them the law? I don't trust the OSI to define open-source, either.

The UK, per capita, is poorer than every single state in the US. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/gdp-alert-united-...

As much as the current situation in the US upsets me, anyone who has spent considerable time within the US and outside of the US cannot believe what you've stated as anything other than a trite delusion. The US isn't just the richest country in the world, it has the second highest purchasing power parity per capita in 2026 and historically the highest. The average person in Mississippi is economically better off than the average person in England.

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-2026...

Seems to substantially disagree that the average person in the U.K. is worse off than the average person in the U.S.

In a similar way to Ireland, measurements of the USA's wealth tend to be severely distorted by the financial shell games that countries play.

The American poors (10th percentile income in America) are 67th percentile income globally, when calculated via Purchasing Power Parity. [1]

Your description of it as a "developing country" is completely inaccurate.

[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/great-convergence-equal...

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