1st v 2nd v 3rd World

[LagerLout]

The above quote gets my vote for second most pointless post of the century (this being the first).

[Satellite_TV]

@LagerLout

[quote]The above quote gets my vote for second most pointless post of the century (this being the first).

[/quote]

After reading thru the fitst 4 pages I tend to agree.

Taiwan, 3rd world country with money…

[PoSTMoDeRNFuNK]

In summary: In the original post when I said I “did my research” in the same post as “1st vs 3rd world”; that research was done at a time BEFORE Taiwan joined the WTO in late 2001 as an economically Developed (1st -whatever the bloody vocabulary) Nation; as I was gearing to come to Taiwan. It was not considered a Developed Nation then.

I then posted some links which STILL display Taiwan as a ‘3rd world’ nation, but with a “Pristine Defintion of 3rd world”, which consisted of a more hybrid definition; including more factors than just Economy.

I defined my own postmodern interpretational definition which would personally consider Taiwan (as a whole), to be more along the lines of that Pristine 3rd world Definition; but without the negative connotation of “3rd world”; as Developing (perhaps even almost Developed - thus something in the middle of 1st & 3rd equalling to ‘2nd’, EVEN THOUGH 2nd is reserved for Ex-Commies, and 1st, 2nd & 3rd are apparently UNPC - but I don’t care so much about PC!!).
Money doesn’t excuse everything else that hasn’t yet been solved. My definition is definitely hybrid.

I adore how 914 put it in this thread:

The mentality is money first, life second.

LagerLout: Wasn’t that you I saw lastnight at some road-side Watering Hole, laughing in mad hysteria under a bar table, acquiring a new nickname as the ‘Village Idiot’??

[Bu_Lai_En]

I then posted some links which STILL display Taiwan as a ‘3rd world’ nation, but with a “Pristine Defintion of 3rd world”, which consisted of a more hybrid definition; including more factors than just Economy.

Ok, change the defintion of ‘third world’ to mean what you want it to, and then sure you can say that Taiwan is third world. However, ‘third world’ already has accepted definitions, and as I clearly spelled out with refgerence to those definitions earlier, Taiwan is obviously not third world.

Your defintions have more to do with ‘modern western society’ than first world/third world.

Brian

[xp_10K]

My apologies if someone has already posted this; I think I’ve read the whole thread, but I’m getting old. . . .

Apparently, the people who make the UN Human Development Index somehow have included Taiwan in their assessments. Caveat, though: My source is secondary–Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia’s map version of the UN HDI, Taiwan is listed as “elevated.” Argentina, Chile, South Korea, and some Eastern European countries are in that category. Other categories are “very elevated,” (which is above Taiwan’s rating), “middle” (of course, below Taiwan, as are the following:), “somewhat weak” (or “weak enough”), “weak,” and “very weak.”

So, if Wikipedia’s map-format data are accurate, then the UN considers Taiwan to be fairly well off, but not as well off as the countries we normally think of when we use the word “developed.”

I didn’t say any of the above to initiate a dispute or enflame one which is already in progress. Of course, some things are not properly quantifiable, and some things are bound to get quantified in ways we disagree with, but it looks to me that the Wikipedia map is in the general neighborhood of how I sized up Taiwan.

Anyway, if you haven’t already seen this map, enjoy!

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c … 005%29.png

I’ll scrounge around the 'net a little for the actual report, to try to see whether Wikipedia’s article is accurate.

[PoSTMoDeRNFuNK]

Thank you. My sentiments exactly. There were two maps I was originally referring to having seen a long time ago. One being that I have already posted in this thread, where Taiwan was depicted as being 3rd world (BUT a newly more PC defined interpretation of 3rd world aka Pristine Third World) and then another I spoke of having it depicted as being on the same as some old termed 2nd world nations. This may have been the map I was referring to.

[xp_10K]

@PoSTMoDeRNFuNK

Thank you. . . . This may have been the map I was referring to.

You’re welcome, but my subsequent surfing has left me confused:

While the name ‘Taiwan’ is mentioned in the UN’s Human Development Report for 2004, Taiwan is, as half-expected, not classified. The page with links to the different chapters is here. They are in PDF (you need Adobe Reader). The whole report is here, in PDF (again, you need Adobe).

I was going to leave it at that and conclude that whoever made the Wikipedia map simply decided, “Bwa-ha-ha, there’s no data on Taiwan, but it sure will look cool colored light-green,” but I took to scrounging some more, and I found out that, for example, according to a (reprinted?) piece on the Changhua County Government’s website:

Taiwan’s Human Development Index was ranked 26th in the world in a 2002 HDI report compiled by the United Nations Development Programme, the [Taiwan] Cabinet-level Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) announced Tuesday. . . . Taiwan gained a score of 0.902, which belongs in the category of high human development as defined by the United Nations.

Here’s another one, from the website of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK:

[quote]Taiwan placed 24th in a global human development index (HDI), ahead of Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong, according to a report released by the Executive Yuan on December 1, 2003.

The report by the Cabinet’s Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting & Statistics (DGBAS), which cited figures from the U.N. Development Program, showed that Taiwan’s HDI is 0.895, down one place from last year’s 23rd.[/quote]

The Executive Yuan report, presumably the same one, is cited for the same assertion here.

[Please note that I cannot account for Taiwan’s being ranked 26th in 2002 and then being at 24, “down one place from last year’s 23rd,” in 2003. The official UN Human Development Reports appear to bear the number of the year of their release, which seems to take place in the summer. So I can’t tell if the data released by the Executive Yuan, if reliable, was early or late.]

So:
(1) Are people somehow able to get, like, bootleg or under-the-table UN statistics on Taiwan?
Or:
(2) Is there a more pedestrian explanation?
Or:
(3) Does the most pedestrian explanation of all obtain, i.e., that I’ve somehow misread all this stuff?

[Kick-Stand]

[quote=“LagerLout”]This gets my vote for most pointless, boring fucking thread of the century … so far.
[/quote]

You know, I remember Kaohsiung summer of 97. It was HOT. I had an old apartment in downtown Kaohsiung…several shiny new twenty story skyscrapers were going up around my place…one afternoon I exited my apartment to telex some money overseas…waaaayyy cheaper and faster that it could be done in any other city except for Hong Kong…and in order to do so, I had to carefully walk over a wooden board that a workman had so thoughtfully laid across the open trench in my alley… some little orange poops bobbled by in the dirty water…then later on, I told that story to my students and we made up a song about dirty water.

[xp_10K]

[quote=“Kick-Stand”][quote=“LagerLout”]This gets my vote for most pointless, boring fucking thread of the century … so far.
[/quote]

. . . Kaohsiung summer of 97 . . . HOT . . . old apartment . . . shiny new twenty story skyscrapers . . . telex . . . wooden board . . . open trench in my alley. . . little orange poops . . . dirty water . . . students . . . made up a song . . . [/quote]

Excellent post. Pretty much captures the essence of it, and not boring, and not at all pointless.