Over-Developed/Developed. Used in my classes (together with PQD countries) to refer to the comparative socio-economic status of different countries across the planet.[1]
[1]. Following the thought-provoking work of Lewis and Wigen in their Myth of Continents (1997), an effort has been made in this work to dispense with two egregious terms: the “Third World” and “developing countries.” The normative hierarchy implicit in the term Third World is simply unwarranted in this day and age. Moreover, it is an erroneous term now given the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and the rapid erosion of communism in China (the so-called “Second World”). As for developing countries it simply does not make sense today (if it ever did). New categories are needed to designate the different levels of economic development. Leys (1971: 32), writing more than three decades ago pointed out the problem: “The very expression developing countries has come to sound embarrassing precisely because it so obviously rests on the linear conception [of development] and sometimes refers to countries which are in fact stagnating or even regressing.” While any categorization will, to some degree, be arbitrary, it must do the best it can to come as close to reality as possible without, however, becoming so unwieldy that it loses its user-friendly value; but certainly anything is probably better than the current scheme that lumps, for example, Burkina Faso and Djibouti in the same category with Brazil and India or Ireland and Hungary with Germany and United States. Toward this end, five categories appear to strike a proper balance: pre-developing (e.g., Burkina Faso, Jamaica, Zambia); quasi-developing (e.g., Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa); developing (e.g., Brazil, India, Poland, Russia, South Korea); developed (e.g., Australia, Canada, Denmark); and over-developed (e.g., Britain, Germany, United States). Sometimes, where necessary, in the text these five categories will be collapsed into two primary divisions expressed as: pre/quasi/developing (PQD) countries, and over/developed (OD) countries. Of course, no one ever dares to admit, be it academics or politicians, the inherent dissemblance that undergirds such terminology—that in order for all to achieve the much sought after status of “developed” we would need the resources of three or more planet earths combined since the present status of the over developed is being maintained on the basis of their consumption of more than two-thirds of the world’s resources (even though they constitute a mere one third of the world’s population).