Global Stratification & Poverty: Crash Course Sociology #27

This week we’re taking our discussion of stratification global. We’ll look at First and Third World countries and the reasons why these terms are no longer used. We’ll introduce the four types of country categories we now use: high income, upper middle income, lower middle income, and low income countries. We’ll also go over some consequences of and explanations for global poverty.

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References:
Sociology by John J. Macionis, 15th edition (2014)

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[crashcourse]

Apologies for the error & any confusion it might create.

[crabyman]

Fun to the old definition, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden would also count as '''3rd World countries'', because they were not allied either with Americans or Soviets in the Cold war.

[iuliacoclenci]

ahhh, why I discover this in my last day of sociology. This explain more that 100 books pages. Thank you so much

[naif]

You end poverty by investing in high quality education. Education opens the gateway for all opportunities.

[MuseOel]

Maybe do a Crash Course playlist on adulting for college students? Particularly for financial applications (loans, taxes, etc.)?

[dogofgraam]

1:53 Correction

Gross national income (GNI) is defined as the sum of value added by all producers who are residents in a nation, plus any product taxes (minus subsidies) not included in output, plus income received from abroad such as employee compensation and property income.

Per capita GDP is a measure of the total output of a country that takes gross domestic product (GDP) and divides it by the number of people in the country.

[vathek]

Fun fact: '3rd world' actually predates the terms 1st or 2nd world. It was originally used by a French dude to reference the fact that this was the area of the world best poised to shake up the world order, much like the 3rd estate of French society in the French revolution. Later, the term was appropriated with its new meaning as the 3rd best world, but I still like the original meaning, especially when you look at how in the Cold War many of these countries formed the non-aligned movement that did indeed try to shake up the world order by defying the Cold War paradigms of east vs west, capitalist vs communist.

[alexhood]

One thing I learned that don't trust comment section on YouTube comments section, anyone regardless of who side they on they trend to be incorrect and false.

[Alverant]

Religious fundamentalism is also one of the causes of poverty because it's against gender equality and birth control. Not just in poor countries either. The states in the US that have strict anti-abortion laws have seen an upswing in infant and mother mortality rates.

[Teo]

These learning playlists are amazing. I always leave a like to show my support. I try to comment often as well, though I comment much less.

[Pinkerton]

Development Economist here with a few thoughts related to my field:

GNI does not measure GDP per capita. GDP per capita measures GDP per capita. GNI is GDP plus incomes earned in foreign economies by domestic residents minus incomes earned in the domestic economy by non-residents. The idea is to capture the total income that is claimed by residents of a country as opposed to simply the total output of the domestic economy. The numbers that you were quoting were GNI per capita. Not really GDP related, directly.

Also, you are mischaracterizing the population growth issue in developing countries. Explosive population growth is a standard part of development and it has very little if anything to do with lack of access to contraceptives, although they often do lack access to contraceptives. The issue is that countries, at one point, have high death rates, low life expectancies, and high infant mortality rates. When your country is like this, you have to have high birth rates or your population will collapse, so that gets built in to cultural practices. As their access to medical care and nutrition and education improve, all of those things decrease. When you have fewer infant deaths and everyone alive starts living longer, but cultural practices around reproduction do not change, population goes crazy. This always happens, especially when a country develops relatively quickly. Eventually, cultural practices change for various reasons, birth rates fall dramatically, and population stabilizes. You see this in countries like Japan, Korea, and China to a certain extent. Giving people better access to contraceptives and reproductive healthcare doesn't fix this unless your goal is to manually shape their cultural practices from the outside, but this has tons of undesirable ethical implications.

Also, child labor is not as cut-and-dry an issue as your off-hand comment made it seem. There are kinds of child labor that are unequivocally bad like when children have to work long hours in some production facility or are pressed into illegal trades to the detriment of their own personal development, but there are some kinds of child labor that are not so clearly bad. For instance, there are many places in the world where children often assist their families in economic activity of various sorts in such a way that the family's ability to sustain itself is affected dramatically but the child is still able to get an education and everything else that is important for child development. These instances are often lumped in with the more severe cases of child labor, but it is not clear that the situation would be improved by ending these less negative instances of child labor.

[tbdaemon]

Econ guy here: GNI is NOT GDP per capita. This is incorrect!

[nadeyd]

This series is amazing!! I’ve learned so much.

[MrSpeakerCone]

"western Europe colonized much of Latin America, Africa, and Asia ..." Surely western European powers colonized all of North, Central and South America, most of Africa, and some of Asia. Why exclude high income post-colonial countries like the US, Canada, Barbados, and Hong Kong from your analysis?

[victorcates]

This seems to imply that without colonialism everyone would be in a similar bracket. Respecting different cultures requires that you regard them as different enough to generate different results. They have different priorities and may have different ideas (of time, of the individual, or being part of a greater world) percolating. The west producing the current culture implies a deep cultural alignment with the culturally specific version of civilization (full of its assumptions, weird values).

I think a lot of histories of the west would imply that the west had dozens of advantages/lucky breaks, such that western nations might well have infrastructure advantages even dating back 2000 years. It's not like everyone started from the same point.

[davidmizak]

You deliver excellent content to your audience. It's very interesting material. All of your effort put into creating this video is much appreciated. I'm truly grateful for your help!

[Reynadelcamino]

I am so thrilled to see colonialism discussed in this subject!

[DuranmanX]

How is Venezuela considered a high income country after everything that is going on there?

[cwzboue]

The comment section in CC sociology is always so butthurt sigh... I'm gonna spread some love for the great work of this team

[anirudhakumar]

Well, now I think I can guess the contents of the upcoming episode.Dependency theory, Cumulative causation and economic development theories could be discussed in the next episode.