We’ve all heard the expression “first world problems.”
It’s a Twitter cliche, a disdainful sniff directed at
those who get all worked up because their caramel latte
wasn’t foamy enough (or whatever). And while it’s
true that most advanced nations have problems that
would make your average failing state weep with envy,
there are some areas where even us rich Westerners
could use a helping hand.
10 Russia Is A Slave-Owner’s Paradise
Slavery is one of those things we associate with the
distant past and dirt-poor countries on the fringes of
civilization. We know it’s bad and we’re instinctively
against it, but it couldn’t happen in any modern,
wealthy nation, right?
Try telling that to Russia. In a recent report, the US
State Department ranked the country as one of the worst
for slavery in the entire world . According to advocacy
group Humanity United, there are currently around one
million Russians being kept in forced-labor conditions,
including some 50,000 children working involuntarily
as prostitutes. And that’s before we get on to the abuse
of migrant workers.
In their report, the State Department revealed that the
2014 Winter Olympics venues are being built on the
back of what we’ll non-euphemistically call “slave
labor.” Workers have their passports confiscated, are
forced to work 12-hour days with only one day off per
month, and are sometimes housed 200 people to a
single four-bedroom house. Yet the authorities do
almost nothing to curb this abuse and arrests are
extremely rare. So yeah, if you dream of being a real-
life Calvin Candie, head to Russia.
9 Greece Is More Corrupt Than
Actual Dictatorships
It probably isn’t surprising to learn that Greece is
somewhat prone to corruption. After all, southern
Europe is almost-famous for its good-natured bribery
and faint whiff of sex scandals—not everywhere can be
Scandinavia, right? But Greek corruption goes beyond
mere posturing and into “failed state” territory.
When Transparency International released their 2012
Corruption Index, Greece was ranked as the 94th most
corrupt country on Earth. Admittedly, that still places
it light years ahead of, say, Somalia or North Korea,
but it also places it lower than Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
Oman, Qatar, and Cuba.
In case you’re not up on your geography that means
this EU member state is officially more corrupt than
several actual dictatorships. Not only that, it’s also
more corrupt than several third world countries (such
as Liberia, Swaziland, and Benin) where nearly the
entire population lives below the poverty line and they
still have stuff like absolute monarchs. The only
comfort Greeks can take from all this is that they still
did better than Russia, which came an appalling 133rd.
8 Israel Fails On Press Freedoms
In most areas, Israel fulfills the criteria of a modern,
functioning democracy. However, according to Reporters
Without Borders, that commitment to openness and
transparency doesn’t extend to press freedoms. Put
simply, Israel has some of the most restricted
journalists in the world.
In their 2013 global rankings, the group placed Israel
at 112th: behind countries like Guinea-Bissau, which
operates military censorship on the media; the
Maldives, where journalists have been attacked by
government forces; and Mali, where the military
overthrew the State broadcaster and arbitrarily tortured
journalists. Even drug war-buffeted Guatemala fared
better, ranking 95th, despite the frequent murders that
afflict press work there. In other words, Israel was up
against some pretty stiff competition and yet still
managed to stomp on press freedoms to a degree even
impoverished military juntas could only dream of.
7 Vermont Has The GDP Of Yemen
Vermont is a pleasant, wooded State to the north of the
USA where nothing much interesting ever happens.
Yemen is an unstable third world country, crippled by
debt, prone to terrorism, failing to exploit its natural
resources, and with nearly 50 percent of its population
living in poverty. On the surface, the two have nothing
in common. But there is one area where Vermont and
Yemen are almost identical: their GDP.
Now, obviously this is a slightly unfair comparison, as
Vermont is a single state while Yemen is an entire
country. But the fact remains that if every US state
were to simultaneously secede, Vermont would be the
absolute poorest of the resulting 50 countries. Sudan,
Uzbekistan and Iraq would all be wealthier, as would
Morocco, Algeria, and Belarus. What we’re trying to
say is that Vermont better pray Rick Perry doesn’t get
his way about dissolving the Union.
6 East Glasgow Has A Life
Expectancy Lower Than Some War
Zones
Thanks to decades of rampant economic growth,
medical advances and improved equality, life expectancy
has surged in the West. If you’re male and live in the
UK for example, you can expect to live a good 78.5
years—compared to the 56 an impoverished Ethiopian
might get. Unless, that is, you live in East Glasgow
where you’ll be lucky to scrape 54.
No joke. The Glasgow neighbourhood of Calton has some
of the lowest male life expectancy not just among
developed nations, but in the entire world. People there
live in soul-crushing poverty, with rates of alcohol and
drug addiction and homelessness some of the highest in
the Western world. The average male life expectancy is
53.9 years, lower than Afghanistan (59), The Ivory
Coast (55), Haiti (61), or even Iraq (65). Even male
children born into the nightmare of Somalia will only
live an average of 4 years less than their Glaswegian
counterparts—and these are kids who can expect to
spend their lives being bombed, shot at and nearly-
exploded.
The area is so messed up that young people from
developing countries like Indonesia actually volunteer
there in the hopes of making a meaningful difference.
In short, this tiny corner of the super-prosperous UK
may have a claim on being one of the most-deprived in
the entire world.
5 South Korea’s Unbelievable Suicide
Rate
It’s fairly obvious that poverty causes depression. If
you disagree, feel free to dump your possessions and
try living on the streets for a year, we’ll wait for your
report. So you might expect those living in crippling
poverty in developing nations to be more prone to suicide
than their affluent Western counterparts. But that’s
not the case. If anything, there are some richer
countries where suicide appears to be almost endemic.
Take Japan: Japan is one of the richest and most-equal
societies on earth, yet it has a suicide rate higher than
Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, Jamaica, and
Guatemala combined. But even this has nothing on
South Korea. At nearly 40 men in every 100,000,
South Korea simply has one of the highest suicide
rates on Earth—comparable to developing nations like
Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Sri Lanka. In fact, only
Hungary and Russia are both similarly affluent and
more prone to suicide, but even then Hungary’s GDP is
a fraction of South Korea’s. Final proof, if needed, that
money objectively can’t buy happiness.
4 Ireland’s Barbaric Abortion Laws
What do Haiti, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iran,
Afghanistan, and Ireland have in common? The answer
is that until only a couple of months ago, they all
completely outlawed abortion—even when a woman’s life
was at stake.
In 2012 a pregnant Indian woman living in Ireland
suffered life-threatening complications. Rushed to a
hospital, she was told there was no chance of her baby
surviving. There was also very little chance of her
surviving, unless doctors forced a termination. They
refused . In 2012, abortion was still so illegal in
Ireland that it couldn’t be done, even to save the
mother’s life, even when the baby was guaranteed to die
anyway.
In the aftermath of her death, Ireland finally pushed
a bill through that would allow termination—but only if
the mother’s life was at risk . This places Ireland
firmly behind every single other developed nation on
abortion rights. Even Algeria and Pakistan will allow
terminations to save the mother from sickness or
injury, as will Ethiopia, Costa Rica, and Zimbabwe. To
give you some perspective, this is one area where even
North Korea outperforms Ireland—something no
country should ever be proud of.
3 The USA Has The Gun Homicide
Rate Of A Failed State
Without getting into the politics of gun control, we can
probably all agree that the US has its fair share of
shootings. But if you were to rank it on gun homicides
against the rest of the world, where do you think it
would come? Near other, similar Western states
maybe?
Try right at the very bottom . With a gun homicide
rate of 2.97 for every 100,000 people, no other
developed nation comes close. The only other Western
state within spitting distance is Lichtenstein, with a
gun murder rate of 2.95, but Lichtenstein’s tiny
population means this actually works out at a single
shooting per year. The closest after that is Switzerland
with 0.77, i.e. almost a quarter of the USA’s.
This means the US gun homicide rate is worse than in
the West Bank and Gaza, worse than in Uganda or
Cambodia, worse even than in the shambles that is the
D.R. Congo. It’s only thanks to the drug cartels of
Latin America and the endemic violence of South
Africa and Jamaica that the US isn’t even further
down the list. Now there’s a depressing thought.
2 The UK Is An Endemic Surveillance
Society
It might not be a third-world problem, strictly
speaking, but we do tend to associate endemic state
surveillance with developing nations ruled by brutal
ideologues. No way these guys could be as bad as, say,
China.
Well, think again. A few years back, Privacy
International conducted a global survey into government
surveillance and ranked each country accordingly. They
took into account stuff like CCTV prevalence, the
monitoring of borders, and internet freedoms, and came
to the conclusion that the UK is one of the worst “spy
states” in the world. Only the US, China and Russia
fared equally badly, with even semi-authoritarian
regimes and corrupt states doing noticeably better. But
this was years ago, and the US fared equally badly, so
why is this section specifically about the UK? Well,
let’s take a look at the recent NSA scandal. In the US,
the scandal was followed by an open debate and congress
taking Obama to task for his dictatorial tendencies.
In the UK, the paper that broke the story is being
investigated under anti-terrorism legislation. Earlier,
government agents turned up at the newspaper’s offices
and smashed up their laptops with hammers, claiming
they had sensitive information on them. They detained
the reporting journalist’s husband, and the rest of the
media has been officially warned not to report on the
leaks, lest they make “inadvertent public disclosure of
information that would compromise UK military and
intelligence operations and methods.” We’re beginning to
think the UK government mistakenly filed George
Orwell’s 1984 under “good advice.”
1 Israel’s Human Rights Problem
Earlier this year, Relief Web—a part of the United
Nations’ Office for Humanitarian Affairs—released
their yearly Human Rights Risk Index . The index does
exactly what the name suggests: ranking countries by
the risk they pose to human rights. The aim is to
highlight countries with an “extreme” risk—such as
Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Somalia—but it also highlights
those where human rights are at “high risk.”
Countries such as Algeria, Malaysia, Kazakhstan,
dictator-ruled Cuba, Turkmenistan . . . and Israel.
According to the report, the Middle East’s most-
developed democracy has a human rights problem
comparable to countries that have barely shuffled out
of the Dark Ages. It ranked lower than any other first
world nation, with only semi-first world Russia doing
more to systematically stomp all over human dignity.
In fact, the only European countries to come close
(Israel being an EU “associate state”) were the Ukraine
and Belarus, an archaic Soviet-style dictatorship where
political dissidents are frequently tortured. Again, this
is according to a United Nations body specifically set
up to monitor human rights abuses, not some angry
leftie student raging over his tofu. It seems that
economic development and respect for human rights
don’t always go hand-in-hand.

Interesting.