Labeling Countries

I have heard in the past that the old USSR had a first world military/space program with a third world economy. The average people suffer, while the leader lives in luxury. (sigh) I'll never understand people.

I think that it's just convention. Certainly diplomats do not refer to poorer countries as 'third world' because that would be insulting. Countries that are not technologically advanced, or socially tolerant tend to be viewed as third world. Just the way people label it, I suspect.

"The economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, considered as an entity with common characteristics, such as poverty, high birthrates, and economic dependence on the advanced countries. The French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the expression ("tiers monde" in French) in 1952 by analogy with the "third estate," the commoners of France before and during the French Revolution-as opposed to priests and nobles, comprising the first and second estates respectively. Like the third estate, wrote Sauvy, the third world is nothing, and it "wants to be something." The term therefore implies that the third world is exploited, much as the third estate was exploited, and that, like the third estate its destiny is a revolutionary one. It conveys as well a second idea, also discussed by Sauvy, that of non-alignment, for the third world belongs neither to the industrialized capitalist world nor to the industrialized Communist bloc. The expression third world was used at the 1955 conference of Afro-Asian countries held in Bandung, Indonesia. In 1956 a group of social scientists associated with Sauvy's National Institute of Demographic Studies, in Paris, published a book called Le Tiers-Monde. Three years later, the French economist Francois Perroux launched a new journal, on problems of underdevelopment, with the same title. By the end of the 1950's the term was frequently employed in the French media to refer to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America"

Source

Hmm.. very interesting read, Francis.
"...its destiny is a revolutionary one."
I wonder if that means their destiny is internal revolt, or revolt against the 'first world' countries?

I had no idea that there was such a precise definition.

I think that this explains it nicely. A map of the world, with the countries differentiated by category is included:



http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_world_countries.htm