“Rich” Countries

Dispelling myths.

When I was living in Colombia (2019), I took private Spanish lessons with a teacher who had studied physics at university.

He was much smarter than I was. But both his passport and the low salary he earned had prevented him from traveling to other countries (passport privilege is a real thing).

We began to speak about Western Europe one day and after listening to him, I figured that the delta between his expectations and reality about “rich countries” was, to put it mildly, wild.

That’s when I realized that the collective spirit was also plain wrong about rich countries.

Misinformation

There’s this idea in both developed and developing countries that Scandinavia, Western Europe, Canada, the US, and Oceania are somehow, “rich countries”.

They’re not.

Well, not exactly.

These countries may be rich.

But the population is predominantly poor.

I am from Belgium, one of the richest and most developed countries in the world…where 20% of the population lives below the poverty line.

When you look at Brussels, it gets even worse. In the “European capital”, these numbers go to 25%.