What does a developed nation mean to you?

Question

For some Developed nation means having great infrastructure, for some it is about high average gross income of its citizens and etc.
What does it mean to you? and may be why?

I also meant to ask about the moral character of people. Does it play no role? I feel a nation of good people are much more advanced or developed than others. Nothing else matters. Yes, all they need is a good armed forces to better protect themselves against greedy people or nations.

Answer 1

The nation should be able to provide all its citizen in actual terms the following :

(1) The nation should have well-developed political, economic, physical, educational, and infrastructural institutions in place, full of natural resources or facilities, which offers others as an ideal force for emulation. The military might is secondary, because such system itself churns out an army, if at all required, full of patriotic and chivalrous sense to live and die for a national cause or prestige.

(2) Every citizen, irrespective of his class, sex, or birth should enjoy the confidence to live his life by choice and not by imposition either by the society or by the circumstances any restrictions; provided such liberty is within the accepted moral norms of the society, without fear or inhibition of any kind or from any quarter. Such confidence and conditions enable each and everyone to develop himself to his fullest potent, and become a gift for the nation. Simply imagine, even if one, out of ten, of the populace turns out to be an asset for the nation, the nation enjoys unflinching loyalty from its human resources, capable of bringing laurels from all quarters, be it education, sports, warfare, culture or commerce. Such society is more humane than the one which has mechanised every sphere / institutions.

(3) Such nations are able to phase out illiteracy, poverty, diseases, infrastructural deficiencies, risk of calamities, social imbalances, bureaucratic and political bottlenecks, etc and work in cohesion and unison in one voice and dictum and achieves as a result, the highest in the fields of science, and discoveries, at any given point of time and leads the field with highly developed systems in the area of law, justice and social retribution.

All the nations presently known as a DEVELOPED nation have reached the state in some measure or the other, as noted above, before being tagged as such.

Unfortunately, as rightly noted by you, the description is more materialistic in assessment, than appreciation of character.
Had there been overwhelming weightage given as evaluation factor to the later, our Great Nation INDIA, would have never lost its tag of THE GOLDEN LAND, as ascribed by ancient and medieval travellers from Europe and Far East in their chronicles.

One should not miss to read the LINE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER before upgrading a nation's tag.

Answer 2

Developed Nation , for me , means

1. Best Quality of life
2. Good Happiness Index
3. Freedom to live a life without hindrance to others
4. Less Corruption
5. More Transparency in systems
6. No Beggars
7. Better law and order
8. Better Traffic-Control
9. Respect for Women
10. Less Pollution

Answer 3

A developing nation is one that is in the process of making a transition from an agricultural based nation to industrial.

Answer 4

I have a couple of dictionaries to hand. Let’s have a look:

developed, adjective
wealthy and industrialized: wealthy and technologically advanced, with sophisticated manufacturing and service industries - Encarta

I guess I can go along with most of that. Countries that we generally regard as ‘developed’ are certainly wealthy and industrialised, and have sophisticated manufacturing and service industries. I get a little tripped up over the ‘technologically advanced’ bit though.

Let’s have a look at the definition of the root word here - develop:

Develop, verb
to change and become larger, stronger, or more impressive, successful, or advanced - Encarta

Develop, verb
to bring to a more advanced or more highly organized state; to cause to grow or advance; to evolve. - Bookshelf Basics

Nuclear bomb of the type used against Nagasaki
As I thought - the root word insinuates a progressive movement towards a goal - that goal being a state or condition that is better, more successful, and more advanced than before. Now, following this logic through we should conclude that a ‘developed’ nation has reached that goal. It’s arrived. Those of you that raised your hand at the beginning of the class - I must congratulate you.

Still, I have some lingering issues here. Have we in fact arrived at a more impressive, successful state? And what does ‘advanced’ really mean? We certainly have a lot of gadgets and inventions. We’re clever, but are we smart? We’re intelligent, but are we wise? Sensible?

If I break these two groups down to their base differences - what are they? A developing nation, I believe, is one that’s on the trailing edge of the industrial revolution. Here we think of subsistence farmers, herders, fishermen - families living self-sufficient lives in rural communities. A developed nation is vastly different, a lot more complicated, a lot more specialised, mechanised, and urbanised - and, I would propose, consequently a lot more vulnerable.

It is ironic that as industrialization provides more and more facilities to humanity, the inhabitants of the modern world increasingly become subject to the pressures and negative impacts of the industrial age. - Turkish Daily News

Atom cloud above Nagasaki
Ironic indeed. The machines we’ve invented to improve our lot in life have become an effective noose around our necks, to the point where they’re threatening to destroy us. Through the latter half of the last century a lot of attention was drawn to our ability to snuff ourselves out with the simple push of a bright red button in the middle of a President’s desk - but didn’t this in-your-face representation of the industrial age merely distract us from even more insidious and globally calamitous ‘developments’? If we have in fact arrived, it’s worth taking a moment to consider what we’ve gained. If we ponder further we can see that our ‘developed’ society is full of ironies - incongruities we really could have, should have, seen coming.

Follow along with some almost prophetic passages, written thirty years ago in ‘The Agricultural Crisis, a Crisis of Culture’, by Wendell Berry:

There is nothing more absurd, to give an example that is only apparently trivial, than the millions who wish to live in luxury and idleness and yet be slender and good-looking. We have millions, too, whose livelihoods, amusements, and comforts are all destructive, who nevertheless wish to live in a healthy environment; they want to run their recreational engines in clean, fresh air. - p.15,16.

The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint - that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery - indeed, the impossibility - of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists - people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for intance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average - one is tempted to say, the ideal - American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists, and “agribusinessmen,” the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else - or, perhaps more typically, nobody else - will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain

Answer 5

a developed nation is one that is liberal, with very very little corruption, infracture, the people are open-minded, the econonmy is booming and the standard of living for all people is high, not just the upper class........

Answer 6

Setting all dictionary definitions aside. To me... One that does not allow the use of terrorism. If they can get above that. I consider them developed.

Answer 7

going by the answers parameters , no body has given examples of any country which can measure up.

By the defintion of question ther is no develoed country on this earth

Answer 8

No poverty/Hunger
High literacy rates
High GDP
Better living condition( Shelter,food)
Social security
Low unemployment rates
Self reliant in energy,food needs
Good defence
Low crime rates

Answer 9

Any country that can stand on it's own with out help from another country.

Answer 10

A nation where one can have better quality of life (All inclusive).....