First World Problems, Third World Solutions

It's a smart, even snarky, reversal of conventional wisdom. For years, advocates in the West have been urging politicians to "do something" about "insert-developing-world-problem-here." Now, if the Design for the First World competition takes off, the "Third World" might beat the West at its own game.

"Our fellows in the First World have been concerned for a while with us having the major share of the badness, so we thought, why don’t we pay back? After all, their life isn’t problem-free either. And that’s where this competition starts," the web page says.

There's no doubt that the organizers have pegged the right issues: obesity, aging, immigration and overconsumption. They've also managed to keep the process a bit simpler than answering a UN request for proposals: Pick an issue area; pick a population within the West you'd target and explain how you'd do it. Use social media, and send the idea off. The only requirements are that you're over 13 and that you are a legal citizen of a developing country (defined by the organizers). (Submissions, only online, must be made by May 30, so hurry!)

The organizers clearly get the wry humor potential here, and they've anticipated some snark in their entries, noting in the rules that "ironic" contributions, while welcomed, should also actually solve something. (Perhaps this, too, is aimed indirectly at the West?)

But this is also serious business: "Design for the First World shouldn’t be funny. The phrase 'Third World minds designing for First World Problems' provokes smiles in many... But why is it funny? Why do we assume that Third World minds shouldn’t be involved in the problems of the First World?"

In fact, part of the argument here is that the First World's problems will soon be the Third World's, in large part because of the latter's aid dependency. It's a good point — but I think there's another danger, one perhaps a bit too controversial to organize a world-wide contest around. And that's the invisible ties that come with aid.

I'm not just talking about conditional aid, which comes with all kinds of rules attached, or about the less-than-subtle use of free-flowing cash by France or China to wield influence in a way often described as neo-colonial. I'm talking about culture. All that aid, if and when it works, is supposed to move people out of poverty — but toward what?

Societies look and sound and function the way they do for a lot of reasons; I don't want to reduce this all to one magical cause. But it's possible that First World wealth and obesity go hand in hand. If you read the U.S. economic history of the last 20 years, you could easily argue that overconsumption isn't simply a byproduct of American wealth; it fuels it.

It's easy, and silly, to romanticize the developing world as purer, more natural, more simplistic than our complicated Western modernity. Anthropologists and sociologists have been committing that mistake for more than 100 years. But when Rwandan youth lament to me that parts of their culture are less important today than they were even 20 years ago, they're not playing into that myth. They're seeing something they value disappear. Often, it's replaced by something that I, as an American, recognize as a product of our cultural biases about how society should function. (Structural adjustment, anyone?)

So the competition designers are onto something here: Taking an up-close look at the First World is as good a way as any for aid recipients to imagine their futures. And devising solutions to First-World problems may not solve those problems for the First World — just as First-World aid hasn't brought economic redemption to the Third — but it might just focus people's attention enough to ask whether they want to follow suit, and if not, how to avoid making our mistakes.

Photo Credit: Robert Couse-Baker