I grew up in a developing country. In some ways (e.g. quality of roads or number of homeless per mile) my home country is even better than California. Have you lived in a developing country? (Hint: It's not as bad as you think) The fact that it's kinda of comparable to California in some ways while California is collecting so much tax on top of federal budget is baffling.

I would imagine if we compared literacy rate, infant mortality rate, life expectancy, median net worth, retirement age, etc, we'd start to find some stark differences between california and a "developing country," though I'm curious what we define as "developing country."

This from my time living on the border of Mexico. Everyone always talked about how the roads on our side were as bad as on Mexico's side as a criticism of texan infrastructure. It's fair, by the way, American infrastructure is a mess. But then the life expectancy was like ten years lower just a couple miles away because of an invisible line (and a fence you could easily hop over with a ladder).

Did you know that life expectancy of Cubans is higher than that of Americans?

It’s most likely not. Doctors in Cuba self-report aggregate statistics and are penalized if they underperform. That tells you all you need to know.

https://www.econlib.org/about-that-cuban-life-expectancy/

Independent studies have shown giant anomalies in other metrics that suggest the favorable metrics are being fudged:

https://mobile.twitter.com/wwwojtekk/status/1233017228792082...

Also a lot of reports that women are pressured to get late term abortions if there are any potential issues observed with the fetus, as this will ensure it doesn’t count as a mortality and not hurt that clinic’s stats.

Careful with that argument though, some of this is based on US propaganda.

How so?

Yes, Hollywood’s vaccination rates are worse than South Sudan’s for example. No developing country would allow kids going unvaccinated. So in a sense California is worse than an average developing nation.

This smells of untrue American exceptionalism. Being a very well traveled person with a spouse from a developing country that we travel to often, I would expect so-called “poorer” countries to do better on nearly all of those metrics you list (the exception being median net worth, unless you correct for cost of living in which case California lags behind on all metrics listed).

This is where the definition of "developing" matters.

It's also worth noting I would never try to compare the USA to other nations typically lumped under the now-vague definition of "first-world." The USA fails at many things.

I agree with him. I grew up in a developing country but I cannot stand California. It does not matter if it is the richest state, what matters is how much a p50 person has on his bank account at the end of the month. Most of the wealth of California is in the hand of the top 1%. It is also one of the most expensive states of the US.

Plenty of brutal poverty in the USA, even California. Or haven't you smelt the stench of human shit rising off San Francisco? The First World pretty much consists only of western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, New Zealand, and maybe Australia. Those are the countries in which the average citizen can expect a reasonable level of government service and public infrastructure without excessive corruption or partisan obstructionism -- table stakes for being considered "developed" in the 21st century.

The USA is distinctly, profoundly third world. Just because your rich ass is enjoying a pretty good life in the USA doesn't make that not the case; the rich enjoy good lives in many third-world countries.

I'm also from a developing country. It was California's similarities with my country that led me to leave California.