The USA could be a developing nation too. We should be building our first settlements on the Moon and Mars right now, eliminating biological limitations like ag

The USA could be a developing nation too. We should be building our first settlements on the Moon and Mars right now, eliminating biological limitations like aging and various sources of heritable inequality, sending our first probes to nearby stars with a high probability of hosting living biospheres in habitable zones, wiring every address in the nation with low latency gigabit+ broadband, and upgrading our infrastructure to be fully renewable and post-carbon. That's a very incomplete list of actual first world problems. A "developed nation" should be called a "day two nation." See Jeff Bezos' excellent shareholder letters. A developed nation has a "day two mentality." No nation is developed but some are stuck. Part of the problem is that we compare ourselves to other nations and think "wow, we're awesome." We should ignore all other nations and think "what can we do now?" Unfortunately I'm not optimistic. The last election was a contest between a narcissistic reality TV star and a dull apparatchik with no vision. Our selection of such inferior representatives reflects our collective expectations about our future, or lack thereof.