This has not been my experience at all. I spend a lot of time in Scandinavia. There are more and more homeless people, many living in state parks that have shared eating areas (gazebos with a fire pit and state-provided firewood to protect the forest). I've watched a dozen times while people ate food in front of the obviously-homeless and hungry in these places without offering to share anything. "They gave at the office". I have trouble imagining this happening in America. On the other hand, in the situation I described, Scandinavians will interact with the homeless (while eating in front of them) as equals: having conversations and so forth. In America, people act as if the homeless are less than human.

I am a former American citizen who married a Russian woman, had children, and relocated permanently to St. Petersburg, Russia. This is absolutely not the "third world", in the sense that I've always understood it. I have much better internet, cable TV, mobile phone, and house phone service here than I could ever hope for in the States. That's not true in the countryside though. A lot of things don't meet Western standards generally, but a lot of it is the relatively short time period the country has had to rebuild and has done so almost without foreign help (as opposed to East Germany as an example). New construction is to Western standards - houses, roads, etc.; salaries are comparatively lower for similar work, but they have steadily risen and most people can afford some luxuries in their life like iphones. And by "most people" I mean full-time cashiers at a grocery store, normal people. I think you would be shocked at the disconnection between the coverage of English-language Western media on the situation and local (Russian) media and opinions, and even non-English European coverage, like Der Zeit. The problem is partly that the American media think Pravda is still the authoritative voice of the Russian government, so they don't bother translating anything else - but Pravda was privated after the fall and today is sort of a mix between The Sun and The Onion, not official position. And wifi worked at Appleby's today - the restaurant was really busy, the weather is beautiful and the town is full of tourists.