Talk Elections

Japan would certainly be up there.

Singapore would probably be on top

Depends on how one defines developed and non-white, I guess. But reasonably, Japan and Singapore seem like the obvious choices.

Singapore, by any objective measure. Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan are also up there.

According to the UN's Human Development Index, the "majority non-white" (I'll translate it as non-European descent) countries with a "very high development" are:

12. Japan
13. Hong Kong
15. South Korea
26. Singapore
30. United Arab Emirates
33. Brunei
37. Qatar
42. Bahrain
47. Barbados

Chile and Argentina are also in the "very high development" category, but under my definition their populations are in fact "majority white".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index

Italy?


I kid I kid.


Could any of the smaller emirates on the Arabian Peninsula make a case?




...and on preview I see that yes, a case could be made for several of them.

Only as long as you disregard its political system: it happens to be a non-democracy. Economic development isn't everything, you know.

So, if you include political development, it leaves Japan, South Korea and Barbados.

I would have thought Taiwan would be up there as well.  What's holding it back? 

Non-membership of the UN.
Were it so, it'd rank between S Korea and Singapore.

Interesting that Japan was #1 as recently as 1993, it has since dropped to #12.

Development is an economic concept.

Lol wut?

Different cases. Chile is Mestizo majority, so non-white. Argentina is "whiter" than the US and NZ.

Categories have bounds. Without them, they fall apart faster.

Does Israel count as a non-white nation?

Chile is definitely debatable, because I found very conflicting numbers on this. According to a survey from 2011, 59% of all Chileans define themselves as "white", 25% as "mestizo" and 8% as "indigenous". Since human "races" mostly exist as a social construct, one could argue that you're white as soon as you claim you're white.

A genetic study from 1994 also stated: "At present the Chilean population is approximately 64% white and 35% Amerindian with traces of other admixture." (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1050080/pdf/jmedgene00288-0042.pdf)

Regardless of the technical definition, as the starter of this thread, I meant socially/politically (i.e. democracy) and economically developed.

I think then you are trying to fit too many things into a single concept. If you want to ask which countries are most democratic, that's one thing (and is complicated enough by itself). But economic development is something else (also a complex mix of things that has often been critiqued as a narrow-minded construct). I think there have been too many counterexamples through history and even today to sustain the idea that the two go hand-in-hand.