Of course, it's not Third World, we aren't talking holes in the ground, it's just kinda ... Second World, well intentioned, badly designed, appallingly constructed, which is how Russia has been described to me (often).
What really appalled her, in our last place, was having the toilets back up into the shower stall, while she was trying to have a shower. The underlying cause of that one was tree roots gradually crushing/lifting the combined outlet pipe, but she - well both of us really - were appalled that the toilet outlet pipe and the shower drain would be combined, rather than separately piped into the sewer mains.
Quite a bit of the plumbing, electrical and other basic infrastructure seems to be like that: just not well-thought-out, and often poorly implemented. For instance, some dimwit in the 60s thought it would be a good idea to wire houses with aluminium (sorry, aluminum haha) wire, which was cheaper, but has caused endless problems.
Another, and this still appalls me, is that the electrical plugs are largely just 2-prong, i.e. there is no earth! This is gradually being phased out (bad pun) but this stuff is still being sold and still installed in houses, despite the minimal savings and the truly lamentable lack of safety. Aside of anything else, it also means any appliances you have which have 3-prong power points, requires a converter plug in order to even fit (the plugs & sockets are also disastrously designed so that plugs are forever falling out of the wall - I have had it seriously recommended to me by electricians that you need to bend the prongs in order to alleviate this!)
Part of this is, I'm sure, because there are few or no regulations compared to NZ, England, or ... well, the civilised world*: and of course that varies state by state, as there are essentially NO federal regulations on anything like this. Part of it - and I'm sure a lot of Americans would say all of it - is that we're in Arkansas, which is regarded as relatively backward & third-worldish by most of the USA**. But a lot of it is just the cut-the-corners, minimise-everything attitude that has become more and more prevalent with the last 5 decades or so.
Bah, youngsters today! Standards are falling! Everything is worse!!
But seriously, I've had people I work with, supposedly educated and intelligent, tell me that many houses*** are, and should be, built to only last 30 years because they'll get pulled down and replaced after that anyway. Which (a) I doubt, and (b) results in insta-slums, because they look like crap after one year, and start literally falling apart after 2. Cost-efficient for the builder, I'm sure, not so much for the owner.
That, again, is a kind of tangent though, because the plumbing, electrical & stuff I am ranting about is in middle-class housing - pretty much all the houses we looked at buying, and at least the next tranche above, i.e. the ones we looked at but couldnt have afforded, all had these afflictions. I am assuming that the really affluent houses don't ... but when I stop to think about it, I'm probably wrong about that too: this is more a disease of the spirit than an absence of wealth: the shonky fly-by-night attitude of casual disregard.
Enough grumpy old rants for one day :)
*yes that's a bit harsh, I agree.
**except for Mississippi and Alabama which in the same boat
*** Many = poor peoples, i.e. black people and po' white trash
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