Elinda, Star Breaker wrote:
yossarian wrote:
I guess the index is fine, just it isn't linear, so it may not really be what people expect.
The index takes the log of the GDP while not taking the log of the other factors. This blunts the effect of money versus life expectancy and education, which I'm sure was the author's intention.
Isn't it really just blunting the disparity between GDP's, versus the weight of the GDP?
Yes. It's just that the log function really, really blunts it. On a linear scale, if one nation has an average (per capita) GDP of, say, $1000 per year, a nation of twice that average, $2000, would receive twice the points. Both, of course, would be abysmally poor. On a scale of zero to one, the former would score: 0.025, the latter 0.05. On a log scale, to double the log of $1000 the nation would have to have an average per capita GDP of $1,000,000. The former scores 0.652 and the latter scores 1.304. In both the above cases, a nation scoring $40,000 per year scores 1.0, by definition.
Alternative functions which blunt, but not to the extent that the log does, would be something like the square root, or the cube root, which would be closer to the log (more blunting). In fact, any the GDP could be raised by any exponent between zero and one and that would "blunt" the effect.
Elinda wrote:
Quote:
I'm sure I'd rather live 10% longer rather then make 10% more money, but what about 40% more money? How can this be a rational trade off?
??
I don't see a trade off.
I should have been more clear. On a linear scale, if the GDP goes up by 10% but life expectancy goes down by 10%, would result in no change. However, since the HDI is nonlinear, it takes about a 40% increase in GDP to counter out a decrease of 10% in life expectancy. (Note: this is true only when the GDP score and life expectancy score are near equal to begin with - which is the case for the nations listed above).
Elinda wrote:
The only message I see here is that some countries do better than others at converting monetary worth to human-development (as it is definded by the UN). The US being one country that apparently doesnt' do so well as we have the highest GDP, yet are 14 in this ranking (i blame video games).
Some might argue that national security is a criteria for human developement, in which case the US could come out smelling like roses...or rose Bushes.
To some extent, national security would be reflected in life expectancy, which the US is low in and, of course, getting lower due to misguided efforts to improve our security.
But I agree national security could be added, or something like it.
The glaring omissions I see to the human development index are political, economic and personal freedoms and personal safety (crime rate).
I think the HDI was probably created to use information widely and easily available and thus really hard to measure things would be left out. Also, geography determines national security to a large extent. They may not have wanted an index in which a nation can be damned by its neighbors, assuming you could even define such a thing.
Ruining our perfect record over here.
