United Nations Human Development Index
Description
Ian Morris:
"The first Human Development Index; http://hdr.undp.org/en/ ) designed in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul was Haq with the aim of shifting development economists’ focus from national income accounting toward actual human wellbeing (ul Haq 1995). Working with Amartya Sen and a team of United Nations economists, ul Haq crafted the HDI to provide a single score that would tell development officers how well each country was doing in allowing its citizens to fulfill their innate potential.
The HDI uses three traits: life expectancy at birth ( e education (with adult literacy rates accounting for two thirds, knowledge and the score and enrollment in schools and universities for the other one third); and standard of living (gross domestic product per capita [GDP/cap] measured in US$ at purchasing power parity rates [PPP]). The UN Human Development Programme provides a convenient calculator for generating scores (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/faq/question,68,en.html).
The HDI has been criticized for everything from its selection of traits an d the way it weights education and income to its neglect of ecology and morality (e.g., Hastings; McGillivray 1991; McGillivray and White 2006; Sagara and Najam 1998; Srinivasan 1994), but it remains one of the most widely used indices. Human development is of course different from social development as defined here, but the basic principle of identifying a small number of quantifiable core traits is transferable. The HDI can be used to measure change through time, simply by comparing a country’s score in each annual report, but because the maximum possible score is 1.0, the HDI does better at charting a nation’s relative position within the world at a single point in time than at measuring diachronic changes in development levels. In sum, while the princi ples behind the HDI are good models for constructing a social development index, it is less helpful as a guide to calculating changes through time, a central requirement for explaining why the West rules."