All POTUS election are about getting a majority of the roughly third in the middle while getting the majority of your sides rough third to give time and money and show up to vote. There hardly only about one thing, but usually one factor is dominant and makes up at least a big chunk of the vote gap.



I don't think Boll Weevil sorts and 'Reagan Democrat' are synonyms.



It did poll better, campaign stump speeches aren't the same as bills. Lots of stuff, right or left, sounds good on the stump, and the guy saying it thinks it works too, once they get into office they start having the tiny little flaws pointed out. "Thou shall not kill" gets "except in self-defense" tacked on, then "or in defense of others" and "Thou shall not kill furry animals for kicks" and so on. It's sounds great to say 'everyone will be taught to read' but as I'll discuss later in regard to the HDI, this is not necessarily that laudible a goal. Clinton's mistake was over-estimating intiial support and not realizing how much damage opposition could do to that support, this happens a lot, they believe in something so much they assume a good argument will make people change sides, and that the provacateurs of that opposition will be exposed as evil scoundrels. Blinders, they don't believe (CLinton or Obama or their supporters) that there are legtimate objections and people might not see through the BS because it isn't all BS.



Yes, they do have most of thos eprocedures, this is called drafting, where a truck or bicyclist follow right behind the lead guy to save fuel or energy. We produce a huge amount of research on medicine, direct and indirect, and we primarily pay for it while others get it for free, relatively speaking, they get way more than they pitch in in terms of dollars per unit of new tech developed. A country can stay pretty much with the leader by investing no more money into research than the price for journal subscriptions. I don't blame them for this, they research too and nobody expects them to ignore our advances, but you have to remember that as a factor.



You have an honest objection to be people on the otherside of a political disagreement trying to defeat someone and saying so? That's just semantics, we don't like what he's doing and think it will hurt us, we want to see him lose. Constant references to how the GOP wants Obama to fail are pretty close to whining. If a lib smirks about some company been exposed for corruption, he's not smirking because he's happy the company was corrupt, is he? Same thing.



We rail about them too. The whole thing, we feel there should be a limit as to how much someone can get for damages and pain and suffering, you limit that, lot of those guys on retainer have to find a new job, because companies won't spend millions keeping people on retainer when they don't have to worry about theatric SOBS like Edwards swaying a jury to award someone 3 million for dumping a cup of coffee on themselves.



Seems to me a lot of those polls have said they feel they were using bad demographic set ups. I think Bush did gain some in the final month, but mostly I think the polls simply used poor weighting, last I checked most had adjusted for it.



I admire anyone who call pull themselves up, assuming they do it in an honorable way, coming from a poor background does not excuse poor behavior. Coming from a wealthy background does not dismiss someone's own successes. That most of the people on the very top did not start on the very bottom just means there a re a lot of smart people there too and it's a bit easier to make it to the very top when you start halfway up, and luck is always a factor in success, you don't need to roll high as many times, that so many have risen from the very bottom, or darn near it, is a testament to the greatness of the current system.



As many have pointed out, HDI's big flaw is that it tends to measure how Scandanavian a country is. And while I understand the appeal of including education into things, that's an academics bias and really shouldn't be in there, especially with literacy making up 2/3 of it's weight. The other third is basically a measure of what percentage of the population you have in school, sounds nice, to max it out you need 100% of your pop in school. I'm a college grad, I value knowledge, but I don't believe education, especially as HDI measures it, should be on the HDI, better to just do flat IQ tests or something. Although this runs rather contrary to the 'ignorance is bliss' concept.

Pop in there real quick with the other chunk of the ed factor, basically higher education, I hate to sound like a technocrat but I simply don't believe that all degrees, from basket-weaving to hrd science deserve equal weight on there. I say basket-weaving to avoid giving anyone offense but there are a lot of junk degrees. Weighting these the same seems innately flawed. Not too mention it has a public ed bias anyway, I never finished a year of school after fifth grade. Nor did I receive any sort of regular exterior education, and yet I clearly learned far more in the interregnum to college than most, and while I value my college ed, I have learned far more in the time since then I did during, which are nearly equal in length.

There's not much room for doubt, this is an index made by liberal academics that biases towards making their own background basically superior. A prof will score highest in ed, they tend to have a longer LE than average, their income is above the GDPpc and the log kicks in to make the wealthy only marginally happier.

This weighting is very improtant, because every western country ranks between about .95 and .97, so even tiny amounts can make a huge difference. That thing is equal parts education, LE, and GDPpc, that's absurd. Literacy by itself is very nearly as important as GDPpc or LE.

Note also how GDPpc is done on a log curve, where as the other two are linear - that's not exactly a good way to do things. Now, where education increases life pleasure, nobody in any of those countries has illeriterate people who would otherwise be bookworms. If you haven't learned to read decently by 12 you are unlikely to every be a bookworm whose life is significantly improved by being literate, so it's a flat academic bias.

There is a .17 difference between a LE of 65 years and 55 years. Sounds good, but Literacy, being weight as 75% of LE by itself, which translates to 22%, so a country with a 95% literacy rate and a LE of 55 years is considered equal to a country with an LE of 65 years and a literacy rate of 73%, isn't that absurd? Especially since education is already ultimately there in GDPpc, since educated people statistically earn more? Double counting, but after education has too much weight? A ten percent higher literacy rate is all it takes to move from the bottom of the upper rung countries to the top. Let's remember, Iceland was #1 on that list and has dropped to #3, with a bank crash of epic proportions. Does that sound very accurate?

This isn't science after all - look at that index, a high schooler could easily use it and there is no 'scientific' basis for it's conclusions - You want to measure how arbitrary something is, lots of 0's and 5's at the end tend to be a good indicator.

It's junk, utter garbage, they meant well and probably think they did well, but this index is constantly cited by people when it is so much arbitrary trash. When all three factors are equally weighted at 33%, arbitrarily, to point out any difference of around 2% has all the validity of flipping a coin six times and claiming it's weighted because it comes up heads every time is foolish, flipping a coin six times and getting heads each time is, incidentally, going to happen about 2% of the time.

Now, the other flaw, logs for GDPpc and linear for the other two. And yes, I know that the relationship they offer for LE is not linear with age itself by having that 25 year min in there, though education is flat linear, LE is adjusted linear. Sure, being twice as wealthy doesn't make one twice as happy, though on this it would only be 33% more happy if they had it linear, but at the same time, it isn't a measure of individual wealth to begin with. It's the GDP of a country divided by the pop. That means it also represents the tax base, and government expenditures on the social good are not going to curve in net effect in the same way a personal increase in wealth will effect happiness.

Now, shouldn't those other two be logs? Someone living to 60 gets a LE value of 58%, wherease someone living to 70 gets 75%, sounds about right, someone living to 85 gets 100% and values above that (which do not currently exist) still list as 100%. Artificial caps do weird things to stats when you use them as adjustors. Throw in values for most of the great historical civilizations and you'd be lucky to get .05, I really don't think my quality of life is 20 times or more that of someone living in Plato's Greece. Clearly those should be logged too, literacy should not be 25% of the score, which is what 75% of 33% is.

Seriously, I don't think the average person, especially after subtracting additional wealth of education already accounted for in GDPpc, derive 25% of their happines and life quality from being able to read. Most can, all those top countries have pulic ed until one reaches majority, so the people who can't read after that clearly aren't the sorts to be reading novels for fun. You want that weighted in, you probably need to have library usage and book/newspaper sales factoring with it. Then you at least have a decent benchmark for how much people are benefiting from their literacy outside of their income.

Anyone who hasn't learned to read after 12 years or so of school (or even 6) with all those places having special programs for those who have reading disabilities in school, is probably not worth expending additional efforts on teaching to read, it's wasted money. All people being equal and such, I'd argue that beyond a certain percentage, unless the place in question is using a clearly superior teaching method, a higher rate is actually a sign of lower SoL,. because resources diverted into that aren't buying luxuries or feeding the poor or researching vaccines.