There's a lot there and I'd rather not jump around too much in my thinking, so I'll try to get to the early bits later, let's focus on the HDI for now with one caveat. I did not say other countries do not do research, I specifically say they do, but by it's very nature the country with the most funds, scientists, and infrastructure is going to do the lion's share, and in the case of medical research, we produce more per person. I am hardly unaware of things like CERN, and I would point out that I almost certainly am more aware of research being done here and abroad than probably 99% of the poulation of which ever country is actually doing it. I used the term 'drafting' for a reason, drafting on a vehicle does not interfere with there actions at all, but benefits the vehicle drafting, for a bicyclist on a team, one can draft the other and then the other passes and plays the same role, currently the US is the lead vehicle, and others draft primarily off of us, in a few cases we draft off them, again, CERN. Moving back to HDI...



No, I'm quoting an economics professor who made the quip while analyzing the flaws of HDI. They top it out, whereas the powers you'd expect come in lower, The US is 13, the UK is 21, Germany is #22 - the UK and Germany both have many of those polices that are highlighted by socialists as good and certainly have parallel infrastructure to the US. Japan, at number 10, is just a tiny decimal fraction above the US with the second largest economy in the world. I question the accuracy and relevance of any index which produces results that do not have them all higher, and uses arbitrary weighting.



I am, of course, using basket-weaving as an analogy so as not to mention by name other majors I consider less valueable at the baccalaurette level. I've no more problems with a wicker class as a 1 hour pass/fail elective then I do billiards, bowling, winetasting or fencing.

I think I phrased this badly, my learning more post-college has much to do with having learned how to learn during college. Pre-college and post-elementary there was nothing I could not easily learn from a book. Interest as opposed to formal education governs most early learning. At any level of knowledge, one reaches a point where formal instruction produces diminishing returns, that is why we have no degree beyond the Ph.D., and most formal classwork stops after the first two years of grad school, even by then, professors expect one to fill deficiencies by checking out the book and it becomes an easy matter to learn in a weekend of reading what would normally be a freshmen or sophomore level class. A poetry appreciation course is just that, an initital exposure, to both major works and terminology, after which by and large a person can continue on their own if they have the interest without too large a difference between them and someone who continued formal schooling on the matter and both spend roughly equal times learning. For the other point, I have a GED, I am a high school dropout on account of returning to school for three weeks in the 9th grade after skipping grades, and all that was required by law at my location was that I take the ninth grade proficiency course, there was no accreditation. While I do not see a large scale alternative to public education, yet, I do tend to feel that everyone is an autodidact and formal education has a bad habit of suppressing this tendency in areas where we consider it important. There is little difference between memorizing a pack of baseball cards and the chemical periodic table, except the one is viewed as fun and the other is not. The prupose of this point is not to point out exceptions to the rule exists, or that exceptions to a rule typically indicate a fundamental flaw in the concept. It is that non-standarized systems do not compare well to each other, and inaccuracies remains where glossed over. A school system that teaches from 9-5 all year round likely produces a higher rate of literacy than 8-2 180 days a year for the same duration, this is not factored into HDI, and while that is obviously understandable, understandable or not, the inaccuracy remains.



Certainy GDPpc effects LE both directly and indirectly, as it gives money for treatment and medical infrastructure. Vive-versa, the gross income of someone over their life is likely to be far higher for someone who leads a long and healthy life, education should impact both and be impacted by both. We've no diagreement there. I object to arbitrarily making them all equal, they obviouysly are not except perhaps coincidentally. Weighting each to one third is inaccurate. Complex systems having numerous factors, typically causing both positive and negative feedbacks, but just because you do not know does not mean you should arbitraily treat them all as equal. A materials boiling and melting points vary on three things, temperature, pressure, and the individual properties of the substance(s) in question. You can not arbitrarily say they all have equal weight. Double the temp and remove all the pressure and you won't get the same melting point, you will get no melting point at all, liquids can not typically exist in a vacuum and things pass directly from solid to gas. Most substances have a triple point, at which a given pressure and temp all of the quanttiies can exist, as opposed to a double point (a glass of ice water or a pot of boiling water) treating it arbitrarily as equal weighting you will not predict this effect, your results will be utterly meaningless, ultimately the HDI is acceptable only because it contains important factors and produces results that seem vaguely relevant.



Prove that statement.



Science is science, I do not discard social science, but I do expect them to obey the rules of science, just because their circumstances do not permit much accuracy doesn't mean they get a get out of jail free card. Arbitrarily weighting each equally was done because there was no alternative, that lack of alternatives does not mean the flaws isn't there. I honestly think you are confusing wrong with inaccurate - the HDI is not an accurate measure, I know no scientist who would say that it is accurate to 2%, except in terms of the internal data being self-consistent, and that is where all the leftist arguemnts based on HDI come from, they do not argue that the HDI is higher, they use the HDI to argue that the standard of living is higher and that it is higher as a result of certain policies, in that regard the HDI is simply not accurate to prove that statement. I don't think many would disagree that all three of those factors should be weighted in at somewhere between 10-50%. But I can not think of any legitimate way to refine those values scientifically. Those who are pro-european-socialism abuse this index, as you have done, as many do, because it's real point is as a measure of developing countries. It's goal was to produce a good benchmark into which clearly developed countries would all sit on the upper spectrum, to be used as a gauge for developing nations. Literacy is very important for developing nations, because you can not realistically develop a tech infrastructure without a decent junk of your pop knowing how to read, again, realistically, a 50% literacy rate is probably sufficient, but with specific social barriers (X class or gender does not receive public ed) you are unlikely to get that value, it will either be fairly low or make up the majority of your pop.

You are literally using statistical margins of error to justify things, so whereas I consider the HDI a decent benchmark for developing countries, I must tell you it is simply scientifically absurd to use it as a comparison of economic and governmental policy. It lacks the singiifcant digits, I do not knw why they give three figures, that is by the way absolute proof of it not being scientific, because there is now way to justify anything on there to even ten percent accuracy, let alone two whole order of magnitude higher.

Look, if I measure nine things down to eight decimal places, and another to three, and all those figures factor in to my final result, any digit beyond three is fanciful nonsense, reagardless of accuracy of the other values. The values are all given as three digits, to merit that, every single value in the works must be at least three digits, or it is not true, yet it disprove itself in it's own math because it use 75% for ALI, not 75.0, and ofcourse that is clearly an arbitrary value, 3/4 does not tend to result as an answer much. They do it with 25 and 85 too. Now, they do it even worse with 1/3 as the weighting, by definiton the study is only accurate to 1 significant figure, making it an order of magnitude result - that is acceptable and IMO valid. THe HDI is useful as effectively an order of magnitude scale, 1-10, after that, it only serves as accurate for comparing a country to itself, and then you needn't bother with the HDI, just compare those three things to previous values, then you don't even need to try to weight them.




By imposing artificial caps of 0-1 they already prevent this. A LE of 95 and ALI of 0% scores lower than an LE of 85 and a ALI of 1%

Also, yes, this weighting is absolutely arbitrary. Each of those three factors is not, and they are the only three factors I can think of that can realistically be measured. 'Personal Freedom' is not something you can really measure. The reason they don't say it's arbitrary is the same reason they don't say 'may have errors from false reporting', it's obvious, or should be.



You can practically count the population of Norway on one hand. Yes, PPP is important to factor in, of course, PPP itself tends to be a dubious figure. No one is saying (well, some do and for good reasons) that PPP or HDI are deliberate distortions, only that their accuracy is limited and should not be used for the political purposes that it is used for. Honestly, PPP is no more accurate than the Big Mac Index the Economist puts out. It all depends on the 'basket' and even like items are often vastly different in quality. PPP also does very poorly as a guide in place that subsidize or tariff/tax items, thus using PPP for a GDP sustitute is not necessarily very valid.

Let's carry this analogy further, ALI. This is what? The measure of literacy of presumably the primary language. How well does this compare to bilingual countries? Does this factor in relative complexities of languages? Does this acknowledge that knowing how to read English is more advantageous at this time than knowing other languages? If you come form a country of 1 million with a distinct language, is this as valuable to your life as knowing English in and English speaking country is?



Joel, social science is a science, but that does not mean it can pull accuracy out of nowhere, math is math, you can only be as accurate as your least accurate value. Again, by stating one-third as the weight, it is accurate to a single digit, one, uno, the number after zero. Unless you want to show me where they have measured or dervied these values to 0.333 each, then they can not yield a final value more accurate than .9 or .5 or .6, they made up one-third. They're open about it, the just say 'we gave them all equal weight', but that doesn't change anything. Franky, I do not think they can measure ALI to three digits. It is a nice and not arbitrary scale of measurement. They're not trying to use the percentage of people who own a hyena as a measurmeent of development. The weighting is what is arbitrary.

It is not capitalist tendecnies that make people like to use GDPpc and LE as guages for SoL, it is that they can be easily measured and it is hard to distort them, they can be falsely reported, but all measurements can and that is unavoidable. Both have a direct and common sense connection to SoL, but we do not say they are SoL, we say they 'indicate' a higher SoL, as they obviously do. There are no countries where there is a massive difference between LE falsely indicates one has a higher standard of living, nor GDPpc. Are they accurate measures for gauging SoL between near-parallel countries? Of course not, because they only indicate, the correlation is not 100%.



Knowing wtf is going on is not directly correlated to reading. Heck I listen to most books on audio rather than read them, and most peoplew catch or listen to their news, not read it. Considering you can acquire 'readers' that will read of text on your computer or even hand-held (though expensinve) scanners that will do the same, literacy is arguably less important in that context. But I am not disputing it's importance, I am disputing claiming it is 33.3%, when 333.4 or 33.2 or 25 or 50 all seem equally valid and equally unproveable - and more importnt than unproveable is unproven. It may be possible to measur eit's effect, however, this was not done nor the origin of 33.3% on the HDI.



While pies grow or shrink from year to year, at any given time it is a certain size, any piece used for one thing can not be used for another. Money spent on vaccines and literacy is not spent on an X-box, we can say that one is more valuable than the other, but not having the Xbox or paying a larger percent of your net wealth to acquire it because taxes have taken more of the gross is still a loss in your standard of living, you may gain more as a culture by vaccines but that changes nothing, part of your pie has been removed for one purpose, leaving you less pie for the rest. If the average cost to teach someone to read is 10k, spending 15k for somone is is 5k more not spent on something else. Where the pie is limited, to say 60k, you have a choice between teaching 6 average or 4 below average. To teach all six below average means taking away 30k from something else. The merits of that 'something else' obviously vary, but whatever it is will now be less funded. The alternate case, let's say to go from 95% ALI to 96% ALI would require a 5% increase in education spending, is it worth it? IS 96 to 97% worth another 10%? You beign getting siminishing returns, less per dollar, same as you can't expec tto get double the rearch everytime you double the money but might get double the research by a 10% incrase in funding, as the pie is limited, you try for the latter not the former and don't increase the funding for the former.