I must have forgotten to check the 'email notificaiton' box, didn't see your reply.



It is, but only so long as people openly acknowledge it's limitations, when they base policy off it, they have to defend the whole premise, and that results in justifications of it's accuracy but what's really there, delaying improvement 'because it already works'



You really don't need to, when the benefits aren't obvious, then the margin for doubt is present. New policies either require hard sell of charisma, or fail to because they don't show a singinificant and highly probable improvement over the current set up, and are viewed with skepticism because they rock the boat. The liberal's dilemna, invariably, is that outside of desperate times when any change is preferable to what people think of as sinking ship, only changes which show high-prob of significant improvement will be welcomed.



Sure, but knowing you can get to the moon and knowing a rcoket will be involved doesn't mean strapping a rocket to a man in a spacesuit is a good way to do it, even though it 'includes all the right factors - moon, rocket, spacesuit, man', just having all the right factors in play doesn't mean you'll get a better result than raw guesswork, that's why something has to be able to explain where it get's its terms and weights and be expected to predict to better than random what the results are, while showing that the predicitons isn't based of weighting done from raw empirical pattern guessing. The HDI does not predict with any precision beyond common sense, nor does it give a weighting that has any basis beyond a vague common sense guess.



But life expectancy, as you know, more strongly correlates to local diet than many other things. And with wealth, LE may even go down if the prefered foods (red meat for instance) are available for relatively cheap purchase. Steaks in Europe, first hand account, are hard to find (beef is far less common) and do not meet the 'texan standard' as many of my fellow servicemembers stationed there with me regularly testified. This has a massive effect on LE and clearly is not subject to any sort of social policy acceptable in the land of "Don't tread on me" and "Rare, like it better still be mooing when you bring it to me, buddy"



Well, winning a toin coss twelve years in a row is about 1 in 4096, of course, as improbabilities go, it's still the same odds of as any other result, just most of the results produce parallel situations. No, countries staying on the same piece of the plot doesn't mean anything at all, beyond the obvious, that whatever the origin of the inaccuracy it favors them. If we're saying Hyena ownership inaccurately produces an appearance of wealth, the inaccuracy isn't removed because they appear in roughly the same place, the inaccuracy is there because of the existance of a random distribution, and where individual people sit on it indicates no more than that the error is self-consistent.

By the way, if the trouble here is over my use of inaccurate instead of 'precision', that's fine, the two are essentially interchangeable. A microcope, radar, etc can only be accurate in resolution to half it's wavelength by their nature, or can only be precise to a maximum of that, same thing. Not to be confused with deliberately flawing your data or having mistakes. I can only accurately measure something's speed and momentum down to h-bar over 2, doesn't mean the model's flawed or needs improvement in of itself. The HDI, as is, is at best not precise beyond maybe 2% or so, where the developed countries being compared with it are all at, essentially as a tool, the HDI's resolution is not high enough to look at those things, any more than visual light magniscope can look at objects smaller than 100 nanometers, it is simply impossible.

This is why I'm saying it's purpose is for comparing relatively underdeveloped countries, because the alternative is that it's makers are either scientifically incompetent or have a specific agenda they ar epushing, and I try not to label people as nefarious propagandists with alternatives available. Using it to justify policy inside 1st world countries would be like building a rocket ship to the moon when you don't know to better than 10% what the thrust value per mass of fuel is or what the mass of the vessel itself is.



Diet and culture dominate LE, along with wealth and tech of course. Since law-breaking tends to be more common in non-homogenous cultures (i.e. where the law may radically differ from many people's idea of sin or faux pas) it introduces another inaccuracy. Ultimately, for comparing policies, we must be able to say, regarding the HDI, 'is this particular policy from country X rsponsible for an HDI increase, and is it reasonable to expect similiar success as a policy in that other place?' to which the answer is, of course, no. How well would policies promoting the eating of fish of beef work in the US? Would this increase LE? Yes, there can be no doubt that a higher percent of fish to beef in the US diet would increase LE, short of tax incentives - which would probably be butchered in embryo - the only policy that might help on this would be increasing the amount of fish on school menues, hopefully encouraging more children to like fish. Now, that in mind, was there any need for the HDI to come up with that line of reasoning? Again, no. Comparison of social policies inside a margin of error wil meet with greater resistance than say, POTUS coming up on the platform with the Surgeon General and saying "We need more fish in our diet, to that end I am asking congress for 100 million in subsidy to schools to offset the cost of fish, which we will now mandate any school is eligible for if they ensure that unbattered fish will be included on the menu once a week. No additional subsidies will be supplied on this matter." Now, that would probably go over a heck of a lot better than showing some HDI index to people. And I suspect would be the case across the board, the HDI is not only to vague to hold up under scrutiny, but also to generalized to sell individual policy.



Well, China has a lot more males percent wise then other places. It's not a genetic thing, except so far as males are shorter-lived. But, you get a bias-weight from China simple from abortion too, they can get an abortion after they know gender, and while I don't have a figure on hand (and would doubt the veracity of one considering the source), I think it's a safe bet that people willing to dump their baby girl down a well are at least as likely to abort a female fetus. Ironically this is an example of how HDI could be used for false policy justification, showing abortion to lower LE even though aborted fetus's don't count toward LE, because if the abortion rate of females is higher than males, their net LE will be lower than if that was not the case.



I don't put a price on human life, I engage in triage. What is the cost of a human life? I will not say, but I do know that if I am standing next to a switch on the classic runaway streetcar scenario, I will flip it, because to me it's triage. And whether someone let's the car go down the track and run five people over or flips it onto the track with one person (triage), it is definetly different than flipping it from the track with one person onto the track with five people (arguably homicide).

In this sort of case, taking a billion dollars away via taxes, and then spending it two save a hundred lives when it could have been spent to save a thousand, is not putting a price on human life, it is triage, and no one should ever be allowed in a position of public power who doesn't believe in making a decision whether or not to flip the switch, since we all put them there, in a democracy, specifically to decide whether or not to flip the switch. For the sake of liberty, we need people to sometimes say 'It's not my place to flip this particular switch' (say, gun control or legalized alcohol) but we also need them to be able to say "We've looked into this, the switch has three position. In the up, it will, we think, kill ten people, in the down, twenty, and in the middle, all thirty of them, and right now it's in the middle, I can't be sure, but I'm sure enough, and time is a factor, so I'm flipping the switch up" I want know leaders who wouldn't make that call, pacifism, at that level, is a form of negligent homicide. So in this regard, I can put a price on human life, it's just not dollars, it's other lives. Two for the price of one, all things being equal, is still a good deal, the coin's in play just have faces that aren't dead presidents.



Oh, I agree loosely speaking, but there are both the intangible 'what is life worth without pleasure and the right to make my own decisions' arguments, and then the more measurable "Did our suicide rate just jump 10% because or new tax system decreased luxury purchases by 50%?" argument. Happiness is a medicine, and like medicine, there is a 'too high a dose' level. Utopia bliss via nanny state removes motivation, eyond the obvious, that an increase in suicides or depression from a relatively minor decrease in available luxuries from increased taxation isn't necessarily something we should really care about. Again though, suicide is a bit of an extreme example, but depression isn't, there is a point at which loss of productivity and life from depression caused by decreased access to luxury items will exceed revenue from taxes.



Sure, but in the broad sense of stats, you always want to double down on your best bet. If a kid reacts better to a thousand extra dollars spent on math on him then the same in English, it's better spent there, except insofar as we want a certian minimum across the board standard. That desire for a minimum standard can be factored into things, you just have to find a reasonable value. I don't want to burn 10k getting a student to min standard when they're at about 90%, when I can spend the same amount getting 10 kids from 90 to 100. All these arguments are legit, but only so long as a reasonable weigh to weight them can be included, essentially "We think it's more important to make five subpar students literate then 10 average students know algebra, so we divert resources in accoradance with that, whatever the value is in money that statistically gives us 4 for 10, we say no"



Well, phsyical science pay more than social sciences, actually physics, engineeering, and chem BS degrees have consistently and significantly scored higher in average earnings than all other degrees, and probably not coincidentally score higher on GRE exams in the same way. Partially of course, having a phsyical scientist is very expensinve for a company, beyond salary, setting up a 20 million dollar lab for your new scientist makes it easier to say "Sure, 10k per annum higher, that's fair" and we are very hard to economically replace for similiar reasons.




Yes, but a semi-educated populace can actually be a bigger enemy. "Knows just enough to get into trouble" being that the guy who is dumb and knows he's dumb won't try to fix his own TV, whereas the guy who has a bit of knowledge tends to think he has more and unplugs his TV before working on it, not realizing that a TV is one big capacitor and a relative large one (pre flat-screen) carries enough juice in it to stop your heart. PErsonally I'd like to see a lot less science and history in HS, and a lot more accounting, shop, and first aid. Most of the history people really need to know and are likely to learn in school will be taught to them from general cultural exposure as years go on, and there's nothing worse than someone who finishes off a HS or intro college course on history or philosophy or science and thinks they know what the f they are talking about. The only point of doing that at all is to give them some basics in the hope they might find a field they're passionate about and continue on in it. You take evolution, what the heck is even the point of teaching that in HS? You take ten seconds and say "Currently scientists believe that life adapts over long periods of time, so that creatures in a given environment will tend to be more optimized to it, other less survivable forms having died off. Random mutation occurs, and sometimes these represent benefits and remain. This is called the Theory of Evolution, and has not yet been proven, moving on..." Now, honestly, what point is there to telling them anymore than that, and aren't they likely to already know as much from TV and socializing? It all boils down in the kids head to the mostly accurate if not-exactly-correct summary "The world is old, over time creatures have progressed to more sophisticated and superior forms" so why even bother at that level raising something controversial that makes a lot of people on the right think the left is pushing an atheist agenda and really doesn't benefit the average student anyway? Spend a couple class session not on evolution but rather on pathogen vectors and the importance of handwashing and not coughing into your palm, save a lot more lives and money that way and piss off no one.