But aren't you glad you can fix that with an edit now? Maybe my favorite feature on RAFO; I used to toss and turn when I forgot to click the box, because there was no way to fix it, and I'm not the only one who "necros" sometimes. As I said, life happens.

I'll never believe any statistical model is perfect; they are approximations by nature, especially used predictively, and as long as there's room for improvement you do so where practical. If policy decisions are based on it (and at a legislative level it's certainly too soon for that with HDI, however much debate fodder it provides us layman) that's more rather than less incentive to improve an always flawed model.

That in itself is reason to seek more accurate and precise metrics. That social sciences are far more inexact than natural ones is, once again, reason for more rather than less effort to change that. Because the liberals dilemma is not a purely hypothetical one; unresolved it can have serious long term consequences even if liberals do have the right idea in some cases. The intersection with Global Warming (for lack of a better term) is a good example here; if those arguing for a large human role in climate change are correct we don't have a lot of time to establish that they are, particularly given the lag between the cause and effect of emissions. On that particular issue I think cost/benefit analysis favors greater efficiency, reduced consumption and development of renewables, because they pay large tangible benefits as ends in themselves even if they aren't inherently necessary (which they well may be. ) However, there frequently arise crises where two or more responses are mutually exclusive, but have potentially devastating or wonderful outcomes, and the clock keeps running while we're deciding which is which.

I do think it's better than common sense, but how much better is very much open to debate. In fact, even whether it's better is; it's very hard to "prove" because you have to define your parameters for success first, and we haven't. Part of HDIs appeal is that it helps to do that, if only self-referentially.

I think there's a partial correlation with education, because people are at least more likely to eat well if they know how, whether or not they actually do so. Here again we see that while the strongest correlation (barring long large scale warfare) with life expectancy is diet, diet can be influenced by wealth and education. Why is beef so much less common in Europe, out of proportion to PPP GDP/capita? They may have less graze, but if they have the money beef can be imported (indeed, I believe this was the case in Japan in the '80s and '90s, part of what led to skyrocketing incidence of heart disease. )

If the distribution is truly random, then it should fluctuate over time. If we plot countries by per capita hyena ownership, we're not likely to see all the same countries in all the same places; even in Africa there will be variations from year to year between various African countries, and elsewhere we'll probably see a truly random distribution. We may say this metric determines "how African" a country is, but unless we see variations both within and outside Africa we can't say it's random, though it is inaccurate.

You've just about convinced me of that from looking harder at the numbers; the problem is the major point of variance, at least between the US and other Western countries, is life expectancy, which is both easier to measure accurately and precisely and far more extreme for us relative to the rest of the West. Education is a wash and GDP/capita favors us against every Western country except Norway and, depending on the agency reporting, either Luxembourg or Lichtenstein. We're back to asking whether greater wealth is worth greater loss of life. It always boils down to that, and the answer seems to depend on which one affects the person asked the most.

Probably so, I wasn't suggesting it be heavily used in Congress or for stump speeches, I was using it as the best metric I could find to encompass standard of living here vs. the rest of the West, which is broad and vague enough it's hard to define itself (in fact, HDI uses the term "standard of living" SOLELY for GDP/capita. ) I believe very strongly we're letting our prejudice against socialism cause us to fall behind the rest of the developed world, and have been doing it for some time, but it's not in any one area, it's nearly all of them, so I don't want to point to just one and say "J'accuse!" It's not that we're living in Third World poverty and squalor (just yet) it's more of an infrastructure thing, but if we make some basic changes now I believe it can simply be transitional. Britain and the rest of Europe went through it after the War, but look at where they are now. Of course, they didn't do it following a Dickensian laissez-faire model either.

True, China's definitely got more problems than LE, hence I don' think genetics is the primary factor there.

A much better comparison, yes, if a much harder one.

Largely true, though I'd like to note in passing that the philosophical "what is life worth without...?" is a question the dead never pose. People kill themselves because they don't want to slowly starve, or die of exposure, but there's a very short list of people who kill themselves over XBoxes, and the fact is luxury items aren't really the problem there.

Basic cost/benefit analysis; it may be less expensive to get ten kids who know their Rembrandt from their Picasso than to teach them to integrate, too, but which has the better pay off? In a lot of ways, social sciences are MORE challenging than the natural sciences with its control groups and neatly measurable results, and in the context of national and global policy making, arguably as important or more. Guess which pays better....

It's easier to calculate the return on your investment with the physical sciences. That does not, in itself, make it a BETTER investment, but that's how we compensate it.

Oh, I agree, but I think we semi-educate our populace just fine because we take the dregs of the dregs to teach them, well, everything they'll ever learn in school. It's not much better in universities, where most of the faculty is seeking grant money or publish or perishing their way to tenure (or trying) and farming out their classes and/or research to grad students. We place a premium on education, but don't seem to truly VALUE it, hence the phenomenon whereby you need a bachelors degree or better to get a management position, but ANY bachelors will do; they don't want you to prove more than your ability to game the system.