• My first impressions of the HDI are that it feels very abstract. Just looking at the countries on top, and the maps representing HDI, it doesn’t tell me much. Compared to a map of GDP by country, the maps look almost the same. But there are some differences, and by comparing and contrasting the two I have learned some interesting things. I think that the HDI is a more nuanced measure of development than GDP is, but using solely HDI or GDP, or any other one metric to compare development, is not necessarily useful.
• The HDI was created in part to measure development better than GDP does by looking at more than just economic factors. This helps recognize countries that may not be as wealthy, but still very developed or countries that are not as developed but may seem that way because of their high GDP. In this aspect, the HDI is successful. In the 2020 HDI report, Norway, Ireland, and Switzerland were on top. By 2021 GDP estimates, the US, China, and Japan were the top three. The countries at the top of the HDI list are definitely smaller than the US or China, but are just as, if not more livable than the countries that outrank them in GDP.
• This doesn’t mean that HDI is a perfect measure of development, however. If you were to look at a map representing GDP beside a map representing HDI, there wouldn’t be much difference. It’s also hard to fit all of the factors that the HDI does into a single number and decide how to weigh those factors. There are critiques of the HDI that certain factors don’t have enough weight, or that there should be new factors introduced. The HDI may measure freedoms better than GDP does, but by simplifying these different data sets, there is a lot of context lost as to what made a country score high or low.
• If there was more than one index, it would be easier to see exactly what issues affect certain countries and how each country ranks on those issues. Putting every index together into one index only introduces issues of how those indexes should be weighted and makes it hard to distinguish exactly what the HDI means. If there were four indexes, economy, health, equality, and infrastructure, for example, it would be easier to see what a country does well, and it would not be as difficult to compare four maps to each other than to wonder what one map means. Of course, weighing datasets to make up those four indexes has the same issues of balancing as just one, but at least the datasets in those indexes would be more correlated to one another, because they are all health-related, or economy-related, for example.
• I think that the idea of the HDI is interesting, but combining information arbitrarily into one index defeats the purpose for me. If the HDI was split into different categories, it would be easier to learn about development issues in different countries and compare and contrast a country’s ranking in different categories. If presented properly, it shouldn’t be any harder for a viewer to understand the multiple indexes than it would for them to understand the HDI.