Human development
As an analyst I’m always intrigued by measures of “value”.
Investors will pay different multiples on the profits of different companies, depending on the risk/reward prospects.
Higher profits one year does not necessarily mean a higher value for investors for all myriad of reasons.
Therefore, I find this human development index – HDI – fascinating.
It shows that while the US is the richest country overall in terms of, say, absolute GDP. It is not by some way the best in measures that could be claimed to measure human development (and by proxy perhaps, happiness?) such as life expectancy and infant mortality.
In the words of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990: “Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it”