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Posted on 07/09/2003 10:05:08 AM PDT by knighthawk
How does that old saying go? The one, I mean, about putting all your eggs in one basket. For the past decade the Liberal government has been encouraging Canadians to absorb national self-esteem from our stellar performance on the annual United Nations Human Development Index. Whatever one's own experience of living standards, labour markets, and whatnot, Canada was officially the world's best place to live from 1992 until 2000. In 2001, it dropped to third-best. We trembled, but we coped. Last week the 2002 numbers were leaked. We're now ranked eighth, one place behind a large country to the immediate south, which must remain nameless to safeguard readers' mental health. Its initials, however, are U.S.A.
The terrible thing is, our southern neighbour doesn't really care: We've lost a statistical battle in which only one side was fighting. Your garden-variety American is hardwired to read just as far as the second word in "United Nations Human Development Index" before he moves on to something more relevant and interesting, like the instructions on a shampoo bottle.
Is this a sound instinct, or is the UN's measure of "human development" meaningful? This year, for the first time, I studied the actual methodology behind the index. What I discovered surprised me in its simplicity. I expected thickets of arcane calculations representing a complex, although no doubt wholly bogus, substructure of science and theory. But no. The bogosity, the perfect, serene arbitrariness of the thing, is right there on the surface. An intelligent high-schooler equipped with an up-to-date almanac could have compiled the figures, or indeed invented the index itself.
The 175 countries in the UN's ranking are sorted according to their score on an overall Human Development Index. This index is the average of three other indices. One is based on life expectancy. One is based partly on school enrolment amongst children, and partly on adult literacy. And one is based on gross domestic product per capita. And that's that. Three magic numbers that, when combined into one, launch a thousand op-eds. The components themselves are available, and well-known, beforehand. Yet somehow the process of averaging the three has attained a baffling significance in itself, as though it would tax the brainpower of the Manhattan Project.
It is astonishing that this annual enterprise is not dismissed out of hand more often. Life expectancy, school attendance plus literacy, and economic productivity are unquestionably important indicators of social health. But who decided that they, as represented in the sub-indices, are of exactly equal importance? The reader, whatever his political predisposition, is likely to conclude that he prefers one of the three at least a little.
In fact, there are political assumptions lurking in the calculations behind the sub-indices. As some defenders of Canada have noted (choosing to spin the numbers rather than hazard the trauma of disregarding them), the top eight countries are bunched quite closely in the final HDI tally. The U.S.A. beat Canada by a score of 0.9376 to 0.9373. Perhaps the margin of defeat, three ten-thousandths, only makes the result more heartbreaking. In truth, however, you could produce any result you liked if you were prepared to calculate the sub-indices in suitably eccentric ways.
Take the matter of GDP. The figures the UN used (dating from 2001) were US$34,320 per capita for the United States and US$27,130 for Canada. The mere naïf regards these figures and concludes that the American economy is 27% larger, per capita, than the Canadian. He might even say that Americans are 27% richer; if he were to consider disposable after-tax incomes, the spread would be wider. The UN does not take this view. "Income is adjusted," the report warns, "because achieving a respectable level of human development does not require unlimited income. Accordingly, the logarithm of income [in U.S. dollars] is used."
You can recognize the significance of this without having to actually figure a logarithm, or a "log," as protractor jockeys call it. The log of a number is its power of 10: the log of 10 is one, the log of a hundred is two, of a thousand, three. On a log scale, $34,320 isn't 27% larger than $27,130, but about two per cent larger. The UN considers the latter figure a much more accurate statement of the disparity in wealth between Canada and the U.S. In the actual calculation, a couple of digits are taken for granted, so the difference ends up being about four per cent.
In the past, Canada has been able to make up this deficit on the life-expectancy side of the equation: as income effects are arbitrarily minimized in the HDI through logarithms, the effect of life expectancy is maximized by a similar technique. The overall consequence, for industrialized countries, is that an extra $2,000 a year in income is outweighed in the balance by the delicious raptures of an 80th year of life. This is a subjective valuation, and the UN has an openly subjective basis for making it. The shocking conclusion is that "human development," to the UN, means "conformity to the UN's amorphous ideas about desirable social arrangements." Pass the shampoo.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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Congressman Billybob
Latest article, now up FR, "Fear and Loathing in the Supreme Court."
Tell you what, Chretien - we'll give you our silly little ranking in this stupid contest so you can gloat about your "victory." All we'll ask in return is that you expend at least some effort into rolling up the welcome mat you've put out for Islamofascists looking for an easy way into the US.
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