Human Development Index - HDI

Ever wondered why houses have foundations? Probably not, because the answer is pretty obvious: it’s a lot harder for houses to remain standing without them. A house might stay upright for a while, but without a good base, the whole structure is a lot more likely to cave under pressure or additional weight.

It turns out that countries are kind of the same way. If they want to see sustainable economic growth, they have to have a strong foundation on which they can build.

That’s where the Human Development Index (HDI) comes in: it helps us figure out a country’s growth potential by looking at the strength of its economic and social foundation.

The UN developed the index back in 1990, and every year, they calculate each country’s HDI and publish the data for the world to see.

So...how do they figure it out? They look at a combo of a nation’s per capita income, its average life expectancy rates, and its literacy and education levels. Then they use fancy math to compute the normalized mean of those three indicators; the closer the final number is to 1.0, the better a country’s HDI is said to be.

For the curious, the United States came in at Lucky #13 (HDI of .924) on the 2018 Human Development Index Report. Norway was #1, with an HDI of .953.