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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (93442)	11/3/2008 5:41:43 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541761

Here's a Wiki page that uses the Human Development Index as a measure of standards of living. You don't link to it, but perhaps you mean en.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org It shows the US behind a bunch of European countries, plus Canada, Australia, and Japan. You can get all sorts of different countries on the top, all you have to do is set your criteria different ways. The idea of adding other measures besides GDP per capita (or other measures of the size of the economy per person, or income or spending per person) isn't a bad one, but what criteria to add are subjective. Also the "Human Development Index" doesn't just add other criteria it reduces GDP per capita's impact as it increases in such a way as to make being wealthier have relatively minimal impact by using the "natural logarithm" of per capita GDP rather than per capita GDP. And all it doesn't claim to be a measure of standard of living, it uses the natural log of per capita GDP as the standard of living part of its calculation. Even if one accepts the natural log rather than the straight figures, the US has a higher natural log of GDP per capita than most European countries, and thus by the United Nations Development Program's own standards the US has a higher standard of living. (UNDP is the group that created the "Human Development Index). Also the US still comes in 12th in the Human Development Index standard, ahead of the UK, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg (the 1st or 2nd richest country in Europe), New Zealand, Italy, Germany etc. Even by this standard the US is ahead of most of Europe.