page_title: Human Development Index
section_title: Criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Human Development Index / Criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Graph showing ecological footprints of nations along with the Human Development Index (a measure of quality of life)
context_page_description: The Human Development Index is a statistic composite index of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores a higher HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the gross national income GNI per capita is higher. It was developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and was further used to measure a country's development by the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report Office.
  The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index. While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that "the IHDI is the actual level of human development", and "the HDI can be viewed as an index of 'potential' human development". The index does not take into account several factors, such as the net wealth per capita or the relative quality of goods in a country. This situation tends to lower the ranking for some of the most advanced countries, such as the G7 members and others.
context_section_description: The Human Development Index has been criticized on a number of grounds, including alleged lack of consideration of technological development or contributions to the human civilization, focusing exclusively on national performance and ranking, lack of attention to development from a global perspective, measurement error of the underlying statistics, and on the UNDP's changes in formula which can lead to severe misclassification in the categorisation of "low", "medium", "high" or "very high" human development countries.
caption: HDI vs. ecological footprint
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