Talk:American Human Development Report

Untitled
"The American Human Development Index is an indicator of well-being which aims to show the inequalities between congressional districts, states, races and gender. It is a composite of three dimensions of human development: longevity, access to knowledge and standard of living. A modified version of the global HDI, the American HDI uses official U.S. government data on life expectancy to measure longevity, a combination of educational attainment and school enrollment to measure knowledge, and median earnings to measure standard of living."

Access to knowledge is based on the population's highest grade level reached in school plus current school enrollment rates? A preposterous index. Why not use % of population with a valid library cards (or better, the number of books checked out from libraries per capita) and % of homes with high speed internet accounts (or per capita hours on line surfing the web)?

Median earnings as a measure of the standard of living does not include the cost of living!

I assert that the basis of each index is arbitrary. Hence, they are highly questionable.Larry R. Holmgren (talk) 01:29, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Mississippi references.
I am going to ask why the NAACP is used as a reference in Missisippi considering the NAACP is a biased racist based oranization which only looks at the disparities of race instead of looking at the disparities found among all Mississippians. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Brenthere (talk • contribs) 10:42, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Discrepancy with UN HDI report
According to this report, the average US HDI measure is 5.06, yet the UN HDI report, ostensibly using the same criteria, consistently ranks the US around 9.50 for HDI. Can anyone explain this enormous discrepancy in the data?

For reference, 5.06 is right on the cusp between countries ranked "Medium Human Development" and "Low Human Development" (between Togo and Nigeria) in the UN report. Unless I'm missing something obvious?

69.12.129.253 (talk) 01:15, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Question on race
Studies have mostly found that educational performance by race, is not quite as cut and dried as once thought. Whites in the South often (but not always) do as well or better than whites up north. Blacks in the south, surprisingly, often do as well or even better as blacks up north. To put a fine point on it, once race is considered, the South does pretty well. (There are exceptions. Mississippi does poorly either way. Massachusetts does well either way).

So my question is, with categories allowed for race, how do the states perform? The only reason for not performing this additional calculation (the one in education is done by the government, BTW) is that the study might not show the Democratic-voting states do quite as well any more. Student7 (talk) 13:14, 1 December 2010 (UTC)