The Economist: Nation states
THE human development index (HDI) is an attempt to give a snapshot of a country's success by combining three important indicators: health, education and wealth. The most recent global HDI ranking from the United Nations' Development Programme places Norway top, with the United States fourth (out of 169 countries). But with over 300m people living in 50 states, America varies greatly, so the American Human Development Project releases a state-based version of the HDI. We have put the two indices together to see where America's states would rank if they were countries. Because the indicators used in the two indices were slightly different, we calculated our index from scratch using comparable data (though we used a proxy for educational attainment). Our index still has Norway as number one but America drops to eighth.
