Red States, Blue States, and Human Development Index

BBC has a story about the US slipping down the Human Development Index in the latest rankings. It's an interesting read, but it got more interesting for me when I unintentionally compared the HDI map with the Presidential election race 2008 map at Pollster.com.

Human Development Index States MapI was simply on both sites at the same time and noticed some amusing trends. As far as I can tell there's a pretty high correlation between what's called the Human Development Index (HDI, or at least that's what I'm abbreviating it to) and the phrase (coined by Tim Russert [wtf?]) Red and Blue States. Basically, states who rank higher on the HDI tend to be Bluer. Why is that interesting?Red and Blue States Well, you'd think people in the states where things aren't going so great wouldn't vote for the Pro-Business party, right? They'd vote for the (yes, supposedly) Pro-People party... in theory anyways. I believe that's called voting against type.

Obviously this is simplifying things quite a bit and the whole Red State, Blue State thing in itself is controversial, but the two images do lend themselves to, well, in my instance at least, a bit of a giggle.

There is actually some pretty interesting (that's a euphemistic way for me to say depressing) information on the American Human Development Project's website.

Here's the Human Development Project's definition of the Index:

"The state of the nation is often expressed through Gross National Product, daily stock market results, consumer spending levels, and national debt figures. But these numbers provide only a partial view of how people are faring.

The Human Development Index was developed as an alternative to simple money metrics. It is an easy-to-understand numerical measure made up of what most people believe are the very basic ingredients of human well-being: health, education, and income."