peter: no killing is best
Right. No, I have no faith at all in such "universal" indices. The real test is in the individual, on the ground. Those who suffer from mulnutrition are in every country on the planet. The poor, the uneducated, the starving, the unhoused, the drug addicts are not the monopoly of thos countries which don't appear in the best SLIs. Nor are the crooks, the callous companies (like United carbide, BHP, Shell, Monsanto, etc, etc, etc,) which leave whole countries devastated, their soils and waterways poisoned or sold out, inaccessible to the local populations. These are indices which don't show the "why" for the SLI figures, much like the Olympics records don't show the trauma an athlete might have suffered just before the race or the event, though s/he might have been an excellent one. (Will you see anywhere in the records, the hassle that a poor runner received at the hands of a mad irish drunk?)
