A simple measure of human development: the human life indicator

The goal of the Human Development Index (HDI) is to provide a comprehensive measure of human well-being. The HDI accomplishes this by combining indices in three of key domains of human development: health, education and economic conditions. Despite widespread agreement with its goal, the HDI has been criticized on a number of methodological grounds including: (1) measurement errors in its components, with the economic dimension having the greatest measurement error, (2) historical inconsistency, (3) unjustified tradeoffs across its dimensions, and (4) redundancy of its dimensions. Here we introduce the Human Life Indicator (HLI), which is a variant of life expectancy that takes inequality in life spans into account. Life expectancy is the least error-prone of all the HDI components. HLI is free from other shortcomings intrinsic to HDI. The behavior of the HLI in time and space reflects the major economic and political events across the world and provides a credible picture of the evolution of human development in the last century. HLI can be used in policy analyses at the subnational level and can help in the evaluation of progress toward the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).