You cannot balance an economy by unbalancing human lives
Why research whistleblowers?
How did human development achieve such prominence?
All credit goes to the late Mahbub Ul Haq and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen! They saw the importance of putting people at the centre of development strategy.
It is the human development index (hdi) that takes life expectancy, adult literacy, and educational enrollments into account, so expressing the real development of people. Many economists, including me, at first criticised Haq when he developed the index. But Haq realised that if gnp is to be displaced as the dominant measure of development, we would need another measure of the same level of vulgarity as gnp but not as blind to social aspects of human lives.
Sen also contributed, by analysing human development as an expansion of human choices and a strengthening of human capabilities. These ideas have been carried forward in the Human Development Reports, which have tackled people's participation, human security, gender, poverty, globalization, technologies, democracy