Response to Jahan and Rosling 02/04/2020

In the podcast, Jahan defines human development as the enlargement of human choices and freedoms in every day life and this may be achieved through 2 distinct steps. Firstly, by enhancing capabilities such as knowledge and access to proper health care and secondly, by improving opportunities to use the capabilities such as generating higher employment, credit and innovation. And If these two sides are not balanced, there will be a great loss of human potential. Similarly, the different measures incorporated into the HDI include mortality rates, birth rates, employment rates, and a focus on a long healthy life, improved standard of living and increased knowledge.

An example of where health appeared to be a precursor to wealth is during Mao-Ze Dongs rule of China in the mid to late 1900s. During this time, China saw decreased mortality rates and soon after with the contributions of Deng Xiao-Ping, China increased its economic wealth, supporting the idea that wealth alone will not improve a country. The people of the country must be provided basic necessities such as health and education for there to be any major improvement. The same pattern can be seen in the United Arab Emirates which originally had a high GDP but low child mortality rates. Through growth of infrastructure and better health services, the UAE too saw improvements.

Lastly, the dangers of using averages when describing development is that there is too large of a difference between individual countries for average data to be of much help. Averages lead to an over-simplification of data and it perpetuates the concept that there is a “normal” or “standard” level for countries to be at which completely disregards the distnctiveness and variability of countries around the world. Therefore, according to Rosling, human development must be contextualized to individual countries because what works in one country will not work in another.

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