re: HDI
Enjoyed reading about the HDI and it is hard to argue with the above.
Last December I wrote a small newspaper article about how "We should measure our well being?." It touches on the similar issue of aggregating various indicators.
Incase you are interested it is here http://columbiacommunique.org/?p=1374
A quote from the article:
“We might want to know how fast we are driving (55 miles an hour) and how far we can go before we run out of gasoline (250 miles) but a single metric, formed by adding the two numbers (305) would tell us nothing about either question.” Prof Stiglitz