The human development index (HDI) was developed in the wake of Amartya Sen’s critique of development policy that is oriented toward GDP growth. Sen argued that development policy should promote freedom as well. The authors of the HDI included various measures of freedom (or mostly: of human well-being) like political rights, literacy, and health. As the graph below shows, however, a policy of promoting GDP is not much different from a policy of promoting HDI, especially given how noisy both these measures are.