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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.
He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.
In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.
Global Real Estate Project
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Does the UN help dictators?The UN is publishing this year its new version of widely expected report on Human Development, grading more than 170 countries around the world. On the surface the changes are not so important. Many countries barely move 1-2 positions up or down. Many don't move at all. In general, for international movers it's a good first tool for information. There are however several traps with this index, not in the top section, but in the middle of it. Some of them we already mentioned in our previous reports. Some of them are worth mentioning again. This index has three main dimensions, literacy, life expectancy, and purchasing power parity income. Let's start with the literacy. It seems logical that this is something very basic for any human development. Through literacy we learn about our social habits and history, develop our intelligence, and finally socialize. On the other hand, in modern societies mass literacy is the only tool available for the government to indoctrinate people and keep them in servitude. Lists of forbidden books and scientific journals and keeping the knowledge for chosen elite only, this are everyday reality in some countries claiming high literacy rates. Let's make a test, matching two lists of countries, those performing well on HDI and those responsible for most violations against free access to information on the Net. Some countries make a perfect match, meaning the high literacy there is nothing more than a tool for state-driven ideological indoctrination. What about high income with no other conditions attached? Are countries with deep class divisions providing the same 'human development' as those that redistribute their wealth equally? A good indicator for wealth distribution is GINI index. We see that countries that look equal in just everything under HDI are in fact planets apart when it comes to wealth distribution. It's again one thing if this unequal distribution occurs in countries with high social mobility, when everybody can go up and down according to his own merits. But in societies when people are born, live and die without experiencing major social mobility, in these societies being financially advantaged or disadvantaged doesn't correlate well with any notion of 'human development'. In such societies purchasing power parity isn't sign of richness or poverty only; it's also social privilege or curse. Last but not least, long and healthy life represents a good but not high accurate measure. Living for a long time in a prison with three meals a day, free medical and dental care will therefore qualify for a good life, but it will hardly represent anything promising in terms of 'human development'. A country where people have unusually high statistically significant suicide rates will, on the contrary, represent deficit in human development. Countries were people are forced to care about their health will thus perform better than countries where caring about own health is a matter of personal responsibility. In general even these obvious problems with HDI index cannot eliminate the simple conclusion that democratic, rich, and socially mobile nations offer better human development. The difference may come to those countries where undemocratic regimes, corrupt administrations, and immobile societies use backdoors to show better performances than they actually have. The UN cannot help dictators overcoming best democratic countries, but it can help them showing better scores than they actually deserve.
Human Development Index - 2006: --------------------
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