Which countries are raising the most productive humans?

DESPITE their dour reputation, economists frequently play with metaphor and simile, just like literary folk. One familiar example is “human capital”, as Deirdre McCloskey of the University of Illinois has pointed out. Economists have been likening knowledge, skill and stamina to physical capital, such as plant and equipment, since Adam Smith, who counted “the acquired and useful abilities” of a country’s people as one of several kinds of fixed capital, alongside “useful machines” and “profitable buildings”.

But unlike poets, economists prefer to quantify their analogies—to measure whether thou art 15% or 20% more lovely and more temperate. In that spirit, the World Bank this week unveiled a new measure of human capital for 157 countries. Its index combines five indicators of health and education (including the chances of dying before the age of five and between the ages of 15 to 60, the chances of stunted growth, the years of education an average child will complete by age 18, and the score they can expect on school tests) to measure how much human capital a person born today is likely to accumulate. It follows a similar measure for 195 countries from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) published in the Lancet, a medical journal, in September.