The above observations imply that a key finding of the paper—that child mortality fell at the treatment sites at triple the nationwide rural background rate—is incorrect. Child mortality fell at 5·9% per year at the sites versus 6·4% per year on average across all areas of the countries in question (probably more in rural areas alone) according to the available data that most closely match the project period. This difference is not significant.

No one has suggested that Hollywood lower movie-ticket prices by asking Johnny Depp or Jennifer Lopez to walk away with $10 or $20 million less a year. Steve Jobs found ways to dodge taxes comparable to those deployed by any Wall Street fatcat, but he was iPad cool, and so his iPhone billions were exempt from the Occupy nonsense. Cool capitalists are immune from the neo-Marxist critique of capitalism — a racket that $40 billion–rich Warren Buffett learned late in life, but well enough, with the “Buffett Rule.”

When nations are ranked by gross national income per capita, the United States comes in sixth, after Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, and Iceland, confirming one's general impression that the United States is the wealthiest large country; none of the countries ranked ahead of the U.S. have more than a fortieth of the U.S. population (Switzerland, the most populous of the group, has a population of 7.5 million). But when countries are ranked by the United Nations' Human Development Index, which rates 177 of the world’s 193 countries, the United States falls to 12, Denmark to 14, and Luxembourg to 18; and among the nations promoted above the United States are Australia, Canada, Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Finland, and Spain (in that order). The composition of the Index reflects dissatisfaction with income as a measure of well-being. And of course it is a limited measure; income is not the only argument in a person's utility function. The Human Development Index is an attempt to develop a better measure of well-being. It is a composite of three indexes: GDP per capita (computed on a purchasing power parity basis, to correct for distortions introduced by using currency exchange rates); life expectancy at birth; and a combination of the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, secondary, and college/university enrollment rate, with the adult literacy rate being weighted twice as heavily as the enrollment rate. For each component index, the value of 0 is assigned to the minimum level of the development indicator (income, life expectancy, and enrollment) and 1 to the maximum, and each country's score is the percentage of the maximum level that it achieves. A country's Human Development score is the simple average of its scores on the three indexes. I cannot myself see the value of the Human Development Index. Not that per capita income, life expectancy at birth, and level of education as proxied by adult literacy and school enrollments are unimportant; a ranking of each of these aspects of human development might be a good first step in identifying areas of weakness that a society might wish to devote additional resources to improving. It is the combining of the indexes and announcing that the combination offers a ranking of nations by the degree of their "human" as distinct from narrowly defined "economic" development that strikes me as dubious, and indeed as senseless. The obvious objection is to the equal weighting of the three indexes, and to the omission of a host of other important dimensions of development, such as housing quality, pollution, tax rates, adult life expectancy, crime rates, unemployment, inflation, quality and variety of goods and services, economic growth, and quality of education--though including them would exacerbate the weighting problem, and some involve serious measurement problems. A less obvious objection, but a general problem with rankings, is that from a sensible evaluative standpoint the distance between ranks is more important than the number of ranks that separate two countries. The wealthiest nation has a per capita income twice as great as that of the 20th wealthiest nation. That is a big difference. But now consider life expectancy at birth. Japan is number 3 with a life expectancy at birth of 82 years; the United States is only number 44, with a life expectancy at birth of 78. A four-year difference in life expectancy is not trivial by any means; but compare it to the difference in per capita income between the third richest country, Switzerland, and the 44th, Palau: the Swiss income per capita is almost eight times as great as the per capita income of Palau. If a country devotes resources to improving life expectancy, it has to give up some other good. It is hard to say that the United States is making a mistake in not spending more resources on extending life expectancy; many Americans think that we spend too much on health care already. One reason (though by no means the only one) that the United States ranks only 44th in life expectancy is that our large black population has an abnormally high death rate; the average life expectancy of black male Americans is only 69. This shockingly high death rate reflects deep-seated problems of American blacks that would probably cost an enormous amount of money to solve. The political will to expend those resources does not exist.

Other scholars, however, say that government itself is the problem. T. N. Srinivasan, a professor of economics at Yale University, says that political freedoms, to work, need to be complemented by economic freedoms. Mr. Sen, he said, ''doesn't emphasize enough the importance of free markets, trade and access to world markets and capital.'' The reason authoritarian China has grown more rapidly than democratic India, he said, is its embrace of economic liberalization. Mr. Sen, he added, ''seems to have a much dimmer view of globalization than people like me, who see open markets as the best opportunity of the last century'' for countries to grow and develop.

The case of medieval Europe makes for pleasant reading – especially for academics. A new form of human capital (legal training) was discovered, elites supported investments in it by establishing universities and giving students privileges (effectively subsidising training); then, secular and spiritual lords hired the legally-trained to work as administrators, and supported contexts in which legal training was valuable (e.g., markets). However, the fact that Roman legal knowledge spread and was ultimately accepted throughout Europe should not be taken for granted. It was not inevitable.
First, a focal point for all students and scholars interested in learning and teaching about Roman law had to emerge; this coordination problem was solved with the rise of Bologna as the preeminent location of legal teaching.
Second, teachers and students of law needed state protection: in the Middle Ages, foreign students’ and faculty’s legal rights were poorly-defined and left them open to expropriation; they needed protection from townspeople; they needed the right to travel. The establishment and protection of university students’ and faculty’s legal rights was a policy choice made by secular and Church lords. Famously, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa’s Authentica Habita of 1155 granted a range of privileges and protections to students and faculty.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Roman and Canon Law had to be accepted by the rulers of the time as their tool of choice to adjudicate cases and manage an administration.2  Without this form of elite support, choosing to study Roman law might have had too low an expected return for students to invest in the training. In addition, had elites found the study of Roman law useless, they may not have supported it by protecting students – indeed, they might have discouraged it if they found legal study threatening to their positions.
Policy choices made by the ‘states’ of the time – both in the education sector per se, and in the labour market – were thus crucial to the success of the first universities, and the investments made in the new form of human capital that they produced. This pattern was repeated in the public support for many of America’s research universities in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it bears remembering in the 21st century.