Alex Galdstein of Oslo Freedom Forum in New Republic has an interesting piece. The usual feeling is dictators dislike all development stats but actually they like these numbers as they can be spinned to suit the regime. More importantly, the regime itself produces these stats:
Exchanges at the Organization of American States usually don’t do well on YouTube. But when the Honduran Minister of Foreign Affairs brought up Venezuela’s crackdown on dissent last summer, Venezuelan representative Delcy Rodríguez scored surprise points with a rebuttal citing the United Nations’ 2016 Human Development Index, which ranks Venezuela 59 spots higher than Honduras. Crackdown or no crackdown, “Venezuela does not demonstrate such terrifying statistics,” she said, in an exchange that soon went viral on Spanish-speaking social media. It was a win for the Maduro regime, and the key to victory was trusted U.N. data.
For those of us working to advance…
View original post 132 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments