I first became acquainted with the vaunted human development index (HDI) in my junior year of high school in AP Human Geography. I continued running into it fairly frequently as a university student, but always in discussions about developing countries. We sometimes compared HDIs for developed countries, but we mostly just noticed the vast gulf between rich and poor around the world.
Looking at things this way it's easy to lose sight of geographic differences within countries and generalize in ways that might not necessarily be entirely true. While It's common knowledge that economic conditions, demographics, living standards, and quality of government services all vary widely from place to place within any country - even rich ones - but seeing HDI illustrated on this interactive map of the US is eye opening.
It would be great to see an interactive map like the one I've linked here for GINI coefficient.
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