The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) uses the Human Development Index (HDI) in an attempt to summarize in one number the progress in health, education, and economics of a country. In 2012, the HDI was as high as 0.955 for Norway and as low as 0.304 for Niger. The gross domestic product per capita (GDPPC), by contrast, is often used to summarize the overall economic strength of a country. Is the HDI related to the GDPPC? At the top of the next column is a scatterplot of HDI against GDPPC.

a) Explain why fitting a linear model to these data might be misleading.
b) If you fit a linear model to the data, what do you think a scatterplot of residuals vs. predicted HDI will look like?

0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.4 T 0.3 20,00040,000 60,000 80,000 GDPPC