Is measuring "human development" redundant?

An interesting perspective from FLOW hit my in-box today that talked about the correlation between GDP and the Human Development Index (HDI), a measure of child mortality, literacy, education, and standard of living. As FLOW pointed out, "economist Miles Cahill shows that progress on human development, as measured by the HDI, is statistically indistinguishable from growth of Gross Domestic Product per capita. "

Since populations in developing countries are growing rather than declining the only way to increase per capita GDP is expanded economic growth. In other words, more growth will mean less poverty. When you factor in the fact that more women in the workforce leads to lower birth rates you have an additional positive contributing factor. I don't want to put any HDI researchers out of business, but maybe more money and effort should be put into building businesses than into measuring poverty statistics?