This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, December 17, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Human Freedom Index produced by the Cato Institute and Canada's Fraser Institute is now in its 10th edition.

The index gives us a sobering picture of human freedom across the globe.

Ian Vasquez is its main

author. We spoke last week. The paper is available now. Ian, you've been producing the Human

Freedom Index now for 10 years. And what have you learned? And before we get to that, of course,

what was the purpose of doing this,

taking this broader range of data to get a handle on the broader view of freedom in around the world?

Well, we wanted to get a handle on the level of freedom at the world level and within countries.

And up until we created this, there really wasn't any comprehensive measurement of freedom,

at least not one that had as many indicators that we were measuring across economic, personal, civil freedoms,

and certainly not one that complied to our definition of freedom, which is the absence of coercive

constraint, the idea that you can lead your life as you wish, as long as you respect the equal

rights of others, And that's what

we're measuring with our 86 different measures for 165 countries over the course of a couple of

decades. And when you compile that much data, you start to get a better picture about

trends, global trends, country trends,

and not just overall on human freedom, but you look at trends in freedom of expression

or trends in economic freedom or aspects of economic freedom, and you start to get a better

picture of what's going on. You can also use that data to relate it to certain outcomes or what relationship freedom has

with all sorts of social phenomenon, including relationships between different freedoms.

...