How Much Human Freedom Can We Find in the World?

Is the world becoming a less free place for human beings? Just how much human freedom can we find in each of the world’s countries? I suspect many people would vigorously disagree over the answers to these questions. As with many such ideological questions, the answers would depend sensitively on what each person meant by the phrase “human freedom.”

In the post that follows, I will offer some of my own answers. My first task will be to explain what I think should be meant by those words, “human freedom.” What will be offered is the so-called “conservative” (what I call neoliberal) view of the freedoms we should all treasure. I will also state what I think the differences are with the progressive’s beliefs about human freedom.

Once a definitive picture of human freedom is painted, we must see if we can find some empirical way of actually measuring it. If we accomplished that, our final task will be to perform these measurements on as many countries on Earth for which we can find the data.

What Do We Mean by Human Freedom?

There are two major ways of defining human freedom. Although potentially there can be as many definitions as there are human beings, all of them seem to fall into one of two major sets. Those two sets seem to be molded to fit the world views of dirigistes (progressives in the U.S.) on the one hand, and of neoliberals (so-called “conservatives” in the U.S.) on the other.

In the meaning prized by most if not all progressives, human freedom is being free from social threats of various kinds. The main purpose of government would be the preservation of citizens from these social dangers. Such perils would include the threats of being killed by another, of being repressed by others, of starving to death, and of dying from lack of medical care. This is the kind of freedom sought after by Thomas Hobbes in his masterwork Leviathan. Hobbes favored a social contract between an absolute monarch and his subjects. To fulfill his end of the bargain, the monarch would exert his power to preserve the lives of law-abiding citizens. On their part, citizens would surrender up their natural freedoms to obey the dictates of the king.

As Hobbes noted, without a government people would be living in a state of nature in which there would be “a war of all against all.” In this state of nature, we would have “no arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” From this prospective, human freedom from such perils would be completely consistent with an autocratic, even tyrannical government. Hobbes (and many present-day progressives) would say the descent of society into violence and chaos is a greater threat to freedom than an increasingly powerful state.

So, where are the more traditional rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution? You recall them: Such concepts as the rights of free speech, free religion, to assemble peacefully to protest or for other lawful activity, and to keep and bear arms, among many others. Implied by some of these rights is a precious right much threatened by cancel culture today: the right to free thought un-coerced by government or others.

This second conception of human freedom came from the social contract philosophers who followed Thomas Hobbes, such as John Locke and the Baron de Montesquieu. They believed that human freedom was more threatened by the actions of autocratic governments than by the exigencies of social existence. Arbitrary government was the real threat. To be sure, solving social problems was a good that could sometimes be performed by government, but only if governments could be prevented from amassing arbitrary power.

Locke and Montesquieu were the most influential thinkers guiding the writing of both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and of the U.S. Constitution. For example, Locke rejected the divine right of kings. He declared if a king loses the consent of the governed, society has every right to remove him. On this, Thomas Jefferson quoted Locke almost verbatim in the 1776 Declaration of Independence. In the second paragraph of the Declaration, Jefferson wrote,

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them [the American colonies] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

U.S. Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

In addition, Montesquieu’s ideas for a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers into three separate, co-equal branches of government were adopted wholesale in the U.S. Constitution. Also, the Constitution explicitly limited the powers of government over its citizens in other ways, particularly in the Bill of Rights. The U.S. republic was indeed a child of the Age of Enlightenment.

For these historical reasons, I will use the definition of human freedom by the father of classical liberalism. In Two Treatises of Civil Government (2d Treatise,1689), John Locke wrote an individual has freedom if he is not “subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own.” If that is the case the powers of government must be sharply limited. As used here, the word freedom means the absence of coercive restraints on individuals, especially constraints imposed by governments.

How Can We Measure How Much Freedom Exists in a Country?

Our problem now becomes one of characterizing how much human freedom can be found in each country. It is very similar to the problem I had when trying to compare the results of various countries’ economies. I attempted this in a number of posts, e.g. Comparing Economies of All Countries on Earth in 2018. In those posts, I needed an index that measured how much a government controlled its country’s economy. I found what I needed in the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (IEF). Indeed, since a large part of human freedom is individual economic freedom, any index of human freedom must have a part that is greatly similar to the IEF. Given the definition of human freedom I have adopted from the previous section, I found what I needed in the Human Freedom Index (HFI) of the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute.

The creators of the Human Freedom Index developed two major subindices of the HFI, which they call Economic Freedom and Personal Freedom. Each subindex is equally weighted in the HFI, i.e. the HFI is the arithmetic average of the two. The HFI is calculated from 76 different components: 34 for personal freedom and 42 for economic freedom. Each component is scaled to vary from 0 to 10, with 10 representing the most freedom possible. By averaging, the final Personal Freedom, Economic Freedom, and Human Freedom indices will also vary from 0 to 10 with 0 denoting no freedom and 10 indicating maximum freedom. Because of the complexity of the HFI’s composition, it will not be possible in this short essay to completely define the way it is calculated in great detail. More detail can be found at the Cato Institute’s website and in their publication The Human Freedom Index 2020.

Nevertheless, an indication of the kinds of components used can be found in the categories in which those components fall. Those categories and subcategories are listed below:

Personal Freedom

1. Legal Protection and Security
   • Rule of Law
   • Security and Safety
2. Specific Personal Freedoms
   • Movement
   • Religion
   • Association, Assembly, and Civil Society
   • Expression and Information
   • Identity and Relationships

Economic Freedom

1. Size of Government
2. Legal System and Property Rights
3. Sound Money
4. Freedom to Trade Internationally
5. Government Regulation

Those familiar with the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom can see the similarities between it and the Economic Freedom of the Cato Institute/Fraser Institute. However, the Cato/Fraser Human Freedom index also gives us a Personal Freedom index to characterize freedoms that are not strictly economic.

Now that we have these indices to indicate how much freedom is allowed to people in individual countries, we can apply them to examine the state of freedom in the world.

Freedom In the World in 2018

According to The Human Freedom Index 2020, the last year for which complete data was available to compute almost all countries’ indices was 2018. Therefore all data plotted below is taken from that year. Although it is not the most current data, this data has the virtue of not being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, it reflects the intrinsic cultural and economic institutions of individual countries.

What we actually want to know is how well societies meet their people’s needs when each country allows individuals differing amounts and kinds of freedom. This means we need to have several figures of merit showing how well a country delivers to its people. In this essay, I have chosen per capita GDP in constant 2010 U.S dollars, the Gini index, and the United Nation’s Human Development Index (HDI) as figures of merit.

Another possible figure of merit is the GDP’s growth rate. However, there is another factor other than a nation’s economic freedom affecting how fast a country’s economy grows under given economic conditions. That secondary factor is how well-developed its economy is. A widely known fact is that developing economies generally grow much faster than developed ones. This is illustrated in the two plots below. The first plot illustrates the differences between developing, intermediate, and developed economies enjoying differing amounts of economic freedom. The second shows the differences in growth rates.

To construct such graphs with the new indices, I would have to separate the countries according to development status. I am not prepared to do this at the present time. However, I am likely to write a future post with this as the subject.

Before we plot the figures of merit, we should verify the compatibility between the new indices and the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. This is simply done by plotting each nation’s IEF versus the Cato/Fraser freedom indices. If they were completely compatible and painted the same picture of reality, the points of all the nations would fall on a single straight line. Since the indices calculate the degree of freedom in somewhat different ways, there will be some degree of scattering around a trend line. The less the scattering, the more the indices are describing the same world. First, let us plot the IEF of each country versus its Cato/Fraser Economic Freedom index. We expect the greatest agreement between those two indices.

The dashed red arrow is a linear trend line fitted to the data. If we plot the IEF vs. the full Cato/Fraser Human Freedom Index, we expect additional scattering about the trend line.

If we now plot the IEF vs the Cato/Fraser Personal Freedom, we have no reason to believe we would get a trend line with a slope other than zero. We do not have an a priori reason to believe that personal freedoms correlate with economic freedoms. Yet, as we see below, they do. This to me is an unexpected result.

Apparently, there is some correlation between strictly personal freedoms and economic freedoms. Could it be because of the expectations a free people have of their government?

Now, let us apply our new tool on all nations’ figures of merit. First, let us inspect per capita GDP for all nations.

The red curve is a fitted exponential curve. Clearly, per capita GDP rises explosively after the economic freedom index rises above 6. Now, let us plot per capita GDP versus the Personal Freedom and Human Freedom indices.

The data indicate both personal and economic freedoms are important to achieve high per capita GDP.

As our progressive brethren never tire of telling us, high per capita GDP does not help most people unless it is evenly distributed. The figure of merit that tells us whether or not that is the case is the Gini index. This index is constructed so that the larger it is, the less evenly the national income is distributed. If the index is zero, then every citizen receives the same share. If it is 100, then only one person receives the entire GDP as income. Plotting the Gini index for all the nations versus our three freedom indices, we obtain the following scatter plots.

In all three scatterplots, the trend line is a line with negative slope. The GDP tends to become more evenly distributed as freedoms increase. Nevertheless, the large amount of scatter about the trend lines indicates that human freedoms are not the whole story.

Finally, we will examine how the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) varies with human freedoms. The HDI for every country for which there is data is published annually by the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Reports. The HDI is constructed as a geometric average of three indices — L_I, E_I and I_I — which respectively measure life expectancy, mean education level, and mean income. Each of these subindices is designed to vary from zero to one, with one indicating the maximum levels expected (maximum age of 85 years, expected years of schooling 25 years, mean years of schooling 15 years, and mean per capita Gross National Income at purchasing power parity of $75,000). If the value exceeds the maximum expected, the subindex is forced to 1, and if it is below a set minimum, it is forced to zero. The geometric mean has the nice property that since all the sub-indices vary from zero to one, so will the HDI. In addition, if any of the sub-indices goes to zero, so will the HDI. Below are the scatter plots of HDI versus the Cato/Fraser freedom indices.

As with the other figures of merit, a nation’s HDI improves as human freedom from government control increases. Note especially that as economic, personal, and overall human freedom increase, the scattering about the trend lines decreases.

What Does All This Data Tell Us?

While considering the meaning of all this data, one of the first thoughts to strike me was that it is no wonder all the truly socialist countries that have ever existed have failed. (The Scandinavian states Bernie Sanders likes to cite as “democratic socialist” examples do not count. They are in fact fundamentally capitalist countries.) Human freedom, both personal and economic, is required for the success of an economy. The Gini index shows us a country’s GDP tends to become more evenly distributed as both personal and economic freedom increase. Contrary to the claims of American leftists, income inequality is not increasing in the United States. The UN’s Human Development Index demonstrates human beings have a better chance at a long and satisfying life when their personal and economic freedom increase. All we have to do is to minimize the government’s control over us to the bare minimum necessary.

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