Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Ian Vasquez, Vice President for International Studies.

And today I'm going to be speaking about the Human Freedom Index 2025 with Matt Mitchell,

who is a senior fellow at the Center for Human Freedom at the

Fraser Institute, and he's an affiliated senior scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason

University. And for the past two years, Matt has also been one of my co-authors on the Human

Freedom Index. Welcome, Matt. Thanks so much, Ian.

It's great to chat with you. Today, we released the 11th edition of the Human Freedom Index,

which is co-published by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute. So let me begin by saying

something about what the index is and what it does, and then we can

dive into it a little bit more.

The human freedom index is really the only comprehensive measure of economic, personal, and civil freedoms around the world for a period of time of more than two decades. And what we do is we measure

87 distinct indicators of freedom in such areas as religion, freedom of association, trade,

the rule of law, safety and security. You know, if your, if your government disappears you, your human freedom

doesn't tend to be very high. If the crime rate, if the homicide rate is high, your human

freedom isn't very high. And a number of other broad indicators from the year 2000,

which is when the data begins through 2023, which is the

last year for which we have sufficient data.

There's always a two-year lag on indexes, international indexes of this sort.

And so that's the range that we cover.

And everybody has a definition of freedom.

We have our own definition, which is quite straightforward,

and that is the absence of coercive constraint.

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