This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 29th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How do social, political and economic freedom interact

to produce the outcomes we all value, safety, high incomes, education, and

others.

The Human Freedom Index is an attempt to detail various freedoms and how they interact.

Ian Vasquez is one of the authors of the report. We spoke last week.

How does this differ from other reports that tend to focus on economic freedom?

Well, this is a broad measure of human freedom.

It takes into account economic, personal, and civil freedom, and so it doesn't just focus on one aspect of freedom and it's fairly comprehensive.

We're using 79 distinct indicators for 159 countries in those broad areas so that it's really the first

human freedom index of its kind that is as comprehensive.

What are the best predictors to the extent that we have them of outcomes that we all value,

like high incomes, sanitation, outcomes that

sort of thing.

Well, I mean, we see that there's a strong relationship between high levels of human freedom

and prosperity and access to safe drinking water and

longevity and all sorts of things. And one of the reasons that we put this out, which is really an empirical measure of the level of human freedom in so many different areas,

is to be able precisely to look at the relationship between the different kinds of freedoms

and how they interact with outcomes and with each other.

So we've put this data out and the research on that is beginning, but it's fairly clear that human freedom plays a central role in human progress. We just have to do more research in that regard.

We know a lot about economic freedom and how it predicts certain things with respect to outcomes, but what are some of the things that are sort of less tangible that are sort of harder to understand about you know personal freedom and how that is either a cause of or a product of outcomes that we value?

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