This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 18, 2015, and Caleb Brown.

Human Freedom encompasses more than just economic liberty.

It includes many ways the state may or may not intrude upon your private life and your

relationships. So the Cato Institute, Canada's Fraser Institute, and the

Liberales Institute have put together the Human Freedom Index released today.

Ian Vasquez is one of the authors of the report.

We spoke yesterday.

A few years ago, some of us at the Cato Institute, at the Frazier Institute in Canada, and at the Liberales Institute in Canada and at the Liberales Institute in Germany decided to

explore the possibility of creating an index of human freedom that

actually measured broad measures of freedom as opposed to select aspects

of it, which is what most indices that measure some kinds of freedoms do.

And so we held seminars to look into that possibility

and decided that in fact yes we could do that.

And we held further seminars with scholars from around the world to look into conceptual and methodological issues.

And what we've produced is this human freedom index, which we think is a reasonable report that

portrays the state of freedom

index yet for a globally meaningful set of countries.

So what in this from the perspective of the creators of this report What constitutes freedom?

The definition of freedom that we use is the absence of coercive constraint. It's a sort of a negative liberty definition of freedom

which doesn't require positive action from somebody other than to refrain from violating your rights as long as you don't violate the equal rights of others.

And so we look at 76 distinct indicators in this index over a broad range including economic freedom,

rule of law, safety and security, and a whole set of other personal freedoms like freedom of assembly and association,

...