
Freedom in the Fifty States - An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom - wrrice
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmercatus.org%2Fsites%2Fall%2Fmodules%2Fcustom%2Fmercatus_50_states%2Ffiles%2FFreedom50States2011.pdf
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spenrose
See
[http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/06/12/243047/a-follow...](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/06/12/243047/a-followup-
on-the-mercatus-freedom-study/) . "The Mercatus Institute’s freedom score was
significantly linked to (by state)- lower educational attainment (measured by
percent of Bachelor degrees or higher), lower population density, lower per
capita GDP, increased infant mortality, increased accident mortality,
increased incidence of suicide, increased firearm mortality, decreased
industrial R&D, and increased income inequality."

~~~
driverdan
So? Correlation is not causation. The publication has nothing to do with
quality of life or income and everything to do with freedom.

Another study investigating the link between the two would be interesting but
is a non sequitur here.

~~~
nickff
It may also be interesting to study whether freedom is a leading (or lagging)
indicator of prosperity, as it is likely that laws have a gradual impact, not
an immediate one.

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nowarninglabel
If you don't want to read the whole thing, basically in the authors'
viewpoints: smoking, motorist, mandatory health care, and gun laws lead to a
state being less free. To make states more free, get rid of any such laws. If
you don't agree with how the authors measure freedom, then you probably won't
agree with the conclusions they came to (I certainly don't).

~~~
driverdan
It's impossible to take into account every law. Many of those issues impact
personal freedom. Government regulation of personal freedom is a fine gauge
for overall freedom.

How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?

~~~
Steko
"Government regulation of personal freedom is a fine gauge for overall
freedom."

Some of us disagree.

"How would you have done it? What issues would you have selected?"

The most important things I would look at are education outcomes of the first
and second quartile (of household income) and the diversity of employment
available.

I would also look at pollution levels, highway fatality rates, incarceration
rates, certain crime rates, certain disease rates, services received for those
dreaded taxes, entertainment and cuisine options, we could go on...

Big towns don't become cities and cities don't become big cities and big
cities don't turn into metropolii through coercion. They're big because people
run away from South Dakota and never go back. Freely.

~~~
gwright
You seem to be listing a variety of quality of life issues, which I don't
think is quite the same as 'freedom'. I'm not suggesting that it wouldn't be
worthwhile to investigate those issues, just that it seems to be a different
focus than the linked report. Your focus would seem to compliment rather than
refute the goals of that report.

~~~
Steko
I think you're totally missing my point. Not only the government encroaches on
your freedom. You can't just look at the highway regulations as encroaching on
your freedom without also looking at the guy slamming into your car* as
encroaching on your freedom too.

* which may be the direct result of a lack of regulation. See: Montana.

The corporation polluting your water source is encroaching on my freedoms.
People that break into your house encroach on your freedoms. People that
breath smoke in public areas that give other people cancer encroach on our
freedom.

More saliently for me freedom involves fundamental choices. People want to say
what they want, read what they want, go where they want, do what they want,
eat what they want. Kids that are undereducated have their choices (read:
freedom) massively curtailed. People that live in an area where everyone is a
farmer have their choices (read: freedom) massively curtailed. If I want to
get thai food for dinner and there's no thai restaurant for 300 miles my
choices have been curtailed. If the local library doesn't stock Harry Potter
my freedoms have been limited. If the internet is too crappy for netflix my
freedom is limited compared to elsewhere.

~~~
gwright
I don't think that equating "choice" with "freedom" is all that helpful in
understanding choices or freedom.

They aren't the same thing and insisting that they are just makes it hard to
talk about either concept.

Generally when people talk about 'freedom' in a political sense (which is what
the original report was about) they are talking about the way _government_
limits actions and not about how your particular circumstances are different
than someone else's.

~~~
chairface
I don't see a freedom listed anywhere in these comments that doesn't come down
to the ability to make a choice. In fact, I think a pretty good working
definition for "a freedom" is "the ability to make a choice".

Furthermore, the government plays a big role in _increasing_ the number of
choices available to people in the first and second income quartiles, as Steko
suggested. Looking only at limitations that government places on freedom
reveals your bias.

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asolove
This is a very interesting report. I would add one anecdotal piece of
information: having lived and visited all around the US, the places I would
consider living permanently (California, Washington, New Mexico, Maryland, New
York) all rank as significantly less free than their neighbors. I have no idea
what this means.

~~~
Steko
This is not a freedom index. This is a freedom from government index.

Apparently it's cool if you're oppressed by your neighbor playing loud music
all night or the company upstream dumping toxic waste into your water supply
but we've stepped over the line if the government steps in and tries to
actually price negative externalities like you know Hayek[1] and Friedman[2]
endorsed.

[1] <http://businesspublicpolicy.com/?p=1186>

[2] [http://www.angrybearblog.com/2007/10/friedman-
externalities-...](http://www.angrybearblog.com/2007/10/friedman-
externalities-and-difference.html)

~~~
drewcrawford
All freedom can be understood in terms of the authority that is displaced [1].
The net amount of liberty, strictly measured, is always conserved [2].

Individual freedom is a restriction upon xenophobic groups; economic freedom
shifts the needle in favor of those with the capital; emancipation grants
rights to slaves and strips them from slaveowners. The water flows the other
way too: you can talk about the "freedom" of Kim Jong Il or Stalin to murder
their own people.

The entire political discourse in this country (and, to some extent, HN) will
be frozen until we can move past merely reciting mechanically that helping one
group comes at the expense of hurting some other group. If we put half as much
energy into either throughly examining the moral underpinnings of which groups
should be elevated or abased[3], or empirically studying the possible
utilitarian effects of this[4] as we spend reciting talking points at each
other, we would have a great many of the world's problems already solved.

[1] Understand that I'm trying to be morally neutral here, "freedom" and
"authority" are being used descriptively, not prescriptively. Obviously a
great many of us have strong opinions that slavery is bad, etc.

[2] By this I mean in any individual exchange, you are taking freedom from one
group and are assigning an equal amount of freedom to another group. Human
perception can differ a great deal: punishing a murderer has an enormous
negative burden upon an individual, but it has an equal and opposite impact to
society at large, albeit amortized over a great number of people. This can be
hard to see in some cases. Also, I am not claiming that a policy in the long
run cannot raise all ships; that is a function of tenth-order consequences,
and I (and the parent) are talking about first-order ones.

[3] And by this I mean: is it right to take something from this group and give
it to this other group? Under what circumstances? Is inequality bad? Is it bad
in proportion to the amount of inequality? Is it still bad if everyone has a
sufficient floor of resources that meets their basic needs? These are
interesting questions; our current political discourse is not.

[4] And by this I mean: What are some local maxima and non-local maxima for
economic output as a function of regulation? If we plot creative output as a
function of IP law, what will the graph look like? Can we do empirical studies
to confirm or refute the underlying basis for legislation (controlling
phenylephrine reducing methamphetamine production, for example)? These are
elevating questions that inspire us to learn about our world. We are nowhere
close to having this kind of conversation.

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techiferous
Want 100% freedom? Move to an uninhabited area and live by yourself.

I think it goes without saying that when you have relationships with people,
you give up a little bit of your own freedom. It's not surprising that areas
with higher population density are scored as having "less freedom".

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russell
No thanks. CA is 48th. They can keep their definition of freedom. I appreciate
the no smoking bans and the gun control laws and short term disability (which
I had to use this year). They dinged the labor laws, but in CA you can move
from job to job without being sued for a non-compete clause. If we are so
unfree, how come we have Silicon Valley.

This is off topic in the worst way.

~~~
te_chris
I read their state summary of Cali and their "solutions" were just weird. They
prescribed to just out-right cut spending, without specifying anything in
particular, just the typical "cut spending". Also, gun control being a limit
to freedom? What a strange way to view the world.

Politics presented as research are not useful for anyone really.

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mw63214
Thanks for posting this. I may be able to tie it into something I've been
thinking about lately. Here's a link to my previous post. May seem like it's
off-topic, but to me it's dead-on.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625009>

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Aloisius
Clearly South Dakota and they should be killing it economically and culturally
and yet shockingly, this is not the case.

~~~
amock
South Dakota has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and
during my few visits to the state I didn't find any problems with the culture
there. Why do you think it isn't doing well culturally and economically?

~~~
Aloisius
It is in the bottom 50% of GDP per capita in the United States (26th).

If economic or personal freedom were any indicators of success, I'd expect it
to at least be better than average (it is quite a bit below, $47,275/person
for the whole US and $37,375 for South Dakota).

~~~
hugh3
There's a loose correlation between freedom and economic/cultural attainment.
It works on large scales and explains the difference between, say, the United
States and North Korea.

On smaller scales though, such as comparing different states within the US,
other things tend to dominate -- in particular the presence of big cities,
which are positively correlated with economic and cultural attainment and
negatively correlated with freedom.

Honestly, if this graph were the best case we have for the proposition that
freedom is nice then it'd be a pretty weak case.

