Towards a Worldwide Index of Human Freedom

Human Freedom from Pericles to Measurement • 51
responsibility for at least a subset of their actions. We are not attempting
to measure personal responsibility, but if we found such measures, they
may be potential proxies for freedom.
Weighting schemes
Many weighting schemes are possible, and not simply weighted addition.
It may be that freedoms are more than their sum. For instance, having
both freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in religion may create
more (or less) than twice the value of having only one of the freedoms.
Freedoms may be multiplicative and/or they may be non-linear, so that
one freedom is worth “1,” two are worth “2,” and three are worth “4,”
and so on. We need a better understanding of what freedom is, how it
should be measured, and what measures are available before this issue
can be addressed.
Scale
We have not addressed the question of scale: can A be slightly freer to do
X than B? Franco’s Spain was not free, but it was freer than Stalin’s Russia.
Can such gradations be captured? Carter (1999: 220) notes constraint
variables: physical impossibility, threats, and difficulty, though the list
could easily be made longer. He also argues that at a conceptual level, a
measure of freedom should consider only “physical impossibility” supplemented
by knowledge of the probability of future restraints on freedom,
like being sent to a concentration camp for certain speech. That speech
is not physically impossible, but has a high probability of reducing freedom
in the future. Whether one accepts this or not, developing a freedom
scale will be difficult.
It is also unclear whether a cardinal or only an ordinal measuring system
will be possible.
Race, etc.
Governments can restrict freedom based on race, gender, ethnicity, etc.
However, this can also involved a complicated interplay between government
coercion and society. Measuring this will be a great challenge. This
also complicates weighting. If a minority of, say, 20 percent of the population
lacks a certain freedom, does this mean that the measure is weighted
by 20 percent?
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