We are so used to grumbling about how it should be, or how we wish it was, or how it could be if only “they” would get with the program (pick your “they”), or how it once was (probably a romanticized version of the past) that we can forget that a lot of what is going on these days is awfully darned good. Yeah, there is room for improvement, but I am glad to be here, today, now.
6 thoughts on “Index of Economic Freedom: An Anglosphere Sweep …”
Comments are closed.
I think we codify statistics into reality a tad much as well.
This link is to the .
(Lets see if I got the href tag right)
oops sorry
James, thanks for the corroborating info.
Subadei, maybe so. However, we need to reduce masses of information into digestible form in a systematic way. Statistics and surveys are ways to do that. Surveys like this one are not to be taken as hard science. But they are nonetheless suggestive of the underlying reality. For example, the USA is “fourth” on here. OK, maybe it should be second, or seventh. But there is no way anyone will say Nigeria should be anywhere near the top ten. So, this sorting is probably grossly correct.
Lex,
No doubt such statistics are instrumental in boiling down the vast into the cogent and I certainly agree that such stats are not hard science. The issue begins, however, when media spouts stats and people absorb and define their opinions based upon them. One example might include the odd statistical insistence that America is the “greatest threat to world peace.”
This international poll was touted about amongst various cable news networks. One wonders about the effect such a poll had on the international populations that read such “facts” and the domestic effect these statistics had on the American populace.
I guess that was the direction I was heading for. Make sense?
What impact a poll or survey may have is an open question.
Law schools, for example, contort themselves to get into the rankings in US News.
Presidents adjust policy that will have an effect on millions of people based on an opinion poll.
People respond to these things. It is a condition. I don’t think it is a problem with a solution.