Transcripts For CSPAN3 Discussion 20240703

Structure coming up next, the 2023 freedom and prosperity industries. Topic include the relationship between freedom and prosperity, china and russia and womens economic read him around the world. Welcome, everyone to the launch of the 2023 freedom and prosperity indexes. I am the management editor. To give you some brief background on today, the freedom and Prosperity Center near the Atlanta Council aims to increase the wellbeing of people, especially the poor and marginalized of developed countries, a Database Research between prosperity and economic political and legal freedom. We are here to answer questions such as, two countries need freedom . To democracies or hypocrisies have better answers for people around the world . Here to answer these questions is the freedom and prosperity indexer that surveyed nearly every country in the world which we will talk about later today. First, i want to introduce our panelists for today. We have the senior director of the freedom and Prosperity Center who was the state departments special representative for commercial and Business Affairs between 2019 and 2021. In that capacity, he led the gop initiative which promotes business relationships between the u. S. And Foreign Companies around the world. He was also a member of the secretary of states policy and Planning Office between 2018 and 2019 where he was responsible for the economic portfolio. For three decades before that, he held leadership positions on wall street firms where he raised over 15 billion in financing in the United States and abroad, mostly for market economists. He defected from communist romania where he had been an official in the ministry of finance and was involved in negotiating government loans with the world bank and ims. Welcome, dan. We also have Joseph Lemoine who is the Deputy Director of the freedom and Prosperity Center. Previously he was private sector specialist at the world bank where he advised governments on policy reform who helped entrepreneurship and shared prosperitys, primarily in africa and the middle east. He also purchased legislation of Development Indicator on the business climate, good regulatory practices, womens entrepreneurship and government transparency. He is the author and coauthor of several publications including worldwide practices of regulatory impasse assessments, survival of firms in developing economy during the crisis and complementary regulations to improve public procurement. Welcome, joseph. Before we begin, we have a brief video explaining more on the freedom and prosperity indexes. We want people to not only have food and shelter, but a good standard of living, education, healthcare, a fair society and a clean environment. That is what we mean by prosperity. But, what is the surest path to prosperity . Academics, policymakers and citizens have been debating this matter for a very long time. Some say that free societies produce the best outcomes by unleashing the creativity and talent of individual citizens. Others say that focusing on the individual is too chaotic and ultimately, inefficient but a strong Central Authority produces the best results. The freedom and Prosperity Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in washington, d. C. Contributes facts and figures to this debate through our annual freedom and prosperity indexes. We built a Freedom Index to measure economic, political, and legal freedom in 164 countries. Each score reflects measurements of several indicators. Together, they create a comprehensive and unique measurement of freedom. We also built a prosperity index to measure income, health, education, the environment, treatment of minorities and inequality in the same 164 countries. A Prosperous Society should be judged on more than just income per capita. Our index gives us a holistic view of prosperity. In the Freedom Index, we rank countries into four tears based on their total scores, free, mostly free, mostly unfree and unfree. In the prosperity index, we rank countries as prosperous, mostly prosperous, mostly and prosperous and and prosperous. We have three Key Takeaways from the resulting data. Our first take away is that there was a strong correlation between our freedom and prosperity scores. We show a 0. 8 correlation between a countrys scores in the two indexes. This means high values for freedom are associated with high values for prosperity and low values for freedom are associated with low values for prosperity. On average, the freer the country, the higher it will score in all six measures of prosperity. The income scores show that free countries are far and away the richest. People born in free countries are also healthier and live a substantially longer. Citizens of the freer countries have access to better education and spend more time learning. The environment scores indicate that freer countries have cleaner environments. Unfree societies are less equal. Wealth is unevenly distributed among citizens and unsurprisingly, unfree countries are also less tolerant. This leads to our second take away. Evidence suggests that freedom contributes to prosperity. We examined, for our sample of 164 countries, the correlation between changes in freedom and changes in prosperity over time. If freedom is really driving prosperity, an improvement in freedom would be strongly associated with an improvement and prosperity and that is exactly what we find. Countries that increased their freedoms the most are the ones where prosperity increased the most. Peru and venezuela are prime examples. In 1995, venezuela was a freer country than peru but at the turnofthecentury, peru made a clear turn toward freedom. It is one of the top improvers in our data. In contrast, venezuela shows the largest decrease in freedom of all the countries we cover. Venezuela had a higher prosperity score than peru in 1995 but by 2022, the two countries had switched positions. Our third take away is that autocracy generally fails to deliver prosperity for their people while free countries succeed. Of the 30 countries ranked at the top of our freedom rankings, 27 are in the top category of our prosperity index and three are in the next highest category. None are in the bottom two categories of prosperity. Of the 30 countries ranked at the bottom of our Freedom Index, 11 are in the lowest category of our prosperity index. 17 are in the next lowest category and just two in the most three prosperous categories. None are in the top prosperity category. Our indexes demonstrate that there is a strong relationship between freedom and prosperity and we have reason to believe that improvements in freedom will, over time, lead to greater and more durable prosperity. Please visit the website for the atlantic freedom and prosperity indexes. The interactive capabilities of the website allow you to compare detailed data across time for countries and regions. All our indexes, information, and our annual reports can be downloaded for further analysis. Dan, lets start with you. There are lots of indexes out there, including many that measure freedom. What makes this one unique . Thank you. This is the most important question. Is humanity better off with this index system . There is no other Freedom Index like ours. There were excellent economic Freedom Indexes. Heritage is one. There is political treatment index that people know and love. Of course, this project has a legal Freedom Index. We put this all together and we have some indexes for each of these dimensions of freedom economic policies, for better analysis. Having a comprehensive Freedom Index with the sub index is unique. The prosperity index is also unique in the sense that other measurements of prosperity, like the Human Development index of the world bank, measure just three dimensions, gdp, which is material wealth, education, and health. We go beyond that and measure inequality, the environment and the treatment of minorities, which we mentioned with religious freedom. Most importantly, what is unique about that is the purpose behind creating these indexes. By having them with companion indexes, the Freedom Index and the prosperity index, we can study the interrelationship between the two. We want to see if we are right in the premise that we want to explore, which is that countries have more freedom also have more prosperity. This is what sets us apart. Given how comprehensive these indexes are, they require a lot of data. Can you talk about house this data is compiled . We have 164 countries and 28 years of data 1995 to 2022. We do not collect the data. We use data from institutions that are reputable and have been used and approved by the national committee. That includes the world bank, the u. N. , the world inequality database. We have 10 sources that we primarily use. Like dan was saying, we have different indicators. Total would be 19 indicators from 10 sources for a total of 100,000. I go back to, why are we doing this . Having this data, having this conversation and having data for every single country for every single year allow us to do this research, to look at how freedom and prosperity interacts. Data is a great thing but how can we use this in real life . The important thing to understand is that one of the things that we can do is make the case that totalitarian countries are not for their people. It is one of the big debates in our time, given that china and russia claim to have a Development Model that other countries should follow. We did an analysis for that. We can show that countries, when comparable to both china and russia, develop faster when they chose freedom rather than the countries that were not. In general, the way we want to make the case is by engaging with both people and the Civil Society, think tanks and developing countries that want to go to the government and make the case that their country should have more freedom in order to achieve more prosperity. For that, we get something called the reform grant. We give money to think tanks that go to the government to make the case. We work also with people in government who are interested in understanding the levers that they can use to improve the lot of the people and give them benchmarks by using our analysis. Joseph, 2012 seems to stand out as a pivotal year. What happened in that year . We do all of this work and you might ask, why should we care . Today, look at our data. There is a lot of conversation about the democratic fact finding. By having this aggregated data, we can pin it down to what is happening. From 1995 to 2012, both freedom and prosperitys were going up. 2012, freedom started to decline. We have indexes so we can go into what is happening. Economic freedom is still going up, all the way to covid and then declining to what we know. It was Political Freedom and legal freedoms that is declining. If you look at prosperity, how freedom and prosperity interact, 1995 to 2012, prosperity is almost a Straight Line and it is the growth of the year in points. We have a scale from zero to 100. Consistent growth, 20 2012, it flattens. With covid, it starts to decline. A sense of urgency, it has been going on for years, but it is happening. What i find fascinating in this data, because we have the entire world, we can see that it is not a phenomenon that is specific to a certain region or a specific group of countries. There are countries everywhere were democracy and freedom is collapsing. Venezuela is an easy america. We have examples in thailand, russia, belarus, hungary, among the biggest declines. In africa, we have the republic of the congo. It is something that is global in every single region, which makes it hard to pin down the core reason and makes it even more fascinating to me. Are there any talks about china and russia . They are presenting alternative models to western democracies. Lets dig a bit deeper and how did they fare on the indexes . We did this analysis and it is really fascinating because we found parallels between the two. In the case of russia, we have the benefit of an unusual situation where we can have we can do a social experiment. In chemistry, you can have a closed environment. You can analyze something, where you isolate it. It is rare to have it in social sciences but in the case of russia, they were all part of the soviet union. They were all communist countries. They have no Political Freedom. They have no Economic Freedom. After the collapse of the soviet union, russia, on the one hand and the baltics on the other hand, chose different paths. When we looked at where they were on the prosperity spectrum, russia was ahead in 1995. The soviet union fell apart in 1991. Russia was ahead about 10 , compared to the baltics in 1991. By 2022, they were behind by 30 . This is just looking at gdp per capita. Looking at our prosperity index, which is broader, the same picture. They were ahead and then they were behind. The question is, in the prosperity index, the focus went up 1. 2 times. The question is, why . When you look at our Freedom Index, the baltics are ahead of russia by two times. The score in 22 for the baltics was about 80 and the score for russia was about 40. Russia, the freedom core declined between 1995 in 1922 by 20 . It is interesting to look at china because you see something similar. Their Freedom Score is about half of the score for the countries that we take the comparison witches south korea and taiwan. Then, the prosperity score also is for south korea and taiwan. We see both of these cases, countries that started from a similar point, in the case of south korea and taiwan and the peoples republic of china, they would come from before. Also, they were all dictatorships. South korea and taiwan were military dictatorships but they had Economic Freedom and china was a communist dictatorship. They had neither. Then they developed differently , south korea and taiwan. They have a g and i per capita that is twice that of china. South korea and taiwan escapes the middle income trap, meaning they came from middle income to high Income Countries while china is not. In looking at these two countries, russia and the peoples republic of china, who claim they had a model for development i am remembering the ads that we had in the 90s where three ask, where is the beef . They said, why should we be like you . You are nothing compared with countries if i may compliment, what he is saying is our data, by desegregating Economic Freedom, Political Freedom and legal freedom, we can see how the three interact and see how these lead to prosperity. The recipe that works the best is the three of them together. In the case of taiwan and south korea, they had legal freedoms, the rule of law. They had Economic Freedoms and then they implemented Political Freedom and that is what led them to the place they are today. If you look at what china has been doing, which is taking people out of country more than any in history, the switch we dont see the switch and the data. Political freedom is declining in the country. We think that is unfortunate. Maybe there was a missed opportunity here. Beyond china and russia, 162 other countries. Which country made big moves up and down over the last 28 years and what were the consequences of that . So, i like to compare things to make them interesting. The biggest freedom decline or is venezuela. We saw in the video that in 1995, venezuela was far more free and far more prosperous than beirut and beirut has struggles now. Freedom is declining. In the late 90s and early 2000s, implemented pro democracy that led them to cross paths with venezuela. Despite being a country with far less natural resources, they took a position in peru is much more prosperous than what it has been today. What i found fascinating in the data it is easier to increase prosperity than it is to decline prosperity. There are only a few countries that had a negative change from 1995 to 2022. The biggest negative change was venezuela and syria. Syria had the war and venezuela with the governor. The insight of declining freedom over time can be not as bad. It can be similar through that work. We have covered Global Development issues and that includes Civil Society and promotion efforts. Can these indexes be used for americas democracy promotion efforts abroad . This is an excellent question. The answer is yes. Number one, we are not working with the u. S. Government to promote an american agenda in either way. We dont have money from the u. S. Government tort anything. We would like to work more with agencies. We have been meeting with them but we have not designed them to promote anything. Having said that, we have an extraordinary moment in time and our indexes and the reports show tonight, it can be an excellent tool to make the case not just for the United States but for the free world in general toward a Better Future for all humanity. Let me elaborate on that. It became very clear after the invasion of ukraine by russia is that groups of countries have emerged that are very clearly defined. You have the group of authoritarian country, russia and china. Iran, north korea, venezuela, cuba, the chinese are putting spy stations against the United States. That is one grouping of countries. Then, following the ukraine war, the free world by the way, the technology of the cold war is coming back. The free world also has democracies in europe, japan, south korea, australia, new zealand. Then there is an entire other group of countries that refer as the global south. I dont like the term because geography has nothing to do with it. I prefer the term, the new non alliance movement. I also heard that there are swing countries. There are important countries like india, south africa, brazil, mexico, that are not as strongly opposed to the principles by russia. They are taking a position that they want to be nonaligned in many respects. The indexes can help the government of the United States and the people of the United States, as well as the government and the people of the free world in general to make the case to the countries of the nonalliance movement that more freedom leads to more prosperity, therefore they should be seen freedom on their side and also correlate that opposing aggression everywhere. It is in this sense i want to compliment dans issues. You can go play with and we did a little analysis of the countries that were better off in 1995 than they are today on prosperity. Among those countries that crushed the global trend, meaning that they are missing the train, is brazil, south korea, mexico and the philippines. And all the countries, freedom has been declining. Did that come as a surprise to you . We have syria with years of civil war, venezuela under nicolas maduro. Were there other countries that stood out and surprised you as the results came in from the indexes . There are other points. I guess, if we recreated this framework to test assumptions. You do an exercise of testing what you think is the right answer and it might not be but it is spectacular how strong all the links that we find in the data are. We had some interesting conversations. For example, callings at the Atlantic Council and other think tanks looked at the United States. Where is the United States . Quite frankly, we did not worry about it. I think it is 17 and prosperity im sorry, 17 and prosperity and 11 and freedom. You can see people who say, how come it is so high . Others say how come it is so low . Then there are the people who want to know that they have a position on freedom in israel and they wonder why israel is high in freedom. The same thing with singapore. On singapore, there is an interesting discussion to be had, which is, it is one of the exceptions to the rules of countries that have imperfect freedoms that tend not to rank well in terms of prosperity. The way we look, the way we define freedom is an average between economic and Political Freedom. It is possible that the country, for example, singapore, will not rank very well in Political Freedom but rank very, very well in Economic Freedom and legal freedom. When you average the total score, freedom is very high. These are the three countries where we have some conversations. If we bring it back to trends and patterns, something that gives encouragement, the indicator is the greatest progress. And 2022, 18 percente points increase over the sample. This is true across all regions. Some started behind than others. Every region looking at the sample improved womens economic rights. But another thing i found encouraging, obviously for this work, africa is extremely important. The largest growing populations across the whole continent. The region is the region where prosperity grew the most. Obviously they are still behind, but it is happening. What i think is encouraging, it is also the region that saw the largest growth of freedom. We are hopeful that if this continues, if this improvement on freedom is sustained, that will lead to improvements in prosperity longterm. Now a question for each of you. Weve talked about some of the progress and positives that were made, being a journalist i had to look at the critical viewpoints, so the negatives i suppose now the silver lining. I would go back to this womens Economic Freedom thing. I think it was really one of the most heartwarming things. It is also one of the most consequential pairs that consequential. In an ideal society, 50 of the population dont contribute to Human Flourishing because they cannot fully participate in economic life. It is such a use problem. When we look at trends, sometimes they are clear. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they go up, then they go down. But this one indicator, which is the Economic Freedom indicator, women in business, it is a straight up line. It is such a great thing to see. It is on par, i would say, to the tremendous numbers we saw of people escaping abject poverty over the past 20 years. People living on less than two dollars a day. It is on an equal scale, the recognition that women should participate. That was one of the things i was most happy about. Something i mentioned earlier as well, it is much harder to decline in prosperity than it is to increase. We tend to live longer and be wealthier in capitalist societies. A good example of this is the score for russia, where obviously freedom is collapsing. Today, they rank 138 out of 164. But they are still mostly prosperous, ranking 63 out of 164. Because in 1995, they were in a good place. It is not going in the right direction, but that was something that i found interesting, that you need freedom to move forward and russia needs a lot more. But if a country goes to a terrible path, there is hope to recover and go back on the right path. On that note, always good to have positive perspective, i wanted to open it up to the floor for any questions we might have. Theres a microphone there. If you could introduce yourself. We also have online, we have online questions if anyone virtually would like to submit questions. Your microphone should be on. Center for International Private enterprise. Thank you for the report on these important topics. The trend in womens Economic Freedom is one that really does jump out in this report and was partly unexpected to me. I have seen many examples of women in business leading and pioneering and doing new things, but other things i look at might not be so promising like investment in womenowned businesses, or the state of womens Property Rights. Can you elaborate on what you are picking up on that trendline . I dont know how to elaborate. We picked up an index i think from the world bank. So, again, all of our indexes cover 100 six e4 countries between 1995 and 2022. What we are always about doing is use data which are consistently provided from the same source with the same methodology and we trust the work of the world bank. We also want to have data that is available from all countries. Over this period of time, we looked at this one index produced by the world bank and got this result. One of the things that are important to note, and i think that is where your note of caution comes, in some regions, the slope is much more positive than other regions. For example, in the middle east, we have in the middle east and north africa region, the way we divided the world in seven regions, progress is less impressive but it is still positive. In other countries, it is more impressive. If i could complement, there is no good data on the reality of implementation of laws when it comes to women. The data we use witches where my good friend at the world bank produced it, this report is based on laws and regulations. It is not the practice, its the regulation. We took all of the components that were measured by the other indicators we had in the Economic Freedom sub index. What we measured under womens Economic Freedom was mobility, the ability to move freely, pay, measuring the wage gap, entrepreneurship constraints that are added when you are a woman and want to create a business, and assets. I know they are actually starting to create a new project that will look at the actual practice, but it is a multiyear endeavor. Right now, the best we could do is look at the law and regulation. We have some virtual questions here. As a scholar, how can i secure funding in order to make use of the fascinating index in my research . Especially if i want to study particular countries and may need to travel to gather more data. We should direct this question to the gentleman who is at the microphone right now. No pressure. No pressure. We are helping scholars, individual scholars in academia and we are helping think tanks around the world. With a strong preference toward developing countries. In partnership with two wonderful organizations. One of them is the Atlas Network and the ceo of the Atlas Network wants to ask a question. He is normally shy, so it will, naturally. Through them, we have given eight grants to think tanks in eight different countries, totaling about 200,000. The other organization is the action institute. With them, we are giving grants to scholars, individual scholars, right scholarly papers and publish them, or work with us to help reduce this. Bibby you want to elaborate how exactly they can apply . Didnt expect to be doing it plug. First of all, i am grateful to stan and joseph are putting together what i think is a valuable tool. The independent think tanks we work with all around the world are using this to inform some of their work about what kind of policy priorities they should have to move in a direction that allows more freedom and how to make that case backed by empirical data. The Atlas Network welcomes grant applications and we partner with atlas and the Atlantic Council to award organizations that can carry out Meaningful Research and reform agenda work. At this network. Org. If i could put in my question, one of the things i am curious about is getting more granular with the data, are there indicators in your categories, or sub indicators you are finding more correlated with improvements on the prosperity side of the index . I am wondering if theres a way to talk about the sample in general. Or, i imagine countries at Different Levels of development would benefit from prioritizing different parts of the freedom spectrum. The report is for the general audience who are also working on the more academic paper where we will present findings. In the video you saw, we presented the correlation between Freedom Index and indicators from the prosperity index. Here, we saw a perfect correlation on each one. A freer country will be more rich. People will be more educated and live longer. Minority rights perform better. What we did is its a very good question on the freedom side, the policy side, what you can do as a country to get on the right path to prosperity, the question that we are investigating is the sequencing of reforms. Where do you start and what do you do first and so one. The preliminary findings we did is we tested every single one of these sub indexes against prosperity, controlling for everything else. When you do that, you find the rule of law, legal freedom, is the most strongly correlated with prosperity. Closely followed by Economic Freedom. Third comes Political Freedom. All of them are positive relations. All of them are important. Some just have a stronger relation to the other. What is important to remember is by far the strongest is the three of them together. If you have those three, it will lead you to a Prosperous Society. My to the sequence of reforms, we are looking into this. I will let you know in the paper is ready because it is a huge endeavor. There is very Fascinating Research questions in there. We have another question online. Can you please discuss the case of saudi arabia . With a poor Freedom Index and high prosperity. Other countries you mentioned, singapore and the uae, where there is not the incongruity. The interesting question always in defining freedom and prosperity for our indexes is to step back from what people normally assume we are thinking of. When we talk to people about freedom, the first thought is always Political Freedom. But when we talk about freedom, we think about Economic Freedom, Political Freedom and legal freedom together. When we talk about prosperity, people often think about gdp per capita, which is just material. But we always think about it holistically. Saudi arabia falls into a category which is special. We want to analyze this separately. Countries very rich in natural resources, which as a result of that, ranked very highly, have a very high gdp per capita because of that. Countries like this also will have resources to have good education and health care. Then, they may not rank very well for minority rights, which we measure with religious freedom. So, it is something we want to explore further. Not just for saudi arabia, but other countries in the same category. I am dr. Alexander. I wanted to the United States. Can you speak louder . My name is dr. Alexander. I want to dry reference to the United States where it ranks 20 and 21 on your index sees, and find out what strategies and structures are missing as to why we are in the top 20, just below the top 20, given that education may be a determining factor, how can we improve as a nation to rise to the top . The United States. I want to apologize. I wont give you a good answer. Let me tell you why you wont get a very good answer. The aim of our work is to help the poor and the marginalized everywhere, but especially in developing countries. We have spent a lot less actually, very little. Very little on the United States, canada, western europe, japan, countries that are free and prosperous. We are much more interested in what tools we can give to people in government and outside government in developing countries. We have not spent much time on studying what happens in the United States. But, please come by at the end. I will give you my card. We will do a study just for you and give you the results. It is good for us to spend time. I like to say, i am less interested in i am much more interested in taking a country that is doing poorly 120 and take that country and bring it all the way up to 90. We are not worrying about the countries that are 20, trying to make them 11. They are fine. We are fine for now. [laughter] [indiscernible] the figure 20 and republication, you have mentioned you have data for 164 countries, but in this you have only 77 observations. Could you explain why you have chosen substantially smaller number of observation this figure compares to the whole . This figure you are referring to looks at the impact of changes in freedom and how these correlate with changes in prosperity. We did for the entire sample, found a similar positive relationship. What we did here is we took out the sample in the middle from the changes from minus five to plus five with the idea that these would be the signal. So, these countries are not real movers, we just focused on data strong move positive or negative. Direction. But i guarantee you, in the text we mention it, we did seminars and the relationship holds. Let me tell you the genesis of the chart. What is very easy is to show correlation. So the correlation for these 164 countries is 0. 8. It is very easy to show that countries that are free are also prosperous. But this does not count as much. Correlation does not mean that the does not mean that there is causation. We are interested in causation. We want to make the case that if you have freedom, you also have prosperity. What we tried to do was to say, lets look at countries where we have the most change in freedom and lets see if later, those same countries had the most change in prosperity. There are very few methodological avenues for showing causation. We have a Wonderful Team of experts, academics who advise us and they told us this is one of the most reliable ones. And then we said, lets look not at everybody, but lets look at those with the most change. Does that make sense . That explanation to the text because it is very important. Certainly you could put here in the title that you have only 77 observations instead of 164. The reason why you have limited this particular pool to demonstrate what you are trying to demonstrate. But the second one, much more important because you are not the first two are trying to do this because it is a huge body of literature devoted to this particular issue, probably very well known to use into had mentioned in your introductory remarks the work of economic Freedom Index of institute or heritage foundation, but human using exactly the same methodology for more than 30 years. They are doing this work also using very similar figures, similar tables, similar graphs. Similar conclusions. I think it would be worth mentioning those who did something before you, just on which basis you have built your new product. Based on what they had done, and this youd body of literature they have developed, they showed that there is not such a clear relation between the changes in freedom and changes in prosperity. What is omitted here, for example china, one of the largest countries in the world by economic power, which has declined in freedom, even measured by your approach, and substantial increase in prosperity. That is why this observation would fall into the right lower corner or quadrant of your graph that also would change a little bit your figure. There is no so if you put not absolute values, but changes in the values, like for Freedom Change in prosperity change, there would be no so interesting and attractive picture. For everybody involved in those studies, this is a huge problem to understand why the changes in freedom over the last 20 years or 30 years, did not lead not only in particular cases, but on average, did not show increase in prosperity. That is a very substantial academic issue that has been debated heavily for the last three decades. So far, nobody was able to produce reasonable, acceptable explanations for that. That is why at this moment, not 30 years ago, at this moment it would be helpful to contribute to this debate and produce some ideas why. Why, what we cherish so much like freedom, why is the increase in freedom does not necessarily lead to increase in prosperity in all cases. And even overall. First of all, thank you very much for your contribution. If you would be so kind, give me your card. I would love to have a separate conversation. I am not aware of anyone else doing this analysis the way you claim. I am also not aware of anyone having reaching the conclusion in the body of literature showing the opposite. But i am happy to have a discussion with you. We have time for two very brief questions. Hello. Tran. Im an intern for the house of representatives. I would like to know, what are some prevalent ideologies can you speak louder . I want to know what are some prevalent ideologies specifically that are common within the nations that are considered high prosperity but low freedom. There is always the temptation of making the case that an authoritarian leader can solve problems through decisions that are made quickly by this leader, or a small group of people, and dispensing with all of the niceties like elections, legislators and consultations from the people and all that. There is extensive discussion about that and usually people give the example of singapore. Actually, we talked about it in our report last year, singapore has done very well. If you look at kissingers book on leadership, one of the six great leaders of the 20th century he mentioned. He was influencing the affairs of singapore in one capacity or another for 50 years. The two prime ministers that came afterwards were also excellent. You can have a country that has wonderful leaders for an extended period of time, but you can also have a country that has a horrible leader for 50 years, followed by even worse leaders. There is the temptation that you can have a great leader who will solve all your problems, mussolini famously said he would get the trains run on time. He got italy into war and destroyed the country. The ideology exists and we are not convinced by it, but that is usually what they are saying. One last question. J. P. Hogan, i write about politics. Freedom and prosperity, i get the question is, where is Property Rights . If you have a staterun economy, are you is your prosperity is that the government providing quality of life . Where is the difference between whether you own it or you have access to it . Where are you breaking down that line between the different freedom to own . Freedom of access . I have my cheat sheet here. Property rights is one of the four components of Economic Freedom. Property rights, including we use the freighter index for that. Property rights including are not protected by law. That is the lowest threshold. Or, protected by law, the highest threshold. It is a surveybased index where they ask experts whether property is well defined and protected by all. On that note, we are hitting our time. I want to thank dan and joseph for this very insightful conversation, thinking our audience both in person and virtually for joining us. I encourage you to visit Atlantic Council online. You can learn more about their freedom and prosperity indexes. Thank you very much. [applause] announcer washington journal continues. Host returning to our program, tina descovrich of the group moms for liberty, their cofounder, joining us