problem for more than sixty years. Freedom House is a bipartisan, non-profit, non-government organization devoted to promoting global freedom and democracy. Freedom House is so bipartisan that it was founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie, the Republican who’d just run for president against her husband. Try to think of something that Jill Biden and Donald Trump agree on. That’s how amazingly agreed upon Freedom House is about freedom. I was serving on the Freedom House Board of Trustees in the 1990s, when I was writing this book. But I neglected to use the “quantification of freedom” numbers Freedom House produces. Partly this was because I felt that I—a person who has to remove a sock to count to eleven—was already dealing with more numbers than I could handle. And partly this was because I disagreed somewhat with my fellow trustees about Freedom House’s methodology. Freedom House began issuing ratings of freedom in countries around the world during the 1950s. In 1978 the ratings were formalized in a detailed annual report called Freedom in the World , covering every independent and semi- independent nation and territory on earth. How it works is that a staff of more than 125 analysts and forty advisors sets out to find the answer to ten principle questions about each country’s political rights and sixteen principle questions about its civil liberties. Each principle question entails as many as a dozen sub-queries. What the analysts are asking ranges in scope from the broad and general . . . Was the current head of government or other chief national authority elected through free and fair elections? To the personal and specific . . . Do individuals enjoy equal rights in divorce proceedings and child custody matters? I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere in all those questions there’s a “Who’s your nation’s favorite Beatle?” Anyway, the report is really thorough. Each country is given a Political Rights score from 0 to 40 (e.g. China -2, Australia 40) and a Civil Liberties score from 0 to 60 (Syria 4, Canada 58). Then the numbers are added together for a Total Score from 0 to 100 (North Korea 3, Norway 100; game, set, match). And countries are given a rating of “Free,” “Partly Free,” or “Not Free.” Freedom House admits that, “an element of subjectivity is unavoidable in such an enterprise.”
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