 In 2020, what we see is that just freedom falls off of a cliff. So you see this steady decline in personal and economic freedoms. Economic freedoms were fairly pronounced. And then you see this huge drop in virtually every category of freedom that you can think of in the year 2000, setting back 2020, setting back the world more than 20 years. Ian is one of the co-authors of the human freedom index, which, but actually before we get into that, maybe you could just explain to our audience what exactly that is. Sure. The human freedom index is a global measurement of economic, personal, and civil freedoms around the world. And so what we do is we take 83 distinct measurements of freedom in areas ranging from the rule of law or safety and security or the size of government or freedom of speech, freedom of association, 12 big categories, but 83 distinct indicators for 165 countries. And then we put that data together to come up with what we think is a reasonable picture of freedom, human freedom within countries and at a global level. And when we say freedom, we have an idea of what we mean by that. Everybody has their own definition of freedom. George Bush did, Hugo Chavez did, Al Qaeda did, everybody does. We, by freedom, we mean the absence of coercive constraint, the idea that you can lead your life as you choose, as long as you respect the equal rights of others. And that's what we're measuring. And so it's really the first serious systematic measurement of broad human freedoms for a big set of countries and the data that we're using spans two decades now. So it's very useful to look at trends and freedom as well. Can you just very quickly say like going back 20 years, until 2020, and we're, you know, we'll talk a lot about 2020, because that's like, you know, a big year. But what, you know, is the arc of freedom bending towards light or dark, you know, up until 2020? What, what was the general trajectory? So what we see is with beginning in the year 2000, which is the year for which we have complete data, is human freedom being high, relatively high, certainly compared to decades past by what we know. Right. And continuing on an upward trajectory up until the year 2007, which is really the, the global high point of human freedom that coincides with the financial global financial crisis, which came the next year. And we see a steady decline of human freedom up through 2019 from 2007 to 2019, you already had virtually 80% of the world's population seeing some decline in freedom. And then from 2019 to 2020, 94% of the world's population saw this dramatic decline. That one of the things that we noticed is that some of the countries that were already low, like very low, like Venezuela and so on, they were already pretty much rock bottom. And they didn't, there's not much more for them to fall. So the drops really were coming from a lot of countries that were relatively free. I mean, countries all around the world saw drops, but we saw big drops in countries that are used to a higher level of freedom. And typically we see from one year to a next to the next is small movements in freedom in one direction or another. This is a very large movement for the entire world. Could you dig a little bit into what were some of the policies worldwide that caused this hit? I pulled a page from your report here that shows some of these different categories. I mean, we see the largest declines are in movement as you alluded to earlier, expression and trade and even religion is also on there. Did you break down specific policies that caused this or was, how much of it, I guess the one question is how much of it was policy and how much of it was just kind of pure reaction to the pandemic since we're talking about the pandemic year here? Yeah, that's a good question because you might ask, well, some of this had to take place as a response to the pandemic, even if it wasn't policy, people aren't going to be moving around and so on. But what we're measuring there are restrictions. And for the most part, that's what we're for the most part, measuring in the chart that you just showed shows a 20 year movement of these indicators. And so freedom of movement, I think that was the one that saw the biggest decline over that period. But almost all of that decline occurred in the year 2020. And for obvious reasons, I mean, you remember, we travel internationally, came to a halt, travel locally in many places, came to a halt. Certainly in a lot of countries, you couldn't even leave your house. You could be in serious trouble. So that was a big hit. Freedom of expression did too. I mean, what you could say about the pandemic or criticizing the government in many countries, rich countries and poor countries, democracies and non-democracies was restricted. And what media companies and even big tech companies could say came under scrutiny and under pressure in a way that was probably already happening, but even more so because of heightened tensions and health concerns and so on. Freedom of association, we know that people were not allowed to gather. This was a big, a big issue. And the rule of law came under under pressure and we see big falls in that because a lot of these things were adapted or implemented in an arbitrary way, favoring some groups and disfavoring others in, of course, in the less free countries in the authoritarian countries. This was done in a very random way to go after dissidents or political opponents and so on, whereas in more advanced countries, there may be other reasons for that, political reasons, and maybe it was more subtle, but it still was happening. And that was denounced by human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and so on. This was not just a problem for a part of the world. This is a problem that rich and poor countries, democracies and non-democracies were facing to different differing degrees. And you talked about how, I mean, the real drop-off came in more free countries. If you're in Venezuela, you're already pretty heavily restricted on a day-to-day thing, but I was thinking when you were talking about like freedom of assembly or whatnot, I remember reasing running stories. I think it was in Mississippi of a church that was going to have a drive-in, you know, religious ceremony where people stayed in their cars and parked in a lot, you know, and then, you know, kind of, you know, didn't get out of the car in a way. It was, you know, probably the best way to set up church in the future, right, you know, where it's like, you don't even have to get out of your car. But they were banned. They were banned from doing that. And that's like in the U.S. That's really fucked up in a way that in a country that is used to repression. It's like, OK, well, that's just Sunday or Saturday or whatever day we celebrate church on, we're constrained. I think that's right. And that that was, you know, that kind of thing was probably among the most shocking for Americans or for people who were used to a good high degree of freedom. We really haven't seen that kind of curtailment of freedom to that degree across such a wide number of freedoms in the United States. And in you have to go back to like World War Two, really. I mean, probably where there was rationing as well as curfews and, you know, restrictions on industrial inputs and things like that, things were actually being diverted away from, you know, commercial activities into a war effort. Well, that's right. And, you know, not even during the financial crisis, did we see a drop in freedom that was this as severe as this. And I don't want to give the impression that the that the less free, more authoritarian countries didn't see a big drop in freedom. They did. In fact, we have a chart in the book that that looks at which are the countries that most dropped in terms of freedom from the high point in 2007 through 2020. And the top 10 are all countries that were led by authoritarian regimes. But what I want to emphasize there is that that was an ongoing trend. And so what the pandemic did was was accelerate it. Whereas in liberal democracies and freer countries, the trend was a slower trend and then there was a big drop off in one year. So that's probably the difference in looking at one year to the next versus what was going on. And I I mean, it's it's probably true to say that the pandemic accelerated a number of trends that were already happening in the world, including in rich countries. I think that the the freedom of speech issue, which was already coming under pressure in liberal democracies, came under more pressure and, you know, free speech advocates talk about a free speech recession that had already been going on in in the world and in developing in developed countries. And the pandemic accelerated that in rich countries as well. That was an excerpt from our conversation with Ian Vasquez of the Kato Institute about the state of global freedom in the wake of COVID-19. If you want to watch another excerpt, go here. 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