 Hi all, Salvatore here. Last week, Shekhar Gupta was kind enough to feature me in an episode of Cut the Clutter. Thank you, Shekhar. And in that episode, Shekhar highlighted a, quote, new key set of democracy rankings that, quote, don't pass the test of having been checked out only with Indian intellectuals. He was talking about the Cato Institute Human Freedom Index. Now, let's let him talk in his own words about the sources of data for that important new index. If you go back and read the methodology of this, you will figure out that this has not been done by making phone calls to some intellectuals. Go to page 389 of this 435-page report and there is methodology explained in detail under each head. Now, as a comparative sociologist who studies international rankings for a living, I have a very particular set of skills. And among those skills is going to page 389 of the Cato Institute's Human Freedom Index report to find out what their sources were. So let's queue that up. Here we go. I'm getting to the report and page 388, which is where they start talking about religion. Now, there were four indices that dropped dramatically in the Modi years on the Human Freedom Index. Religion, Freedom of Association, Freedom of Expression and Media Freedom. And what was the main source of data for those? That's right. It was all the varieties of democracy and VDEM. Exactly the same report that I criticized in my paper on India's international democracy rankings. And where does VDEM get its data from? Country experts, about 85 percent of them university professors and about two thirds of them nationals of or residents of the country they are studying. In other words, where does the data come from for the Cato Institute's Human Freedom Index? It comes from Indian intellectuals. Call me, Shekhar.