This video is an in depth look at the Economic freedom index, the heritage foundation which created it as well as regression analysis and the basics of data analysis. I explain what the economic freedom index is, what it is maed up of as well as what those things mean and how they relate to the life of the average person. I go into some anarcho-capitalist / Libertarian talking points and debunk them and then I take a deep dive into the data around the Economic freedom index in order to determine whether it is a valid metric or not. Subreddit: reddit.com/r/viki1999 Patreon: patreon.com/viki1999 Twitter: twitter.com/Viki1999Yt E-Mail Address: viki1999mail@gmail.com Sources: The heritage foundation: https://www.heritage.org/about-heritage/mission Heritage foundation Sourcewatch: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Heritage_Foundation Heritage foundation goals: https://www.heritage.org/truenorth What the index is made up of: https://www.heritage.org/index/pdf/2020/book/index_2020.pdf Economic freedom index: https://www.heritage.org/index/explore?u=637243835673850382 EFI Data: https://www.heritage.org/index/download# happiness-report: https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2019/WHR19.pdf Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 4:15 The heritage foundation 8:05 The Index explained 16:51 ALL THE DATA 28:13 Conclusion Transcript: Into, what is the index? Hello everybody, this video will be on the economic freedom index. You might remember that it was a central claim in this video which I made a reply to and I kept saying I’d make a video on the index. And that’s what this is, a video on the economic freedom index. Let’s start with the seemingly easy question what’s that? There are different answers ranging from “the economic freedom index tells you how much capitalism there is” over “the economic freedom index is a metric used by economists to describe how well an economy is doing” to “the economic freedom index is a load of bollocks which tells you nothing about anything”. And we’ll have a look at these things in detail, first I will explain the basics about the index, then I will talk about the heritage foundation who made the index and talk about why they say what they say, then I’ll explain how they calculated the index followed by which we do a deep dive into the data and see whether their claims hold water and in the conclusion I mention what we can learn from this. If you aren’t interested in hearing about the heritage foundation just skip to the data part of the video, use the new YT chapter thingy for that. And before I really get going, we’ll be talking about “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis” a lot. Which is also known as this word. And it can be pronounced “Da-Ta” or “Day-ta” and I have made the executive decision to switch between those two pronunciations at random in order to make the video harder to watch. Anyway, what’s the economic freedom index really? Simply put it’s a score put together by the American Heritage foundation which ranks most countries on earth and gives every single one a score between 0 and 100. This score is supposed to represent the economic freedom. In this case freedom means ease of doing business. So, it’s freedom of a rich person to open a business, not freedom of an employee to get a fair wage. That’s an important distinction and will become more apparent later. It’s about the freedom of corporations and those who are rich. It says nothing about whether the people work in air-conditioned offices or sweatshops. And this is the map that goes along with the index. As you can see it handily colours countries according to which score they got. This map is used a LOT on the internet, especially be right wing free market people. Or neoliberals if that’s what you want to call them. And the first argument they like to use is that the higher the score is, the more capitalism there is. This seems to be a rare argument so I won’t dwell on it for too long. Basically capitalism is by definition the institution of private property. This means that if a country has private property then it’s capitalist. And if that private property leads to people dying then they are dying because of a problem caused by private property, AKA capitalism.

• published: 10 May 2020
• views: 24485