Women’s empowerment in many developing countries is in its early phases, but the right policies can set women everywhere on a path toward the same prosperity and freedom enjoyed by women in today’s advanced countries.
As a result, the value of all drugs seized by the average agent has fallen by 70% since FY 2013. Without marijuana coming in between ports of entry, drug smuggling activity now primarily occurs at ports of entry, where a border wall would have no effect. In FY 2018, the average inspector at ports of entry made drug seizures that were three times more valuable overall than those made by Border Patrol agents between ports of entry — a radical change from 2013 when Border Patrol agents averaged more valuable seizures. This is because smugglers bring mainly hard drugs through ports. By weight, the average port inspector seized 8 times more cocaine, 17 times more fentanyl, 23 times more methamphetamine, and 36 times more heroin than the average Border Patrol agent seized at the physical border in early 2018.
The good news is that over the long term, freedom has spread to a diversity of countries too, including numerous ex-socialist countries, Latin American nations, one sub-Saharan African country (Mauritius) and several Asian countries that all belong to the top quartile of the freest countries in the index. Many are on the rise, and some, like Taiwan, have seen notable increases in freedom in recent years.
The United States ranks 17th in the fourth annual Human Freedom Index (HFI), the most comprehensive measure of freedom ever created for a large number of countries around the globe. Overall, the report finds global freedom has fallen slightly since 2008.
“The Rule of Law continues to be a weak point for the United States, which has relatively low ratings when it comes to such areas as the protection of property rights, the enforcement of contracts, and criminal justice,” says co-authorIan Vásquez. “The Rule of Law plays a fundamental role in upholding liberty, so anyone who cares about freedom in the United States should be concerned with its evolution.”
Explore the 2018 Human Freedom Index — released today in honor of Human Rights Day — and see how your country ranks. Then, join the conversation on Twitter with #FredomIndex18…
The report builds on the famous wager between biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist and former Cato Senior Fellow Julian Simon on the effect of population growth on the Earth’s resources. While Ehrlich warned that population growth could deplete resources and lead to global catastrophe, Simon saw humans as the “ultimate resource” who could innovate their way out of such shortages. The Ehrlich-Simon wager tracked the real price of a basket of five raw materials between 1980 and 1990, finding as Simon hypothesized that all measured commodities decreased in price by an average of 57.6 percent, despite a population increase of 873 million.
In addition, the authors develop the concept of price elasticity of population (PEP), which allows them to estimate the effect of population growth on the availability of resources. Over the time period studied the population grew from 4.46 billion to 7.55 billion, a 69.3% increase. The PEP indicates that the time-price of the basket of commodities declined by 0.934% for every 1% of increase in population. Every additional human being born on our planet appears to make resources proportionally more plentiful for the rest of us.
The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet. The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have.
For nearly 250 years, the United States has recovered from enormous economic and political shocks, including the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the high inflation and oil crises of the 1970s. Following each of these events, the U.S. economy returned to its previous economic trend.
Amazon has chosen New York City and Arlington, Virginia, for new corporate headquarters after the cities ponied up more than $2 billion in subsidies to the retail giant.
Workers in the two cities will be winners as labor demand gets boosted, but business subsidies make losers of taxpayers, other businesses and good governance.
Fairness.Subsidies give Amazon an unfair edge other tech firms in New York City and Northern Virginia.
Alternatives.New York and Virginia would have generated more durable growth by cutting business taxes across the board by $2 billion. That would have boosted investment by many businesses, and thus created more balanced prosperity.
Diversity. Industry clusters such as Silicon Valley are successful not because they have big companies, but because they have a start-up culture that nurtures growth companies with venture capital. Rather than favoring big companies, state and local politicians would better spur growth by reducing tax and regulatory barriers to spawn a diversity of new companies.
Corruption. Allowing politicians to hand-out business subsidies at their discretion generates corruption because the hand-outs get swapped for campaign cash and outright bribes.
Bureaucracy. Amazon-style subsidy deals are jobs programs for accountants and lawyers.
Lobbyists. The high-profile Amazon win will inspire more companies to shake down politicians for subsidies.
Dependency.Just as welfare undermines individual productivity, corporate welfare undermines business productivity.
Bad Decisions. Subsidies induce companies to make bad decisions that backfire.
Politics. High-profile subsidy deals are politically risky.
Priorities. State and local governments face serious problems that may sink their economies in coming years such as large unfunded pension costs. They should fix those problems rather than trying to micromanage the economy.
Rather than subsidizing big businesses, the states should aim to create a diverse business ecosystem — an Amazon, if you will — by cutting taxes and regulations for all types of investment. If states adopt low tax rates and repeal unneeded regulations on zoning, licensing, and other activities, growth will take care of itself.
“Refugees have killed fewer Americans than duck face! This isn’t just cherrypicked liberal, snowflake data. According to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, the chances of you being killed by a refugee terrorist are one in three point six BILLION. It’s not gonna happen.“ — Hasan Minhaj
To better measure educational outcomes, Stan J. Liebowitz, Cato adjunct scholar and Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) with Matthew L. Kelly, a graduate student at UTD, compare state test scores for each of three subjects (math, reading, and science), four major ethnic groups (whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asian/Pacific Islanders) and two grades (fourth and eighth), for a total of 24 potential observations in each state and the District of Columbia. They give each of the 24 tests equal weight and base their ranking on the average of the test scores.
The authors also briefly examine additional factors that affect student performance. They find states with stronger unions tend to get worse academic outcomes. Unions are negatively related to student performance, presumably through opposing the removal of underperforming teachers, opposing merit-based pay, or because of union work rules. Additionally, the authors’ results indicate that having a greater share of students in charter schools is positively related to student achievement.
Although this study constitutes a significant improvement on leading state education rankings, it retains some limitations. There exists substantial variation in education quality within states and disagreement about desired educational outcomes. However, state-level rankings do provide an intuitively pleasing basis for lawmakers and interested citizens to compare state education policies. The authors’ main goal is to provide rankings that more accurately reflect the learning that is taking place by focusing only on academic achievement and disaggregating scores, rather than scoring inputs and state-wide test scores.
Transit ridership in 31 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas has dropped 15 percent or more since the year of highest ridership in each region in the last decade. While transit ridership has declined in the past, as it did between 1990 and 1995, it recovered due to high gas prices. Today, moderate gas prices are fueled by America’s resurging oil industry, and when that resurgence is combined with deteriorating transit infrastructure and the growth of the ride-hailing industry, it appears that the most recent decline may be irreversible.
Many assume that transit ridership is heavily influenced by population density, however, much more important to transit is the concentration of downtown jobs. A major reason for transit’s decline has been the dispersion of jobs from concentrated job centers to distribution across the urban landscape. O'Toole finds the only urban areas whose transit systems carried more than 10 percent of commuters had more than 240,000 downtown jobs.
Americans have responded to the automobile’s advantages over transit by steadily increasing automobile ownership, with 21 percent of American households having three or more cars and fewer than 9 percent having no car. Making matters even more difficult for transit, about half the households with no cars also have no workers: only 4.3 percent of American workers live in households that have no cars. In addition, more than 20 percent of workers in carless households nevertheless drive alone to work (probably in employer-supplied cars) while fewer than 42 percent take transit to work.
Today transit carries fewer than 27,000 riders per operating employee compared to 59,000 riders per employee in the decade prior to 1964, the year Congress gave cities and states incentives to municipalize transit systems.
Current total transit subsidies total more than $50 billion a year, with annual subsidies averaging more than $150 per U.S. resident even though most people rarely, if ever, use transit. A major problem with transit agencies’ dependence on subsidies is that such dependence makes them more beholden to politicians and their backers than to transit riders. Agencies become willing and eager to approve cushy union contracts and gold-plated infrastructure projects that do little to improve local or regional transportation. Meanwhile, politicians neglect the maintenance of existing systems, leading to frequent breakdowns.
The fastest-growing urban areas in the 2000s were ones that spent the least on transit improvements in the 1990s, while urban areas that spent the most on transit improvements were among the slowest-growing regions.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
