Freedom Isn't Free

The group Reporters Without Borders just release their 2006 Press Freedom Index. By their standards, the U.S. has dropped yet again this year, though the usual suspects appear at the bottom of the list.

They ask a series of questions from a number of people, but I don't know if there is any weighting to the responses. It isn't clear what their "index" really means – the scale doesn't seem to have a maximum value. I'd rather see boundary conditions, and I'd like to know that there is some relative weighting, instead of what appears to be a measure of absolute numbers. Can you really compare Cuba, where a large contingent of anti-government forces are entrenched in the United States and receiving heavy financial and political support, to a country where those critical of their government are truly isolated?

So, in the spirit of bad statistics, here's some additional numbers. We are told that "freedom isn't free." This would imply that the higher a country's GDP, the more they can afford freedoms such as the press. The index doesn't scale well to do a straight ratio, so subtract the ratio from 100 (North Korea adjusted to 99.9 to fit the scale). Then divide this modified RWB index by the GDP (from CIA data) of each nation.

The results ... The United States is one of the worst in the world. They rank only after China and North Korea. At the other end of the scale, countries like Tonga and the Comoros are doing quite well, given that they just don't have any money to begin with. If we only look at countries with fairly good GDP, Finland, Ireland, and New Zealand still end up at the top of the list.

What's hinted at here is that countries like Finland and Ireland are getting pretty good bang for the buck. Those of us here in the U.S., however, are getting ripped off. Americans are used to it though, they get the worst return on their dollar for health care, too.