How long will Hong Kong keep ranking?

CANADA CANNOT EXPECT OTHERS TO DO THE JOB FOR US. — BURNEY

The Fraser Institute issued its annual Economic Freedom of the World report last week. It didn’t get much attention; it never does these days. Considered as a league table, the report is very boring and static, and makes poor copy.

The same countries typically appear at the top from year to year, and are separated mostly by microscopic, irrelevant differences. For 2017, whence the data in the new report come, Canada sat in eighth place just a hair above Australia and a hair below the U.K. Ascending to the top, we meet other siblings of the English-speaking world, Ireland and the U.S.; the Swiss Republic stands in its typical fourth; the relatively wild child of the Commonwealth, New Zealand, remains third; and then, in the top two places, you have the twin beacons of radical economic freedom, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Ah, yes, Hong Kong. The Special Administrative Region seems, for now, to have won a short-term victory in its struggle to preserve the conditions of its reunion with mainland China. This has not, ostensively, been

a struggle over economic freedom per se, but it is not a coincidence that the rioting ultimately originated in a conflict over bookstores. It is mighty hard to draw a line where “economic” freedom stops and purely personal or civil freedoms begin, and the design of the index reflects this. It has a large basic ruleof-law component, includes mobility rights under the free trade factor, and takes points away for imposing military conscription. (This is surely a tiny tribute to the shade of Milton Friedman, who was one of the originators of the index.)

Even if Hong Kong’s immediate quarrel with China has been resolved for now, it is only a manifestation of what is likely to be a longer game. Clever columnists always like exoticizing talk about how the Chinese think in generations, but when it comes to Hong Kong, the cliché has weight. The 2019 riots, in showing how attached young HKers are to their distinct identity and to the English-speaking world, have revealed a nightmarish, even delegitimizing failure by the Chinese Communists. Mainland influence on Hong Kong education and politics has been used with the intention of prolonging and deepening the spirit of ‘97; China, so often deemed the super-country of the future by admiring or fearful intellectuals, has tested the results of this effort in the eyes of the world and been made a laughingstock.

Well, I didn’t set out to write a column about Hong Kong. The point I was going to make is that Hong Kong’s presence at the top of the table is a little hint that the long-term trends identified in the economic freedom report might stop being boring and static very quickly. At a moment’s notice, China could, in theory, choose to crack down viciously on Hong Kong (although it won’t), with the likely result that Hong Kong’s landscape of “economic freedom” would resemble that of mainland China — ranked 113th for freedom in the report’s overall table — a lot more than it does now.

The economic freedom report is one of the most useful and highly regarded things that the Fraser Institute does. On one level it is ludicrous to try to quantify economic freedom, and doubly ludicrous to spit out a single summary number for every country. The design of the instrument does reflect subjective choices (one of which is “including Hong Kong separately”), but the underlying data are all in some sense objective, even when they depend on long-term surveys and measurements of economic sentiment. The numerical components are openly provided and can be remixed at will; there are no thumbs on the scale.

Last month, for instance, there was an interesting new paper from Sweden about “Hayekian welfare states” which uses the freedom index to discuss and attack big questions about political philosophy. Basically the authors observe that there are a lot of very free countries with big fat governments like Sweden’s and ours, and they explore the features that might be required for such an equilibrium, which a lot of the folks at the Fraser Institute might deem unstable or illusory. (“The dimensionality of economic freedom,” they say rather tartly, “is not settled simply because the Fraser Institute currently produces a five-dimensional index.”) Their paper is only the latest addition to a whole literature on the various components of the index, and how well they map onto reality.

Which is what the index is for, more or less. The index is part of a little, but ever-growing, world of similar quantitative efforts in social science. A lot of these datasets are connected in some way: the 2019 version of the economic freedom report notes with detectable excitement that there is a relatively new quantitative democracy dataset called Varieties of Democracy (“V-Dem”) whose numbers can be incorporated into the Freedom Index’s rule-of-law measure and other metrics.

Instruments like this sort of say to the researcher up front: “Very well, it’s ludicrous; but would you rather not quantify at all?” We build indices like these in the hope that they are loosely “right” and loosely reflect some underlying phenomenon in the world. Because science talks in the language of math, having these quantifications around lets us attempt tests and guesses that would otherwise be impossible, even loosely.

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WELL, I DIDN’T SET OUT TO WRITE A COLUMN

ABOUT HONG KONG.

COLBY COSH