PRICING THE PRICELESS.

I have a lot of time for both the Montreal Economic Institute, a classical liberal think-tank, and Cardus, which surveys North America's “social architecture” from a conservative, often religious perspective. NP columnist Raymond J. de Souza is one of its senior fellows.

But I find a couple of their recent studies curious. The one from the MEI looks at the impact of freedom on economic output while the Cardus study is about religion's effect on GDP (“What if we told you religion contributes $67 billion to Canada's economy and that's the moderate estimate?” Excuse me? We should take up faith because of its economic return?)

The MEI study is motivated by the obvious fact that freedom of expression is under attack in many parts of society, including our universities — which of all places should know better. It looks at the econometric relationship across 132 countries between GDP per capita and the countries' ranking in the 2018 “World press freedom index” constructed by Reporters without Borders. (In the 2020 ranking, Canada ranks 16th, just behind Iceland, just ahead of Luxembourg. Number 1 overall, as it also was in the 2018 ranking, was Norway.)

The ranking is based on a survey of journalists in the different countries and includes their judgments about seven factors: pluralism in the media, media independence, self-censorship, the legislative framework, transparency, infrastructure and, finally, the extent to which journalists are abused. (Canada had zero cases of journalist abuse, not even among reporters whom neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor hail kept from their appointed assignment of listening to daily prime ministerial COVID intonements from the steps of Rideau Cottage.)

Correlating per capita GDP with the press freedom ranking and other likely determinants of per capita GDP, the MEI researchers, Miguel Ouellette and Maria Lily Shaw, find that moving up one notch in the freedom ranking is associated

WHAT I REALLY APPRECIATE ABOUT MY FREEDOM — AND CERTAINLY CHERISH — IS THINKING, SPEAKING AND

WRITING AS I PLEASE.

with a roughly $150 increase in GDP per capita. If we caught all the way up to No. 1 Norway, Canadians would on average earn an extra $2,522 each and every year.

Maybe that's true, though explaining international differences in incomes using econometrics is hard. But what if the income gain were much smaller? Or if there were no income gain? Or if governments or many Canadians figured, “That's not really a lot of money. There must be easier ways to grow Canadians' incomes.” Would we forget about press freedom?

I don't doubt that free societies do better across a range of economic indicators, as China will eventually learn. But do I really appreciate my freedom, cherish it even, because it enables me to acquire a bigger and better refrigerator or nicer car or an extra room on my house or (post-COVID) a holiday in some far-flung part of the world? I'm happy to have all those things, of course, but what I really appreciate about my freedom — and certainly cherish — is thinking, speaking and writing as I please. A society in which instead you must look over your shoulder every time you want to express yourself would be a living hell (as some in our universities are finally beginning to realize).

So while it's interesting that freedom of the press seems to raise per capita income, it rather misses the point, which is the immense direct, non-economic benefit of living in a free society.

The Cardus study, by the economists Brian and Melissa Grim, strikes me the same way. They provide lower-, middleand upper-bound estimates of religion's impact on GDP. For the lower-bound estimate, which comes to almost $31 billion, they sum the annual revenue of Canadian religious organizations, such as schools, hospitals, congregations themselves, charities and media (i.e., religious publishers and broadcasters). These are different types of spending, of course. If I pay tuition at a Catholic school, how much of what I spend is for math and science and how much for religion? Same thing if I give to a religious charity that, say, helps people in poor countries. How much is because I think they'll do a good job and how much is because they're religious?

For their medium-level estimate the economists add in “halo effects” from such things as substance-abuse programs and kosher and halal food purchases, as well as various benefits congregations provide to their local communities. That gets the religious impact up to $67 billion.

Finally, for the upper bound, they simply multiply median Canadian income by the 9.7 million Canadians who say they have a religious affiliation to get a total of $670 billion. The authors don't make many claims for this number — which is good, since there's no way to know how much of people's income is generated by their religious motivation.

Those of us without strong religious beliefs have trouble understanding how religion could give meaning and purpose to a person's life. But many religious people say it does. You might try to figure out how much they would pay not to have meaning and purpose stripped from their lives — a lot, presumably — but none of the numbers cited tells us that.

Freedom and religious belief are pretty much priceless. Many people have made the ultimate sacrifice for them. These days every industry lobby begins its pitch for support by talking about how many jobs and how much GDP it's responsible for. What a sorry pass we've come to that the freedom and belief lobbies now feel obliged to do the same.