Freedom v. Happiness?

I love reports. Especially reports with neat charts and cool maps. I’m a report geek. So imagine my glee when I came across a new report by two “scholars” who claim to have rigorously measured the level of freedom in each and every state. Whee!

The report, entitled Freedom in the 50 States, concludes that residents of New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota are the freest (doesn’t that word look cool?) while the poor indentured servants of New York and New Jersey are the least free. Now before we go any further its worth noting that the authors here don’t even pretend that this is unbiased although they spend almost 11 pages describing in gory detail the statistical methods they used. Freedom in this report is essentially defined this way: How close does a state hew to libertarian principles?

So far so good. If “freedom” is measured by whether a state allows sobriety checkpoints (bad) or same-sex marriage (good), has a minimum wage law (bad), or regulates home-schooling (bad) then as long as that’s spelled out there’s nothing wrong with the rankings. And the authors do a very thorough job of discussing what variables they chose to measure and what weight they chose to give each one. When they go one step further and compare their “freedom” ranking with how Democratic or Republican a state is that’s fine too — if not surprising. Democratic states are less “free.”

This report is the product of the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank headquartered at George Mason University and best known for guiding the Bush Administration in killing environmental and business regulations. “Freedom” to the Mercatus Center apparently also means the Federal government should not restrict how many hours in a row truckers can drive or how much arsenic should be in the water we drink. So the report is nothing if not true to its sponsor’s mission of making American free for pure libertarian ideals.

What’s funny about all this is how the “worst” states as defined by Mercatus rank awfully well in some other ways that seem kind of important. Take the bottom five, “least free” states: New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland. As the studies authors helpfully (and ruefully) note: “Unfortunately, these states make up a substantial portion of the total American population.” So Americans prefer to live in shackles? Yeah, right.

Gallup and the disease management company Healthways did their own survey of which states are the best to live in using an entirely different set of criteria focused on which residents are happiest – and the rankings offer a pretty interesting contrast to those from Mercatus.

Five of the ten “least free” states contain residents who are among the top 10 “happiest”:

Freedom Rank    State    Happiness Rank

        43                  MA               8
        44                  WA               7
        45                  HI                 2
        46                  MD               6
        47                  CA               9

And the “freest” states? Not all are so happy it turns out:

Freedom Rank    State    Happiness Rank

         3                   SD               39
         5                   TX               21
         6                   MO             44
         7                   TN               42
        10                  ND               28

So what can we conclude? That some people are unhappy with their freedom? Others are happy to be restricted? Hogwash.

There are all kinds of ways to measure whether a state is a good place for its residents or not and manipulative “researchers” can always find and massage data to make their points. The authors of the Mercatus study pretend their definition of freedom is definitive by making this truly ridiculous, and insulting, assertion:

If Americans generally prefer freedom as we have measured it, how did some states come to restrict freedom to such a degree? Perhaps the most regulated states on our index have been responding more to interest group pressures and politicians’ self-interest than to citizens’ most strongly held preferences.

Or perhaps your methodology is flawed because it is designed to produce a predictable outcome. That being said there are some sweet graphics in this baby….