See how free the world is, and which way it moved
Freedom country by country, from published research you can check. You choose what gets measured.
- indicators
- 60
- countries and territories
- 172
- sources
- 8
Freedom gets argued about constantly and looked up almost never.
The measurements exist: media self-censorship, tariff rates, network shutdowns. Then they sit in annual reports nobody opens. This puts them somewhere a person can turn them over in about a minute.
It is a teaching tool, not an argument. Nothing here tells you which country got it right, and it should work just as well for someone who reads the same screen and concludes the opposite.
Freedom is not one thing
A country can protect what you say and control what you own. The freedom measures belong to one of these groups. Each line is the world median, over as many years as that group has been measured.
The viewer
Change the indicator, drag along the years, click a country to keep hold of it. Switching what you measure never costs you the country or the year you were looking at.
Build the measure yourself
Most freedom indices decide what counts and by how much, then put that decision in an appendix. Here it is a slider, or a formula: (2*expression + trade) / 3.
Change what you value and watch the order of countries move. That movement is the honest answer to “which country is freest”.
Before you read a number
- Level and change disagree
- Where a country stands and which way it is moving are separate facts.
- No data is not a zero
- Nothing measured stays blank, rather than being scored as the worst.
- A shade means one thing
- Colours are cut over every country and year, never rescaled to the region.
- An average hides the spread
- So the chart draws the middle of the range behind the countries you pick.
Writing
- My New Project, FreedomLens
First post on my new project's blog, FreedomLens, talking about why I made it and my plans for it
Every number was measured by somebody else, credited where it is shown and listed in full on the sources page with the licence it is used under and how firmly that licence is established. What is ours is the arranging: the indices, the direction each measure is turned, and the rules for when a country gets a score at all. Those are choices you are invited to disagree with, and each index card says so.
Data access and navigation
FreedomLens contains freedom measures and other country statistics, including governance, population, income, health, education, energy and emissions.
Software assistants that may open only URLs they find as links should follow the site’s published navigation instead of constructing an address:
- Open the complete indicator directory and find the statistic by its linked name and description.
- Follow its indicator link—for example, GDP per capita.
- On that page, open Data by year and follow the directly published JSON link for the required year.
Each yearly JSON file includes country names, ISO alpha-3 codes, values, world positions, ranking direction, source and licence.