[lbo-talk] Human Freedom Index

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Sep 20 06:59:32 PDT 2007


On 9/19/07, John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> > The 1991 Human Development Report <http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/
> > 1991/en/pdf/hdr_1991_ch1.pdf> came up with a Human Freedom Index,
> > based on countries' performance on some 40 measures of personal
> > freedom. The rankings of those in the top group, "high freedom":
> >
> > 1 Sweden
> > 2 Denmark
> > 3 Netherlands
> > 4 Finland
> > 5 New Zealand
> > 6 Austria
> > 7 Norway
> > 8 France
> > 9 Germany
> > 10 Belgium
> > 11 Canada
> > 12 Switzerland
> > 13 USA
> > 14 Australia
> > 15 Japan
> > 16 UK
> > 17 Greece
> > 18 Costa Rica
> >
> > With the exception of NZ, the Anglo-Saxon "liberal" countries are not
> > at the top of this list.
>
> But where's Iran? They give out free condom's and teach people about
> women's orgasms. Surely that counts for something?

No Third World state, populist or socialist, ranks high on the UN's Human Freedom Index (published in 1991, based on data of 1985) that Doug posted here, except Costa Rica which the UN included among "High Freedom" countries: on page 20, the "HFI ranking of selected countries" put Cuba, China, the USSR, and other then socialist nations _below_ Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and placed Iraq at the very bottom (<http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/1991/en/pdf/hdr_1991_ch1.pdf>, p. 20). Iran is not mentioned on page 20, but the HFI would have put it, together with the aforementioned Second and Third World nations, somewhere among "Low Freedom" countries.

Apparently the Human Freedom Index was controversial:

The Human Development Report 2000 is not UNDP's

first effort to integrate human rights in its development

assessments. It was already in the second HDR (1991)

that a special indicator, the Human Freedom Index

(HFI), was launched. In solid indexing fashion countries

were ranked according to their realisation of "human

freedom" as manifested in the index. As this was based

on six freedoms of merely a civil and political nature, the

UNDP constituency expressed major discontent with the

exercise. In 1992 the effort was weakened into a Political

Freedom Index (PFI) that did not allow for any ranking

on a country to country basis. From 1993 onwards the

whole endeavour has been abandoned.

("'Rights-Based Approaches': Any New Thing Under

the Sun?," <http://www.development-ethics.org/document.asp?cid=5007&sid=5002&did=1056>)

You might say that the UNHFI itself had a Euro social democratic preference and anticommunist bias, the preference many American leftists say they share (though they will never vote for it) and the bias that they have (though they don't realize it). By pursuing liberalism (especially of the American brand), however, American leftists won't make a Sweden out of the USA, nor will Cubans, Iranians, etc. out of their respective countries. Swedish social democracy itself wasn't built by people who espoused liberalism. In Sweden, those who advocate or hew close to liberalism are the center right, recently voted into power: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Sweden>.

Generally speaking, most states that violate the principles of liberalism one way or another, to whatever degrees, whether they are populist, socialist, neo-corporatist, or social democratic, are pressured by their own ruling classes and upper strata, as well as the US ruling class, to conform to them.

Once you fully accept liberalism, you begin to think like this: the government prohibiting the opening of sex shops in the private sector is a worse violation of human freedom than the government refusing to provide publicly-funded universal health care for all.

American leftists may not want to believe it for liberalism is their only discourse, but liberalism, especially of the Anglo-American variety, has economic foundations and social implications that are inseparably intertwined with its political architecture, which help promote social and economic inequalities, much more so than less liberal though frankly right-wing ideologies like Japan's ruling class's.

Speaking of Japan, btw, Japan's ambassador to Venezuela, Matsui Yasuo, crowed in an El Nacional interview that the Japanese are more socialist than Chavez, probably thinking the way American leftists do about Iran, i.e., abstracting political economy and human development from the history of imperialism: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/08/is-japan-more-socialist-than-venezuela.html>.

On 9/19/07, dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> Hmm, so far, King Sarko I's great contributions to humanity are (1)
> threatening to bomb Iran, (2) scapegoating immigrants (a neat trick,
> considering Sarko is the progeny of immigrants himself), and now (3)
> ripping the heart out of the French public sector:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7003866.stm

It's lucky for the Iranians and Muslim French immigrants that the American Sarko and his Socialist Foreign Minister couldn't postpone (3) and concentrate on (1) and (2), for only (3) can motivate French workers to rise up and defend their way of life . . . from liberalism. -- Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list