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RobinHanson's avatar

If you'd read the post, you'd see why those sort of indices aren't what I'm talking about.

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clever_ape's avatar

There are already lots of indices like this. For example, Heritage has the Index of Economic Freedom. Transparency International has the Corruption Perceptions Index. I'll bet there are more indices for things like free speech, government stability, gender equality, you name it. You could aggregate these indices into an overall quality measure, or let people choose their own weights for various aspects of the index in order to figure out the optimal country for them or something like that.

BTW, one thing that can happen once you set up an index is that national governments will try to game the index, e.g. figure out how the Index of Economic Freedom is calculated and figure out how to increase their score in order to be more attractive to investors. Similar to college rankings I guess.

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