According to the report:
And here’s the ranking for economic freedom in states and provinces. As you can see, Alberta and Saskatchewan are in the top two spots, followed by the American states of Delaware, Texas, and Nevada.and...
If you look at the policies that sub-national governments actually control, the rankings change a bit. Alberta still comes in first place, but Saskatchewan plummets.That sounds a bit more like my perceptions. North Dakota, home of the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, is just below them in 8th place.
Meanwhile, the best American state is South Dakota, followed by Tennessee, Delaware, and Texas.
My impression is that they developed an algorithm - a way to calculate an answer, these ratings - and they now believe it to be true. In my business, we then spend a bit of time and money to see if the algorithm gives answers that agree with reality. I think they need to do that.
They are pretty clearly blindly following their model. California outranking half the country is proof of that. Delaware ranking so highly implies to me that they are weighing freedom for corporations more than freedom for people - Delaware is known for easy corporate regulations, which is why it's home on paper to so many corporations. A lot of my credit card junk mail comes from Wilmington.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that their model delivers scores that reflect what their paying clients care about. I would guess that includes things like regulatory certainty (as opposed to absence of regs), taxes that can be gamed by a big corp rather than low taxes, and so on.
ReplyDeleteAlaska scores poorly, but not near the bottom ... probably a fair rating.
I can tell you that bureaucrats and legislators read those Frazier rankings.
I did note that all of the states with bad ratings had the least gun control laws.---Ray
ReplyDeleteDepends on your meaning of 'free'...
ReplyDeletegfa
Vermont rated "less free" than New York? Massachusetts "more free" than both of them?
ReplyDeleteNice try, now pull the other one.