Why Is There Such a Large Ranking Gap Between Two Good Societies?

The United States ranks 15th and Israel 57th in the 2025 Human Freedom Index (HFI), published by the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute. At first glance, a 42-place difference can suggest a large qualitative gulf between the two societies. The underlying numbers tell a more measured story. The United States receives an overall Human Freedom score of 8.71 and Israel 7.52, a difference of 1.19 points on a 0-to-10 scale. The 2025 edition covers 165 jurisdictions and reports conditions through 2023, the most recent year for which the authors had sufficiently comprehensive data.¹

The distinction matters because the HFI is not a general ranking of moral worth, national achievement, democracy, military conduct, or social welfare. It is a specific effort to quantify negative liberty: the degree to which individuals are free from coercive constraint. A country can be technologically innovative, democratic, prosperous, or militarily secure and still lose points on particular HFI indicators. Conversely, a country can perform well on one freedom category and poorly on another.

How Cato Calculates the Overall Score

The HFI uses 87 distinct indicators organized into 12 categories. Seven are personal-freedom categories: Rule of Law; Security and Safety; Movement; Religion; Association, Assembly, and Civil Society; Expression and Information; and Relationships. Five are economic-freedom categories: Size of Government; Legal System and Property Rights; Sound Money; Freedom to Trade Internationally; and Regulation.

The most important methodological point is that Cato does not simply average the two headline subindex scores, Personal Freedom and Economic Freedom. Instead, the authors average the 12 category scores directly to produce the final HFI score. Each category therefore has the same weight in the final index. In practical terms, the seven personal-freedom categories collectively account for 7/12 of the overall score, about 58.3 percent, while the five economic-freedom categories account for 5/12, about 41.7 percent.²

That method explains why the United States can have a Personal Freedom score of 9.15 and an Economic Freedom score of 8.10 while its overall Human Freedom score is 8.71, rather than the 8.63 that would result from simply averaging 9.15 and 8.10. Israel’s corresponding figures are 7.56, 7.46, and 7.52. The published overall scores are calculated from the underlying category data before rounding.³

Headline scores from the 2025 HFI country profiles. The last column shows Economic Freedom followed by the overall Human Freedom score.

The Ranking Gap Looks Larger Than the Score Gap

Ranks are ordinal: they tell us the order in which countries fall, not the magnitude of the distance between them. A modest change in score can move a jurisdiction many places when numerous countries cluster within a relatively narrow band. Thus, “15th versus 57th” sounds more dramatic than “8.71 versus 7.52.” The ranking difference should not be interpreted as though the United States is nearly four times as free as Israel. The actual score does not support that conclusion.

Israel’s 7.52 also remains above the 2023 global average of 6.81 reported in the 2025 Index. The most revealing question is which specific HFI categories account for the 1.19-point difference between Israel and the United States.

Where the Gap Actually Comes From

The category scores make the answer much clearer. The following comparison uses the rounded category values published in the United States and Israel country profiles.⁴

Because the published category values are rounded to one decimal place, the differences above are approximate. Cato calculates the official overall scores from more precise underlying values.

1. Security and Safety: Important, but Not the Main Direct Explanation

Israel’s security environment plainly matters. The United States benefits from two large oceans, friendly neighboring states, and the absence of an active territorial war on its borders. Israel faces chronic military threats, terrorism, rocket and missile attacks, and periodic mobilization. It would be surprising if those conditions did not affect measured freedom.

But the HFI data do not show a large difference in this category. The Security and Safety category is 8.8 for the United States and 8.1 for Israel, a difference of only 0.7 points. Moreover, Israel actually scores better on the homicide subindicator, 9.5 versus 8.3 for the United States. The larger difference inside this category is “Disappearances, conflicts, terrorism,” where Israel receives 6.7 and the United States 9.4. In other words, Cato’s security penalty for Israel reflects conflict and terrorism far more than ordinary violent crime.⁵

Because every HFI category receives equal weight, the direct contribution of the 0.7-point Security and Safety gap to the overall HFI difference is only about 0.06 points (0.7 divided by 12). Compared with the published 1.19-point overall gap, that is roughly five percent. Security may also affect other categories indirectly, but the Index itself does not tell us how much of those other differences is caused by security rather than by independent policy choices.

2. Movement and Association: Where Security May Have a Larger Indirect Effect

The gap is much larger in Movement, 9.8 for the United States versus 7.8 for Israel, and in Association, Assembly, and Civil Society, 9.4 versus 7.6. A country exposed to war and terrorism may adopt border restrictions, emergency rules, access controls, or limits on assembly that a geographically insulated country does not need.

The HFI measures the existence or absence of freedom; it generally does not excuse a restriction because the government can offer a persuasive reason for it. From the standpoint of the index, a restriction adopted for genuine defense needs can still reduce measured freedom. That distinction is essential when comparing a country in a relatively benign strategic environment with a country that lives under recurring security pressure.

3. Expression and Information: The Largest Measured Difference

The single largest category gap is not Security and Safety. It is Expression and Information: 9.0 for the United States and 5.4 for Israel, a 3.6-point difference. On the rounded category scores alone, that difference contributes about 0.30 points to the overall HFI gap, roughly one quarter of the published 1.19-point difference.

Israel’s profile contains an especially low normalized score on the “Direct attacks on the press” input, while its other media-and-expression inputs are higher but still below the corresponding U.S. values. The proper interpretation is not that Israel has no free press. Cato combines several standardized source datasets and converts them to a common 0-to-10 scale. The score instead means that, according to those source measures and Cato’s normalization method, Israel experienced substantially more adverse conditions affecting expression and information than the United States during the period represented by the Index.⁶

This category deserves more emphasis because, mathematically, it explains considerably more of the measured U.S.-Israel gap than Israel’s Security and Safety category does.

4. Relationships and Personal Status

The Relationships category is another major source of the difference: the United States scores 10.0 and Israel 7.5. Israel receives 10.0 for same-sex relationships and 10.0 on the female-genital-mutilation indicator, but only 7.5 for inheritance rights and 2.5 for divorce. This is the HFI category in which Israel’s distinctive personal-status system is most visible.

For Jewish citizens and residents, Israeli law places marriage and divorce within the jurisdiction of rabbinical courts, and other recognized religious communities also maintain religious personal-status jurisdictions. That arrangement does not mean that Israel lacks religious freedom; Cato separately gives Israel a high 9.3 in the Religion category. It means that the legal structure governing intimate personal relationships is less uniformly individual and civil than the system reflected in the U.S. score. The Knesset’s English text of the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law states that marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel who are nationals or residents fall under rabbinical-court jurisdiction.⁷

5. Rule of Law: A Useful Counterexample

Judicial controversy in Israel is occasionally cited as an explanation for the ranking gap. The 2025 HFI country profiles do not support that conclusion. Israel scores 7.3 in Rule of Law, while the United States scores 7.2. Whatever one thinks of Israel’s 2023 judicial-reform controversy, this particular HFI category does not explain why Israel ranks overall below the United States.

This is a useful reminder that the Index should be read from the data outward rather than from a political narrative inward. A factor may be important in public debate without being a major driver of the measured difference in this particular index.

6. Economic Freedom: A Real but More Nuanced Difference

The United States receives an Economic Freedom score of 8.10 and ranks 5th on that subindex; Israel receives 7.46 and ranks 39th. The difference is meaningful, but it is not a uniform U.S. advantage across every economic category.⁸

Three areas account for most of the U.S. advantage in the five economic categories. Size of Government is 7.2 in the United States and 5.9 in Israel. Legal System and Property Rights is 7.6 versus 6.3. Regulation is 8.5 versus 7.2. The Regulation category is particularly revealing: Cato gives Israel a strong 9.4 for credit-market regulation but only 4.6 for labor-market regulation, compared with 8.6 for U.S. labor-market regulation.

At the same time, the two countries tie at 9.0 in Sound Money, and Israel actually outperforms the United States in Freedom to Trade Internationally, 8.8 versus 8.1. Israel therefore should not be described simply as a closed or anti-market economy. A more accurate description is that it combines strong international trade and monetary performance with a larger state footprint, weaker scores on parts of the legal/property framework, and more restrictive labor and business regulation.

How Much of the Gap Is Explained by Living in a Dangerous Neighborhood?

The best answer is: clearly some, but less can be established from the Index than intuition initially suggests. The direct Security and Safety difference accounts for only about five percent of the published overall score gap when the 12-category weighting is applied. If, as a deliberately generous thought experiment, one attributes the entire differences in Security and Safety (0.7), Movement (2.0), and Association/Assembly/Civil Society (1.8) to Israel’s security environment, those three categories together would account for about 0.38 HFI points, roughly 32 percent of the 1.19-point U.S.-Israel gap.

It would be unjustified to assign all of those differences to war or terrorism. Some movement, association, expression, property, and regulatory rules arise from institutional history and domestic political choices. Conversely, security conditions may also influence categories that are not obviously labeled “security.” The HFI does not attempt to disentangle those channels. Israel’s dangerous strategic environment is an important part of the explanation, especially for conflict-related security and plausibly for some movement and association restrictions, but it does not by itself explain most of the measured gap.

Israel’s High-Tech Sector: What It Shows, and What It Does Not

Technological success is not the same thing as a high Human Freedom Index score. A country can create a highly competitive innovation ecosystem while retaining substantial regulation, public spending, or institutional constraints elsewhere in the economy.

The Israel Innovation Authority reported that the high-tech sector represented about 17 percent of Israeli GDP in 2024 and about 57 percent of exports in the first half of 2025. The OECD’s 2025 survey likewise describes important parts of Israel’s technology-regulatory environment as flexible and innovation-friendly, while also identifying broader skills, infrastructure, and regulatory challenges outside the sector. Israel has demonstrated that selected institutions and internationally exposed sectors can be exceptionally dynamic even when the country’s economy as a whole receives only a moderately high economic-freedom score.⁹

Conclusion

The ranking gap between the United States and Israel is real, but it is easy to misunderstand. The United States ranks 15th and Israel 57th, yet their overall HFI scores are 8.71 and 7.52. The 42-place rank difference therefore reflects both a genuine 1.19-point freedom-score difference and the way jurisdictions cluster in an ordinal ranking.

Israel’s security environment matters, but the Security and Safety category is not the largest measured source of the gap. Expression and Information, Relationships, Movement, and Association show larger differences. On economic freedom, Israel loses ground in Size of Government, Legal System and Property Rights, and Regulation, while tying the United States in Sound Money and outperforming it in Freedom to Trade Internationally. Rule of Law is especially instructive: Israel marginally outscores the United States in that category.

Both the United States and Israel are free, pluralistic societies operating under very different strategic and institutional conditions. Cato’s index identifies where measured freedom differs; it does not determine whether every restriction is prudent, necessary, moral, temporary, or historically understandable. For that reason, the HFI is most useful as a diagnostic instrument: it shows where the differences are and may serve as a motivation for improvement.