A couple classes ago, in a discussion about Ripstein, Tyler said that we tend to focus more on numerical measurements of nations (GDP, purchasing power, exchange rates, ext.) as an indication of quality of life rather than more qualitative qualifications, like freedom. It is just harder to measure freedom directly, and harder to quantify. Sen moves us closer to directly identifying which countries give their citizens more freedom. But he shies away from putting a numerical value on freedom. Sen writes, " I have also not attempted to produce an 'aggregate' measure of deprivation, based on 'weighting' the different aspects of capability deprivation. A constructed aggregate may often be far less interesting for policy analysis that the substantive pattern of diverse performances" (103). I agree with Sen in that an analysis illuminates what metrics often obscure. However, counting freedoms might be possible.
I think we could list all the freedoms gained or lost due to a societal feature (like welfare programs, income inequality, right to bare arms) for a set of individuals. Then, we could add the freedoms or subtract the unfreedoms for each set of individuals, and then we could arrive at a sum of freedoms. This would only be interesting if, through an analysis, it wasn't clear which country gave citizens more freedom. For example, Europe and the United States diffing levels of unemployment and income inequality, that yield different freedoms and unfreedoms. They seem to be sort of at a tie. Sen explains that "American social ethics seems to find it possible to be very non-supportive of the indigent and the impoverished, in a way that a typical Western European, reared in a welfare state, finds hard to accept. But the same American social ethics would find the double-digit levels of unemployment, common in Europe quite intolerable"(95). But which country is more free? We could apply this little math trick to see which situation either more equality, more unemployment or less equality, less unemployment generates more freedoms for sets of individuals and fewer unfreedoms for sets of individuals. Maybe if we could start to quantify freedom on a rudimentary level, we could talk more directly about freedom, instead about indirect measurements of quality of life.
So I think that we can't give a completely quantitative look at freedom. Sen, as you note, looks at the different political cultures in Europe and the US. What decisions their respective electorates make is heavily dependent on that political culture. One way to conceptualize this would be to see the social context as an information base. Democratic governments inherently emphasize whatever that context tells them to, which means we shouldn't expect a universal idea of the correct balance of different freedoms at all, for the simple fact that the informational bases are unique by society.
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