Governments behaving badly… We’ve all seen it. Get a bunch of libertarians from around the world together, and each seems to take perverse pride in proving that her own government is the worst of all. How can we quantify governments’ badness?
On the economic side, we might look to the Economic Freedom of the World index. The Economist has come up with a clever new one: the DOG factor (“discount for obnoxious governments”). It’s the deviation of the price-to-earnings ratio in the domestic market from global standard valuations. Some governments score very high indeed on the DOG factor:
Iran, like Russia a target of Western sanctions, trades on a p/e of just 5.6 and has a total stockmarket value of $131 billion; were it to be rated on a par with the average emerging market, its market value would be $292 billion, so its DOG factor is $161 billion…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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