text: Hong Kong and Singapore finish far lower in the prosperity rankings than they do in the more economically based indices of the Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation or of the Cato Institute/Fraser Institute, which tend to rank them first and second. But in a less severe version of the problem for China above, these countries lack personal freedom and democracy and, as a result, finish eighteenth and twenty-third, respectively, in the Prosperity Index. With due respect to the more economically weighted indices, and given that economic growth is of prime concern to developing nations in particular, weighting the more measurably definitive economic subindices more heavily is a useful experiment and one that is arguably justifiable from a policy perspective. As an experiment, double weighting the two direct economic indicators in the Prosperity Index does make a difference for some countries' performance. For instance, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom would all rise one place in the rankings, and the United States would move up two, but the biggest movers would be China (up fourteen places) and Russia (up eleven).