The Economist, in publishing the first edition of the index in 2007, admitted: "The index will run into some flak." Specifically, according to The Economist, the weighting of military expenditure "may seem to give heart to freeloaders: countries that enjoy peace precisely because others (often the USA) care for their defence," and said the true utility of the index may lie not in its specific current rankings of countries but in how those rankings change over time, thus tracking when and how countries become more or less peaceful. In 2012, The Economist suggested: "Quantifying peace is a bit like trying to describe how happiness smells." The publication admitted that the GPI has produced some "surprising results" and argued that "part of the appeal of the index is that readers can examine each of the variables in turn and think about how much weight to add to each."
