SILENT MISERY:

Remember the Misery Index?: Here's why the press doesn’t play this oldie anymore. (Jerry Bowyer, 3/18/04, National Review)

For those who only began following economic statistics within the past 10 years, a definition is in order. The misery index, as the name suggests, is designed to measure the amount of misery felt by ordinary people in the economy. Since fear of unemployment and loss of purchasing power through inflation have pervasive effects in the lives of ordinary Americans, the misery index is simply the unemployment rate added to the inflation rate. Unemployment is based on the (recently neglected) household survey of employment, compiled by the Labor Department. And the inflation rate is based on the annual change in the Consumer Price Index.

How does the current misery index stack up with earlier periods? You be the judge:

The ranking for the average misery index for given periods in descending order are as follows:

* George Herbert Walker's average misery index is a massively large 10.7 percent.

*The Post WWII period's average is a rather large 9.5 percent.

*The average for Clinton's first term weighs in at a moderate 8.8 percent.

*George W.'s current misery index is 7.6 percent.

*The average for Clinton's second term is 6.8 percent.

This means that George W.'s current misery index is roughly only two-thirds of his father's average. In other words, with the exception of the hyper-growth of Clinton's second term, the current misery index compares very favorably with every other time-period analyzed here.

Not to mention that the jobs number will just keep improving this year.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 19, 2004 4:58 PM