The Thing About Misery Indexes

Back around 21 years ago....an Economist came up and developed something that he called a "Barro Misery Index".  This guy (Robert Barro) basically took the sum of current inflation, added the unemployment rate numbers....then tossed the current interest rate.   Then you would plus-up or minus down the shortafall/surplus.....with the current trend of the GDP growth.  This was the original way of doing a misery index.

Several folks came along after that (Steve Hanke is one example) to develop their own misery index.

When you first hear the term 'misery index'.....you tend to think of some guy living on the edge of life, in a house-trailer, marginally getting $1,500 after taxes are taken out, and mostly drinking cheap beer.  Then you compare that dude against some guy who makes $100,000 a year....lives in some urban dwelling with a high maintenance wife who spends $300 a week on fitness gurus....driving an imported BMW that requires a $300 oil change every six months, and going to some Tampa beach hotel every other month.  In my view of that misery index....the house-trailer dude might actually be less miserable than the $100k guy.

I worked with a guy once, who'd gotten seriously in debt from the first wife....owing almost $50,000 on various bills that she'd racked up, and the cost of a lawyer to arrange a divorce.  There wasn't a day that didn't pass at work where he would talk of his misery feelings, and his index was mostly maxed out.

I talk about this misery index business because you can see an awful lot of folks now in some degree of misery with the Coronavirus, the national trend, and stupidity via various state and local officials.  This frustration level is building.  I noticed some guy talking today of the impact on his Los Angles business, and how he'd finally reached a breaking point (he was going to terminate his business empire there and move out-of-state).

The trouble here is that an economist can write down ten things and just measure them for a established index.  In this case of Corona.....there are various things which you can't measure.

You could be living in Alabama, and be a '3' on miserable feelings....yet be fifty-percent happier than the guy in California.  That's the sad part of about misery.  Even living in some housetrailer, with a job at a truck-stop, your mother-in-law living in the trailer with you, and your dog suffering from worms....yet you might have a a great prospective on life and way above that poor guy in Riverside, California.