July 23, 2022 • 44 mins
Economists love their data because somewhere in the numbers lies the answer to the ills of the country. They also love to frame data in a way people can relate to. Such is the case with the famous "misery index." Learn all about it in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody, it's Chuck here. I guess it's time to
introduce another Saturday Select. I'm pretty miserable, so maybe I
should just do this one on the Misery Index. It's
called What's the Misery Index? And it's from June. I
(00:24):
hope you'd like it. It was a lot of fun
recording it. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant. The
(00:46):
W stands for Wayne Dr Wayne Coyne. That gets you
every time. I know, it's funny to be forty five
years old and named after Wayne Coyne because he's like, right, no,
he's his fifties too. But it would be weird. I
would have been named after a very uh like kindergarten
age Wayne con Right. You know, maybe your parents were
(01:10):
friends with his parents and they really thought a lot
about him. Play he's a real achiever, right that, Wayne?
Coins are going places? Okay, Uh, that was a weird sidetrack.
It was already out of the gate. Man, how are
you feeling. I'm good. I got a lot on your plate,
got a lot going on? Oh, you know what today is?
What dude? Today is the day that I leave this
(01:35):
office and I go to a shop in Edmond Park
and pick up four brand new last chance garage hats.
Oh wow, it's a big day, very big day. So
I have a couple of people would like to thank.
It's a bigger deal than it should be for a
grown man in a hat. But we all understand. First
of all, Katie, my custom patchmaker, this is really where
(01:58):
it all came together. It's a patch, isn't right? The
hat's not right. Katie killed it. It looks identical and
you can find her work at tulip cake dot com.
T U l I P Cake. And I said, you know,
people might ask you to make you to make them
last chance garage patches. Did you have her destroy the mold?
(02:19):
And I said, I don't you know. It's on you.
It's up to you legally. Uh. I'm just saying you
might get requests. You should have been like Ivan the
Terrible who blinded his architects after they've built his pal Now,
I don't care people, I'd love to see these things
around and la mood big hats l A m o
O d uh for big heads. Because part of the
(02:41):
problem was finding Uh yeah, man, like, uh, the problem
I have with hats these days. I don't look like
I have a huge chat, but they just fit so
snugly and they don't go far down enough on my head.
So I finally looked up oversized hats and found La
mood Hats and dude, their exactly like the old hat
(03:02):
except it doesn't stink. Oh yeah, like, these are great.
I got four brands, an improvement for sure. So are
you gonna put one in like the seed Vault in Norway? Uh?
Probably one there? Uh, there will be one in the
nuclear suitcase and um, I'll wear the other two at
the same time at the same from back. That's right. Anyway,
(03:23):
I'm super excited. So that's pretty cool. Thank you to
Katie and lemod Hats for allowing me to spend too
much money getting four hats remade. And speaking of while
we're thanking people, we we owe a long overdue thank
you to a guy who um made us a really
cool sign. Um. Oh you mean the sign this guy
made for us like seven years ago. Yeah, his name
(03:45):
is Matt Street. He's at fat Bison dot com. And
it made a really cool wood carved sign. It was
in our TV show. It was like like the production
company got clearance rights for it and all this stuff,
and we love the sign, but we just forgot to
ever thank Matt. So, Matt, thank you so much for
the sign. We love it. We have it hanging here
in the studio. It is a work of art and
we appreciate it. We're sorry for the oversight. Okay, is
(04:08):
that all? But thank you? So let's talk about the
Misery Index. Huh. Yeah, what a great transition have you? Um?
Had you heard of it before you came across this article? Yeah,
I didn't know a lot about it though, and um,
apparently it's going a little bit out of fashion lately
from what I understand. Yeah, I think so, because well,
well let's get into it. Okay. It turns out economics
(04:28):
as a whole is in danger of going out of fashion.
I read this, I've read this really interesting article on
a on which is maybe the greatest website on the
planet a E O N dot It might be dot
CEO because you said that British about a lot of websites.
I think I said about a on a lot and
and it just seems like I'm talking about different ones.
But there's this article by Allen J. Levinovitz and it's
(04:51):
called The New Astrology, and he basically makes a parallel
between economics and economists and economic theory when you take
economics and try to apply it to future forecasting and
the um the BCE Chinese astrologers that basically directed the
way that the economy or the government was going to
(05:14):
move based on the movements of the stars. So what
are they saying, It's you might as well just do that.
He draw some pretty pretty interesting parallels between the two
that that economics in and of itself is not necessarily flawed,
but when it's used to forecast the future, then it
becomes inherently flawed. Yeah, this this article really kind of
kind yeah a little bit, Yeah, to an extent. I mean,
(05:36):
the Misery index is a legitimate economic tool, and it's
hit or miss in a lot of ways. Yeah. I
think one thing that hit home to me with researching
this is it just seems impossible to say that there's
one correct way of doing things right or that is absolute,
and you're like, you know, if you do things this way,
(05:57):
then there will be nothing but growth in job abs
and the GDP and g MP, and uh, it just
it just doesn't seem to work that way, right. I
think the problem is is that if you listen to economists,
they like to act like they do have a handle
on that kind of thing. But if you really look
into economics, it's very politicized. There's liberal economics and there's
(06:18):
conservative economics, and the fact that each one saying it's
right kind of makes you think that maybe no one is,
you know, But the misery index actually is is it
started out from a guy who was pretty good at
walking the line between conservative and liberal economics. Um, a guy, uh,
what was his name? Okin? Yeah, Arthur Oakin, and he
(06:41):
uh he worked on Kennedy's staff as Council of Economic Advisors,
John F. Kennedy that is, and he was, Um, I
get the feeling, one of the main influences and talking Kennedy,
who initially did not necessarily agree, but talking Kennedy into
kind of trying to an act both conservative and liberal
(07:02):
economic policies simultaneously. Right. They were. The US was in
a recession when Kennedy took office in nineteen one, um,
and they talked him into not only increasing government spending
like welfare programs. They raised the UM the minimum wage
and um some other stuff like that. But they also
(07:23):
cut taxes, which is, you do one or the other.
You cut taxes and hope everything goes for the best
because businesses will start investing in spending or you start
you start investing in welfare programs to help your ailing
UM lower in middle classes. Right, you don't do both,
And Kennedy did both and it was successful. Yeah. He
(07:44):
well he at first he said, I don't know about this.
I don't know about this author. Mike Kennedy sounds like
a robot. My Gooda did too. Actually this is fine,
but Arthur, mr okunn, I think, ok it's a weird name. Okay,
you in? Uh he talked him into it and said
(08:05):
trust me, and things worked out in that case. Yeah. Well,
and a lot of guys, including Oaken's, names, were made
by this advice that panned out like the US Center
to Boom. Yeah and um. Oakin ended up as being
the head of the Council of Economic Advisors for Kennedy's successor,
Lyndon Johnson. Right, yeah, and um. One thing that economic
(08:29):
economists economists love to do is um. I mean, he
loved to forecast and all that stuff. But it's all
about data. Man. They love to pour over data like
stuff that makes the average person their mind bleed from boredom.
They just find it fascinating. That's what they do on
Friday nights. Friday nights, they pour over data, historical data,
(08:51):
trying to find you know, it's like the big puzzle
and they're all trying to solve it, so they pour
over this data. Okin did and um he said, you
know what, I noticed something here between when we started
recording some some decent unemployment rates, which I didn't know.
I didn't know we started that. Yeah, it seems like
(09:12):
it would have gone back before then. But between sixty
he said, you know what, I've noticed that the gross
national product rises three for every percentage point that unemployment falls,
with a caveat that unemployment has to be between three
and seven point five, which is a pretty like it's
(09:32):
a pretty bold statement to say I've noticed this is
a definite trend. It is, and it came to be
called Oakland's law because it was verified other people poured
over the data. Like this guy's right, man, he just
keeps coming up with hits, doesn't he Um and The
reason you would want to know some arcane piece of
(09:52):
data like that is that if you know that that's
the case, then you can say, well, if we attack unemployment,
can get it down a couple of points. We can
you know, raise g d P or g MP you know,
by three percent every time we drop it. So when
we need to but bulk g m P up, we
just attack unemployment, right, easy peasy. Uh yeah, And everyone said,
(10:18):
thank you are Yeah. Things worked out pretty well for
a while, but then the nineteen seventies came along, and um,
if you we're gonna talk a little bit about stagflation now.
But if you haven't heard it, we have a pretty
good episode. What's good? I think? So it's called what
is Stagflation? From February twenty four, two thousand eleven. Um, yeah,
(10:40):
I think as far as our economics episodes that it
was not bad. I went back and listened to a
lot of it before I got bored, so it checks out. Yeah,
the first three minutes were great. Um, but yeah, I
go back and listen to that. But um, like he said,
he served as chairman of the c e A for
Johnson and then in seventy three a very unfortunate thing
(11:03):
happened that kind of ended up rocking the world and
the United States in particular with our economy. Um. So
we're gonna take a break and we're gonna talk when
we get back about the Middle East. All right, what
(11:38):
happened in the I'm two years old, I am negative three, Okay,
The Arab oil embargo happened, right, that's right. So at
the time, until very recently, the US was super dependent
on for in oil, like like other countries, we wouldn't
even sit down at the table with we were getting
oil from right. Yeah, we're doing and better now, yeah,
(12:01):
with our dependency, But back then, very bad, very um.
And it was a it was a source of anxiety
for a lot of people. And that anxiety actually panned out.
So in UM nineteen seventy three, Egypt and Syria and
a few other Arab nations invaded the Golden Heights and
the Sinai Peninsula to attempt to take back land um
(12:25):
from the State of Israel. The us UH was found
to be supplying arms to Israel, So as far as
the Arab states were concerned, the US had cast its
lot on israel side, and they were fairly peeved about that,
so they literally shut off the tap of oil flowing
(12:45):
to the United States and other countries that were found
considered to be on the side of Israel in this
in this war, UM huge deal. It was an enormous deal.
The the this foreign dependency in the the precarious situation
that it places the United States and came to pass
and the price of oil rose thirty seven. The long
(13:06):
lines at the gas station were never seen before or since,
even after the financial crisis of two thousand eight. UM,
it was just insane. There was gas rationing in the
United States in nineteen because the UM the oil embargoing.
After a while, the tips were turned back on. But
that shocked to the system, screwed the economy up for
(13:28):
a decade. Yeah, inflation went out of control and UM
a very another unfortunately happened along the same timeline. Unemployment
started to creep up. And these two things happening at
the same time as devastating. Yeah, and up to this point.
So first of all, the US had never had a
shock to the system like that. That was one thing.
(13:50):
It wasn't a gradual thing it was. But the other
thing is when you have something that has never happened before.
You can look at it and say, wow, what happened,
and new things that have never happened before come out
of that. And one of the things was inflation and
unemployment going up, because up to this point, economists just
assumed that the two were mutually exclusive. If you're if
(14:12):
you're um. If inflation was up, prices were high, that
meant that companies could go out and hire more people,
so unemployment of course would be low. Yeah, it kind
of made sense. Well not not. After the oil embargo.
The shock to the system led to, like you said,
high unemployment rates and high inflation, and uh, it was
a miserable time. Yeah, and that was called stagflation. It
(14:34):
also led to skateboarding, as we all know. Oh yeah,
because of the pools, right, yeah, they could and cal
well actually that was the drought, but I think the
drought was also tied into the economics. Sure, but they
couldn't fill up swimming pools, so they started skating in
swimming pools. Well, yeah, if you have a drought, then
you lose your crops, and if you lose your crops,
you lose money, a significant sector of the of money exactly.
(14:55):
So good news. We have half pipes now quarter pipe
and peralta. There they're still around, right. I think bad
news is like you said, it had a devastating effect
for many, many years on the United States. So Oakland
starts to look around. He said, you know what, things
are pretty bad here. One might even say miserable. I
(15:16):
haven't gotten any acclaim for a while. Yeah, nothing's been
named after me in a while. So let me create
this new, uh, this new method for looking at the economy.
And it turns out to not be like a a
look over a period of time or anything, but just
sort of like a polaroid of that day and not
just that day for like the country as a whole,
(15:39):
or um for the FED or anything like that. But
what he did that was different was he looked into
what the what it was like that day or that
year for the average American in their daily life. And
he called it the misery index. Yeah, and it was
very rudimentary. Uh at the time. It was just simple
(16:02):
calculation of the yearly rate of inflation plus the unemployment rate. Yeah.
So if you have like five percent inflation and two
percent unemployment, you have a seven percent misery index. It's
as simple as that. I don't know why it got
so much, you know what. It was hailed as a
big deal because I think Oakin had a a a
knack for noticing things that seemed obvious in retrospect, but
(16:26):
at the time no one had ever noticed before. I'll
buy it, thank you. Why not? Alright, So now he
has this index, and not only can he look at
a snapshot of that day, he can go back because
he was a a data walk and he could look
at data throughout history, well at least to yeah, which
is just when we started recording unemployment, like we said,
(16:46):
which must have been frustrating for him because our um
our inflation rates data goes back to nineteen But that's
only part of the equation. Well, it must have been like,
oh man, sure, and to be able to look at
the great depress and you could have learned a lot,
you know. Uh. So he went and he looked back
and he says, here is what we've noticed, and this
(17:06):
is so obvious to me, uh, that that presidents and
political parties are brought in and out of office largely
depending on how the economy is doing. Yeah, but they
kind of proved it, but not even just how the
economy is doing like he he was saying, like, the
misery index you can use to predict whether the the
presidency's going to change hands politically. So, uh, misery index
(17:32):
is six point five three, which is great. That's during like, yeah,
very low. Mr Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, and he got reelected
because things were pretty good, right as far as the
misery index goes. Yeah, yeah, everybody was pretty happy, even
though they didn't really know what the misery index was
because it wasn't invented yet. They just had a general sense.
(17:55):
Well yeah, they didn't call it that at a time. No,
They're just like, seems fine to me. You're miserable. We
I No, I'm not miserable, are you? So night Johnson
came to the end of his term and the misery
index was up to eight point one three, And then
he had his Democratic successor, Hubert Humphrey in line, and
because the thing had crept up, people a little more
(18:17):
miserable and they said, now get out of here. I
want Mr Nixon in office, right, And I guess I'm not.
I'm not sure about this, So I don't understand why
Johnson was replaced by Humphrey by the Democrats and in
this article, and it seems to be because of this
misery index that it would have predicted that. But he
was the incumbent president, so let's see, so he was
(18:44):
he would have should know this, No, he Yeah, he
was a one term or technically one in a third
or one in a quarter because he took over after
Kennedy's assassination. But if his term was up in sixty eight,
then he would have won the sixty four election, so
he technically, I think, would have been able to have
been president. Again, I'm not sure we could have found
this out too sure, but I'll bet there's somebody out
(19:06):
there who can explain it to us, and so email us,
will you? Uh? At any rate, Nixon gets elected and um,
the misery index shot up to eleven point six seven
during the first term, but then started to decline enough
that he did get re elected. UM. But then uh,
in nineteen seventy four, with Watergate, the misery index leapt
(19:26):
all the way up to seventeen point oh one. That's
not good now, that's that was the all time high
at the time from what I understand. I UM, and
that happened around nineteen seventy four, which meant that when
Watergate broke. Some people who have really subscribed to the
misery index say Watergate might not have been quite as
big a deal. If, um the misery index have been
(19:48):
low at the time, he might have been able to
squeak by without resigning or being forced out of office.
I think everyone has more leeway if things are great,
you know. But he his his his currency had been spent. Man.
I watched All the President's Men a few weeks ago. Again,
have you ever seen that great, great movie? Yeah, I've
(20:10):
always meant to, really really good and just sort of like,
they don't make a lot of movies like that anymore.
Spotlight reminded me of All the Presidents Men. It's good.
It's just I call it movies for adults. You know.
There's no chase scenes or anything remarkable. It's just good
dramatic movie making. Yeah, good stuff anyway, Wait, what's wrong
with chase scenes? Huh? What's wrong with chase? No, there's
(20:33):
nothing inherently wrong with the chase. But I know what
you mean, just for the sake of a chase scene,
which we see a lot of these days, you know
what I mean, Like Mark Ruffalo is chasing a priest
in a car and spotlight. Yeah, um, where were we? Okay,
we're with Nixon. Um one that with Nixon, you know
what I mean. Ford comes in office for a short
(20:54):
time and he actually managed to get the misery and
next year down. Well, I think just the fact that
Nixon was out. I think that probably helped um you
know and inspire like consumer confidence in the like. So
it crept back down to twelve point six six, but
not enough to keep um, the Democrats and Jimmy Carter
from coming into office. And Carter actually cited the misery index.
(21:17):
It was relatively new at the time. He talked too
much about it, but it was it was a g
whiz thing that you could really just point to like
this plus this, this is the misery index. Can you
can you hear me? That's my car? But that was
his famous quote, can you hear me? It came back
to haunt him though, to say the least, because he
talked a lot about the misery Index and then in
(21:37):
his term the it reached an all time high of
twenty one. Yeah, which, man, I really think that shock
to the system. Under the oil embargo, UM and plenty
of other stuff. This stuff gets laid at Carter's feet,
I think unfairly in a lot of respects. Well, I mean,
(22:00):
I would love for someone to really that really knows
their stuff to explain to me exactly how much a
president's influence has on the economy and how long it
takes for that to bear fruit. Yeah, I would love
to know that too, I think though, Uh, the guy
who came after Carter Reagan is a pretty sterling, unassailable
(22:22):
example of an impact a president can have on the economy.
Whether you agree with his politics or his economic policies
or not, he most decidedly had an effect on the economy. Yeah.
I just remember hearing one time. I need to look
this up, but somebody told me once that that the
economic impact of a presidential four year term is felt
(22:43):
the most like eight years later or something. Yeah, that
makes sense to me. Economies don't move on a dime. Yeah,
I just I don't know if that's holking lumbering things.
They aren't fully understood by anybody. Yeah, it's interesting to
me now more than ever before. Though, don't remember. Economics
used to just bore me. I know, I was really
really surprised when you suggested this one. It's slightly more
(23:04):
interesting to me, now what changed? Oh? Just wondering things
like that and during an election season, like are the
decisions we make now gonna affect us in one year
or two years? Eight years? Uh? Yeah, Well, if there's
any economists who are still listening after that initial remark
about the new astrology, we'd love to to get a
(23:25):
primer on how long it takes for a president to
impact an economy, if they do at all. And I'm
sure it's a arranged you know, it's not like starting
at eight years and really honestly, was Carter that band
or was he a victim of cross stars? Yeah? I
mean you can make a case where a lot of
bills of presidencies not being directly at their feet. Well
(23:47):
you remember that, uh Simpsons where they unveil a statue
of Jimmy Carter in Springfield and on the pedestal it
says Malaise Forever, and somebody goes, Jimmy Carter, He's history's
greatest monster. Carter. So, like we said, that came back
to haunt Carter because he talked a lot about the index.
(24:08):
It rose a lot. Then Reagan came in was like, well,
let's talk about that misery index that you like to
talk about so much, that's at an all time high.
Reagan got in there, um knocked it down to nine
point five five by the end of his term, enough
to get Bush Senior in UM it inched up some.
Then Clinton was able to Uh, it didn't go up
(24:28):
that much, though. And I read an interesting article today
on whether or not Ross Pero really got Clinton elected,
because that's sort of the popular thought he was a spoiler. Yeah,
I could see that, but um, he's definitely more in
line with UM Bush Seniors policies than Clinton's. Well at
the time, yeah, you would think, but I read, uh,
I read one article that said that it was kind
(24:48):
of a myth that basically that Clinton won by six
million votes and it would have taken seventy of Paros
supporters to have uh been aligned with with Bush m hm,
and supposedly exit polls showed showed it more like thirty
And so they're saying it's sort of a myth that
(25:09):
Pero swung the election to Clinton. I see, but I
mean that was one person's opinion to who knows. You know,
I've been reading a lot about you know that we
that that suspicion you can't quite kick that there's really
no difference between Republicans and Democrats these days, that they're
really just kind of all in the same little club.
I think people feel that way sometimes. I've been reading
(25:31):
a lot about that, and apparently it's all based on neoliberalism.
That's like the key and um, there's there's a lot
of If you look into Neil liberalism and the policies
of neoliberalism, you realize we're like living in the thick
of it. But no one everyone's kind of blind to
the idea that it's just a single thing that basically
everybody in power subscribes to and that it has a
(25:55):
trickle down effect of screwing over everybody below the top. Um.
But just the name itself seems totally fine, you know,
but it's a it's it's interesting. Yeah. I researched that
a little bit lately too. Yeah, there's been some good article.
We totally should let's do it, Chuck agreed. Man, we're
gonna get some emails for that one from billionaires. Yeah. Um,
(26:18):
so let's just finish out this quick little recap. Clinton
brought it down to seven point three five. Things were great,
Bush Junior gets elected. Um, despite the fact that Clinton
had a low index. Well, it depends on how you
look at the two thousand election. We should do one
on that one too. But this is the This is
that's considered one of those rare instances where the misery
(26:41):
index didn't indicate where it was going to go. But
you could also say it might have had things gone
slightly differently. In the Supreme Court, George W. Bush, the
index rose from seven point three five to eleven point four,
and then Obama came in it went down to seven
point eight seven. But another weird flaw in the system
is exposed there because, um, despite the fact that the
(27:03):
misery index was lower, things were not good. The stock
market had crashed, unemployment was rising at a rapid rate,
and they said, you know this. It basically was another
example of like, look, this misery index isn't all it's
cracked up to be, right, so let's work on it. Yeah,
I think a lot of people said this is too simplistic,
you can't rely on this. But we'll talk about some
(27:24):
of the additional factors that people have worked into the
misery index after this. All right, Chuck, So the misery
(27:54):
index open. Everybody's happy with him. They're like, this is
just too simple. Well, especially in what's called the post
stagflation era after the oil embargo UM. And so some
people have said, okay, you can there's certainly there's other
things you can add and to give a genuine, true
snapshot of what the conditions are like on the ground,
(28:17):
as it were, right, Well, yeah, not only what the
conditions are, but whether or not performance over a period
of time is getting better getting worse. Yes, And you know,
rather than say, oh, under under this president, the misery
index was this, you know, and it gives you a
pretty good idea. This with this one guy um named
Robert Barrow. He wrote book called Getting It Right, Markets
(28:39):
and Choices in a Free Society, and in it he
takes the misery index Oapen's Misery Index, and he says,
we can add some stuff to this to to make
it an even clearer picture, not just of the conditions
on the ground, but you can take it and apply
it genuinely to a president's entire term to see just
how good their economic policies were or weren't the health
(29:00):
of the economy. And he added some other stuff. Yeah,
he added four main new measurements. Uh, took the inflation
rate during the last year of the president's term, compared
it to the average inflation rate over the entire course
of the subsequent president's term, which is based on what
you were saying that like the a four year term,
(29:22):
the effects are felt like years down the road. Sure,
so I think that's what he was doing there, right, Yeah,
it makes sense. Did the same thing with the rate
of unemployment. That was number two. Ah. He added in
changes for the thirty year government bond yield over a presidency.
And then finally he said, UM, I need to look
at the difference between the long term GDP growth the
(29:45):
real rate of growth. Compare all these things along with
the original Uh, this plus this equals this, right, and
with the real growth rate. Um, that's where you take
the actual change either the shrinking or the growth of
the economy the g d P year over year. Right.
And he took that for year after year over the
(30:06):
course of a presidency and averaged it out. I guess
that's right. Yeah, And he came up with what's called
the Barrow Misery Index. And UM, A lot of people
think that that's where the misery index started. When In fact,
it was Oakin who came up with it about twenty
years before Barrow took it up and improved it. So
under Barrow's misery index, UM Clinton and Reagan that's Bill
(30:28):
Clinton of course came out on top. Uh. And then
it got named Steve Hankey about ten years later. This
was originally and then Hankey came along in two thousand
six and said, you know what, we need to add
even more things. And this all just makes sense. You
need to if you want a more detailed picture, then
add more detail to the data going in, you know.
So he said, we need more detail. Uh, why don't
(30:51):
we do this. Let's um, let's measure inflation and unemployment
like we're doing, and then let's now add interest rates
and subtract annual percentages from the GDP to get a
more accurate picture. And he said, you can use us anywhere,
you can use it all over the world. Well that's
what he did, and that's kind of what made his
his version of it pretty famous. He figured out how
(31:11):
to apply it to other countries, even countries that used
UM price controls to keep inflation in check, which means
price inflation is held back artificially. So Hanky looked into
other things like, um, the exchange rate in the black
market in the given country, that kind of thing, um,
and he figured out real inflation rates and he applied
(31:33):
it around the world to find out what country is
the most miserable in what country is the least miserable.
And what he found in two thousand fourteen was that
the most miserable country in the world was Venezuela, which
had a Hanky Misery index of seventy nine point four.
It's pretty high high, uh, and then Japan had the
(31:54):
lowest misery at five point four one. Yeah. The US
came in at about nineteen, correct I think eleven? Yeah? No, no, no,
eleven was our Oh I'm sorry nineteen yeah, yeah, ranked
nineteen within eleven. I didn't hear that, Yeah, because my
tooth is still gone. You think it'd be it would
(32:15):
be more pronounced if there were nineteen, I would have
heard it clear as about August can't get here soon enough.
So um. There are critics of this one too, though.
There's critics of all these indexes. Well, yeah, a lot
of them say no, still too elementary. Yeah, some people
(32:37):
say this is all just try like you can't you
can't use this stuff to to make any real predictions.
You could use it to look back at the past,
but to use it for the future, probably not. But
some people do believe in the idea that if you
have enough data and the right kind of data, you
can get a clear picture of misery. And again, that's
what we're after here, Like the whole point of the
(32:58):
misery and next is to figure out how unhappy and
and just low the average person in a country is
feeling at that moment. Right. So, um, HuffPo actually came
up with a pretty good one huff po boo. Yeah.
In two thousand nine, HuffPo came up with what they
called the Real Misery Index, Right. And so a lot
(33:21):
of people cite the the use of what's called you
three unemployment statistics, which when you hear unemployment numbers in
the news, that's what you're hearing. That's what the Bureau
of Labor Statistics issues as the official unemployment numbers. Right. Yeah,
And that's the very first thing that people will say,
if they want to poop poo the unemployment numbers, that
(33:44):
that these are these are just false numbers. Yeah. If
someone says, hey, man, look how great ex president is doing.
Look at the unemployment rate, right man, they're just using
the U three. They need to use the U six.
Wake up, pal up in your eyes, which you know
is valid. Well yeah, so, um, the e l S
has six measurements of unemployment. You one through U six,
(34:06):
and YOU six is the broadest. It includes people who
are so discouraged with the state of the job market
that they've given up looking for work and are just like,
have given themselves over entirely to judge Alex right, and
then um. It also includes people who are working part
(34:26):
time but wish they could work full time, but there's
no full time work available, Like I'm a graphic designer
about I work at Starbucks. So that's the U six measurement.
That's and that's considered the the broadest snapshot of unemployment,
the real um vision of unemployment. Yeah, like you said,
mostly they use you three, I guess because it's in
(34:46):
the middle. I mean you one. They would never use
you two. Everybody used to like but not anymore. I
still like you too, you get yeah, you know, not
like I used to. I'm not poo and anything, but
I did see that concert they did on the HBO,
(35:08):
and I have to hand it to him. My big
problem with you two for years it was they just
got so out of control with those live shows like
these Giant Spider spaceships and things. And I was always
of the belief that, man, you need to go back
to basics and just get up on stage and play again.
And that's what they did with this new tour. I mean,
there was a cool visual element, but the stage set
(35:29):
up in the way they did it was very much
back to basics, and it I think they really connected
with fans again. Yeah, that's kind of help. Yeah, because
you can only when the when the interactions between you
and the fans rather than the fans and giant spiders. Yeah,
you just you can only go so far in that direction.
I think they realized that. Sure. Anyway, where do you
go YouTube? I'll defend those guys. Um, even though I
(35:53):
know everyone in the world generally wants to punch Bono
in the face, I know I'm not one of them.
Kind of feel weird. I like them. Yeah, I'm on record.
I know if you're listening, well, if you're Jared indicators,
any any predictor Bono is going to come out to
be canonized one day, what you know, you're like, just
(36:14):
something about Jared. I don't like him, and you know
we found out about Jared and then um, now you're
saying something's got like they're going to find a cure
for cancer and a saliva or something. You never know. Um,
so did we even mention what the HuffPo what kind
of outrageous numbers they came up with? No, well, we
(36:34):
didn't mention everything they used. We were talking about the
use six measurement. HuffPo used that measurement, the most extreme
one of unemployment numbers. They also used other things like, um,
the inflation rate of food and drink and fuel and healthcare.
Because other the misery index just uses the consumer price index,
which is inflation as a whole. HuffPo used, um, the
(36:58):
the inflation of some really essential things that people can't
do without and where you're gonna immediately feel the pinch
when prices go up with those factors, right. Um. They
also included the rate of credit card delinquency, the cost
of housing, how many people are using food stamps. That
seems like a smart move to home, equity loan deficiencies.
I guess people who are laid on their payments um.
(37:21):
And then they took the average of those seven numbers
and added it to the U six unemployment numbers, which
here you can step back and say, wait a minute,
how would you how are you adding this together? How
does this make any sense? You can't just keep adding things, right,
And really you can take that all the way back
to the initial misery index, like what You're just adding
unemployment percentage and inflation, and all of a sudden you
(37:43):
have a magic number that doesn't make any sense. This
HuffPo metric really points out the inherent flaw in it.
I think, yeah, because in two thousand eight, the Oakland
Misery Index was eight point one, but huff po's real
Misery Index a k A. You think things are bad,
here's how bad they really are index was twenty nine
point nine compared to the eight point one, right, And
(38:04):
some people are like, oh, well, that just shows how
off the Oaken misery index is. Who knows. I know
they quit doing the real Misery Index at HUFPO like
five years ago. I think it was a am I
going to call it a stunt. It was a bit
of a stunt maybe, but I'm sure Really what happened
was the writer who was contributing it for free. Sure,
(38:27):
like left for a paying job. That's probably what happened
to the HuffPo Real Misery in Dingy. Yeah, you're probably right. Um,
I was reading this guy, Tim McMahon. He has a site,
or he writes first site, I'm not sure it's his.
Are not called inflation data dot com. Jim McMahon, Tim
his brother, not the Super Bowl Shuffle, No, his brother. Um.
(38:48):
So he mentioned this two thousand one paper that concluded
that unemployment causes one point seven times more misery than inflation.
And so if you're doing any kind of misery index
that uses those two, you need to first multiply the
unemployment number by one point seven before adding it to
(39:08):
um the inflation number to to properly wait it and
like how did they come up with that? So I
looked at the paper. It was actually pretty clever. There's
like twenty three years of the survey of life satisfaction
and happiness that these researchers looked at back in two
thousand one, and they found that um economically based or
just like how happy are you? Know here's the thing,
(39:29):
it was, how happy are you? It was like a
single question like would you say, based on how you're
feeling right now, that you are fairly satisfied, unsatisfied, very
satisfied with your life right now right. And then they
took that that measurement for that that country as a whole,
and you can do this for any country that participated
in the survey. And then they looked at inflation, and
then they looked at um unemployment for those years and
(39:52):
they could figure out the the variation between or the
interplay between unemployment and inflation andatisfaction. And they found that
that um that unemployment was one time one point seven
times more miserable than inflation in regards to life satis
fashion as that survey goes pretty clever. Yeah, it's a
(40:15):
lot of hocus pocus, but it's I thought it was
pretty clever how they did it. That makes sense to
me because to be without work, like if you have
a job and things inflation is happening, you still have
your job, sure, and you're like, man, this sucks to
pay this much more, but you can still conceivably pay
for Yeah, I'll cut back here or there. If you
if you're unemployed, then there's not a lot of hope. Yeah,
(40:36):
one the number might be conservative you. Yeah, I agree
with you. Very interesting stuff. So that's uh, that's it, man,
that's the misery Index. You got anything else, No, but
I'm looking forward to hearing from economists that me too,
like in an unbiased way to try to explain things.
Me too. If you if you send just you know,
(40:57):
these crazy political emails and they're they're gonna fall in
deaf ears because everyone yells at each other that they're right.
I just want to hear some real numbers, do it, chuck. Uh.
If you want to know more about the misery index,
you can type those words in the search bar how
stuff works dot com. And since I said search bar,
just play an old search bar. It's time for a
(41:19):
listener mail. I'm gonna call this, uh follow up on
vocal fry once again. Oh yeah, um. Regarding vocal fry, guys, Uh,
you guys were offended because someone said vocal fry was repulsive.
But there is another side of this, Dude's I suffer
from a neurological disorder known as miss aphonia, which we
(41:42):
totally should do a show in this. I agree. It's
a condition where a person has extreme emotional response to
commonly occurring sounds and I remember hearing a lot of times,
just like people chewing noises or gum or whatever, um
he said. In my case, my trigger noise is the
high pitched s sound when some people speak. Uh. It
feels like my brain is cringing, as if an allergic
(42:03):
reaction is taking place. Cannot stress enough. This is not
a mere annoyance, as a legitimate mental disorder that can
vary great and greatly in severity. I don't visibly freak
out when I hear my trigger noise, but it really
kills me inside. Gives me an instant headache. And that's why,
which is why I will get away from the noise
if at all possible. UM. I believe in avoiding complaining
(42:24):
in life and playing the victim, but this disorder really
has made my life like a subtle hell. It's been
especially toxic to my family relationships and my ability to
learn in school. UM. I felt compelled to email you guys,
because you definitely appreciate interesting medical conditions. I think would
be a great topic for a show someday. There's a
documentary about it called Quiet Please. If you watch the trailer,
(42:46):
you might be inspired to watch it to learn what
the condition is huge, thanks to everyone and Stuff you
Should Know. You make a mundane parts of my life
interesting and educational. Uh, I'm gonna anonymize this from Texas
because I didn't. You're back from him from text. Yeah,
text PS was in disbelief when Chuck said he had
not seen Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore. That's a good PS.
(43:10):
I believe it. It's a good PostScript and post PPS right,
not p s S. I think his post PostScript. Yeah,
but people often put PSS. What doesn't mean? Do you
think Stuff you Should Know could ever become a television show? Well?
Text never we actually did that. We we found out
the hard way that it came. Yeah, we did a
(43:31):
TV show on the Science Channel and it ran for
one full season that played out over the course of
several days, which we will always have. Chu, we'll always
have that season television. We did once. It lasted nine
or ten days. Let's just show them all at once,
out of order. But you never know, we might get
(43:51):
another shot at stardom. But we're not looking to no.
I like it. In this room where no one's looking
at us. Jerry didn't even look at us. She's just
there looking away and discuss That's right, good idea about
the mesophonia. I think we mentioned that before, Like that
was I really like that vocal fry episode, And that
was the one thing that I wish we would have
(44:13):
mentioned because it's a legitimate thing that it does affect
some people. Um, but yeah, look for a mesophonia episode
at some point in the future. Text uh. If you
want to get in touch with us, if you can
send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at how Stuff
Works dot com and you can join us at our
very own home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
(44:35):
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Hi, everybody, it's Chuck here. I guess it's time to
introduce another Saturday Select. I'm pretty miserable, so maybe I
should just do this one on the Misery Index. It's
called What's the Misery Index? And it's from June. I
(00:24):
hope you'd like it. It was a lot of fun
recording it. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant. The
(00:46):
W stands for Wayne Dr Wayne Coyne. That gets you
every time. I know, it's funny to be forty five
years old and named after Wayne Coyne because he's like, right, no,
he's his fifties too. But it would be weird. I
would have been named after a very uh like kindergarten
age Wayne con Right. You know, maybe your parents were
(01:10):
friends with his parents and they really thought a lot
about him. Play he's a real achiever, right that, Wayne?
Coins are going places? Okay, Uh, that was a weird sidetrack.
It was already out of the gate. Man, how are
you feeling. I'm good. I got a lot on your plate,
got a lot going on? Oh, you know what today is?
What dude? Today is the day that I leave this
(01:35):
office and I go to a shop in Edmond Park
and pick up four brand new last chance garage hats.
Oh wow, it's a big day, very big day. So
I have a couple of people would like to thank.
It's a bigger deal than it should be for a
grown man in a hat. But we all understand. First
of all, Katie, my custom patchmaker, this is really where
(01:58):
it all came together. It's a patch, isn't right? The
hat's not right. Katie killed it. It looks identical and
you can find her work at tulip cake dot com.
T U l I P Cake. And I said, you know,
people might ask you to make you to make them
last chance garage patches. Did you have her destroy the mold?
(02:19):
And I said, I don't you know. It's on you.
It's up to you legally. Uh. I'm just saying you
might get requests. You should have been like Ivan the
Terrible who blinded his architects after they've built his pal Now,
I don't care people, I'd love to see these things
around and la mood big hats l A m o
O d uh for big heads. Because part of the
(02:41):
problem was finding Uh yeah, man, like, uh, the problem
I have with hats these days. I don't look like
I have a huge chat, but they just fit so
snugly and they don't go far down enough on my head.
So I finally looked up oversized hats and found La
mood Hats and dude, their exactly like the old hat
(03:02):
except it doesn't stink. Oh yeah, like, these are great.
I got four brands, an improvement for sure. So are
you gonna put one in like the seed Vault in Norway? Uh?
Probably one there? Uh, there will be one in the
nuclear suitcase and um, I'll wear the other two at
the same time at the same from back. That's right. Anyway,
(03:23):
I'm super excited. So that's pretty cool. Thank you to
Katie and lemod Hats for allowing me to spend too
much money getting four hats remade. And speaking of while
we're thanking people, we we owe a long overdue thank
you to a guy who um made us a really
cool sign. Um. Oh you mean the sign this guy
made for us like seven years ago. Yeah, his name
(03:45):
is Matt Street. He's at fat Bison dot com. And
it made a really cool wood carved sign. It was
in our TV show. It was like like the production
company got clearance rights for it and all this stuff,
and we love the sign, but we just forgot to
ever thank Matt. So, Matt, thank you so much for
the sign. We love it. We have it hanging here
in the studio. It is a work of art and
we appreciate it. We're sorry for the oversight. Okay, is
(04:08):
that all? But thank you? So let's talk about the
Misery Index. Huh. Yeah, what a great transition have you? Um?
Had you heard of it before you came across this article? Yeah,
I didn't know a lot about it though, and um,
apparently it's going a little bit out of fashion lately
from what I understand. Yeah, I think so, because well,
well let's get into it. Okay. It turns out economics
(04:28):
as a whole is in danger of going out of fashion.
I read this, I've read this really interesting article on
a on which is maybe the greatest website on the
planet a E O N dot It might be dot
CEO because you said that British about a lot of websites.
I think I said about a on a lot and
and it just seems like I'm talking about different ones.
But there's this article by Allen J. Levinovitz and it's
(04:51):
called The New Astrology, and he basically makes a parallel
between economics and economists and economic theory when you take
economics and try to apply it to future forecasting and
the um the BCE Chinese astrologers that basically directed the
way that the economy or the government was going to
(05:14):
move based on the movements of the stars. So what
are they saying, It's you might as well just do that.
He draw some pretty pretty interesting parallels between the two
that that economics in and of itself is not necessarily flawed,
but when it's used to forecast the future, then it
becomes inherently flawed. Yeah, this this article really kind of
kind yeah a little bit, Yeah, to an extent. I mean,
(05:36):
the Misery index is a legitimate economic tool, and it's
hit or miss in a lot of ways. Yeah. I
think one thing that hit home to me with researching
this is it just seems impossible to say that there's
one correct way of doing things right or that is absolute,
and you're like, you know, if you do things this way,
(05:57):
then there will be nothing but growth in job abs
and the GDP and g MP, and uh, it just
it just doesn't seem to work that way, right. I
think the problem is is that if you listen to economists,
they like to act like they do have a handle
on that kind of thing. But if you really look
into economics, it's very politicized. There's liberal economics and there's
(06:18):
conservative economics, and the fact that each one saying it's
right kind of makes you think that maybe no one is,
you know, But the misery index actually is is it
started out from a guy who was pretty good at
walking the line between conservative and liberal economics. Um, a guy, uh,
what was his name? Okin? Yeah, Arthur Oakin, and he
(06:41):
uh he worked on Kennedy's staff as Council of Economic Advisors,
John F. Kennedy that is, and he was, Um, I
get the feeling, one of the main influences and talking Kennedy,
who initially did not necessarily agree, but talking Kennedy into
kind of trying to an act both conservative and liberal
(07:02):
economic policies simultaneously. Right. They were. The US was in
a recession when Kennedy took office in nineteen one, um,
and they talked him into not only increasing government spending
like welfare programs. They raised the UM the minimum wage
and um some other stuff like that. But they also
(07:23):
cut taxes, which is, you do one or the other.
You cut taxes and hope everything goes for the best
because businesses will start investing in spending or you start
you start investing in welfare programs to help your ailing
UM lower in middle classes. Right, you don't do both,
And Kennedy did both and it was successful. Yeah. He
(07:44):
well he at first he said, I don't know about this.
I don't know about this author. Mike Kennedy sounds like
a robot. My Gooda did too. Actually this is fine,
but Arthur, mr okunn, I think, ok it's a weird name. Okay,
you in? Uh he talked him into it and said
(08:05):
trust me, and things worked out in that case. Yeah. Well,
and a lot of guys, including Oaken's, names, were made
by this advice that panned out like the US Center
to Boom. Yeah and um. Oakin ended up as being
the head of the Council of Economic Advisors for Kennedy's successor,
Lyndon Johnson. Right, yeah, and um. One thing that economic
(08:29):
economists economists love to do is um. I mean, he
loved to forecast and all that stuff. But it's all
about data. Man. They love to pour over data like
stuff that makes the average person their mind bleed from boredom.
They just find it fascinating. That's what they do on
Friday nights. Friday nights, they pour over data, historical data,
(08:51):
trying to find you know, it's like the big puzzle
and they're all trying to solve it, so they pour
over this data. Okin did and um he said, you
know what, I noticed something here between when we started
recording some some decent unemployment rates, which I didn't know.
I didn't know we started that. Yeah, it seems like
(09:12):
it would have gone back before then. But between sixty
he said, you know what, I've noticed that the gross
national product rises three for every percentage point that unemployment falls,
with a caveat that unemployment has to be between three
and seven point five, which is a pretty like it's
(09:32):
a pretty bold statement to say I've noticed this is
a definite trend. It is, and it came to be
called Oakland's law because it was verified other people poured
over the data. Like this guy's right, man, he just
keeps coming up with hits, doesn't he Um and The
reason you would want to know some arcane piece of
(09:52):
data like that is that if you know that that's
the case, then you can say, well, if we attack unemployment,
can get it down a couple of points. We can
you know, raise g d P or g MP you know,
by three percent every time we drop it. So when
we need to but bulk g m P up, we
just attack unemployment, right, easy peasy. Uh yeah, And everyone said,
(10:18):
thank you are Yeah. Things worked out pretty well for
a while, but then the nineteen seventies came along, and um,
if you we're gonna talk a little bit about stagflation now.
But if you haven't heard it, we have a pretty
good episode. What's good? I think? So it's called what
is Stagflation? From February twenty four, two thousand eleven. Um, yeah,
(10:40):
I think as far as our economics episodes that it
was not bad. I went back and listened to a
lot of it before I got bored, so it checks out. Yeah,
the first three minutes were great. Um, but yeah, I
go back and listen to that. But um, like he said,
he served as chairman of the c e A for
Johnson and then in seventy three a very unfortunate thing
(11:03):
happened that kind of ended up rocking the world and
the United States in particular with our economy. Um. So
we're gonna take a break and we're gonna talk when
we get back about the Middle East. All right, what
(11:38):
happened in the I'm two years old, I am negative three, Okay,
The Arab oil embargo happened, right, that's right. So at
the time, until very recently, the US was super dependent
on for in oil, like like other countries, we wouldn't
even sit down at the table with we were getting
oil from right. Yeah, we're doing and better now, yeah,
(12:01):
with our dependency, But back then, very bad, very um.
And it was a it was a source of anxiety
for a lot of people. And that anxiety actually panned out.
So in UM nineteen seventy three, Egypt and Syria and
a few other Arab nations invaded the Golden Heights and
the Sinai Peninsula to attempt to take back land um
(12:25):
from the State of Israel. The us UH was found
to be supplying arms to Israel, So as far as
the Arab states were concerned, the US had cast its
lot on israel side, and they were fairly peeved about that,
so they literally shut off the tap of oil flowing
(12:45):
to the United States and other countries that were found
considered to be on the side of Israel in this
in this war, UM huge deal. It was an enormous deal.
The the this foreign dependency in the the precarious situation
that it places the United States and came to pass
and the price of oil rose thirty seven. The long
(13:06):
lines at the gas station were never seen before or since,
even after the financial crisis of two thousand eight. UM,
it was just insane. There was gas rationing in the
United States in nineteen because the UM the oil embargoing.
After a while, the tips were turned back on. But
that shocked to the system, screwed the economy up for
(13:28):
a decade. Yeah, inflation went out of control and UM
a very another unfortunately happened along the same timeline. Unemployment
started to creep up. And these two things happening at
the same time as devastating. Yeah, and up to this point.
So first of all, the US had never had a
shock to the system like that. That was one thing.
(13:50):
It wasn't a gradual thing it was. But the other
thing is when you have something that has never happened before.
You can look at it and say, wow, what happened,
and new things that have never happened before come out
of that. And one of the things was inflation and
unemployment going up, because up to this point, economists just
assumed that the two were mutually exclusive. If you're if
(14:12):
you're um. If inflation was up, prices were high, that
meant that companies could go out and hire more people,
so unemployment of course would be low. Yeah, it kind
of made sense. Well not not. After the oil embargo.
The shock to the system led to, like you said,
high unemployment rates and high inflation, and uh, it was
a miserable time. Yeah, and that was called stagflation. It
(14:34):
also led to skateboarding, as we all know. Oh yeah,
because of the pools, right, yeah, they could and cal
well actually that was the drought, but I think the
drought was also tied into the economics. Sure, but they
couldn't fill up swimming pools, so they started skating in
swimming pools. Well, yeah, if you have a drought, then
you lose your crops, and if you lose your crops,
you lose money, a significant sector of the of money exactly.
(14:55):
So good news. We have half pipes now quarter pipe
and peralta. There they're still around, right. I think bad
news is like you said, it had a devastating effect
for many, many years on the United States. So Oakland
starts to look around. He said, you know what, things
are pretty bad here. One might even say miserable. I
(15:16):
haven't gotten any acclaim for a while. Yeah, nothing's been
named after me in a while. So let me create
this new, uh, this new method for looking at the economy.
And it turns out to not be like a a
look over a period of time or anything, but just
sort of like a polaroid of that day and not
just that day for like the country as a whole,
(15:39):
or um for the FED or anything like that. But
what he did that was different was he looked into
what the what it was like that day or that
year for the average American in their daily life. And
he called it the misery index. Yeah, and it was
very rudimentary. Uh at the time. It was just simple
(16:02):
calculation of the yearly rate of inflation plus the unemployment rate. Yeah.
So if you have like five percent inflation and two
percent unemployment, you have a seven percent misery index. It's
as simple as that. I don't know why it got
so much, you know what. It was hailed as a
big deal because I think Oakin had a a a
knack for noticing things that seemed obvious in retrospect, but
(16:26):
at the time no one had ever noticed before. I'll
buy it, thank you. Why not? Alright, So now he
has this index, and not only can he look at
a snapshot of that day, he can go back because
he was a a data walk and he could look
at data throughout history, well at least to yeah, which
is just when we started recording unemployment, like we said,
(16:46):
which must have been frustrating for him because our um
our inflation rates data goes back to nineteen But that's
only part of the equation. Well, it must have been like,
oh man, sure, and to be able to look at
the great depress and you could have learned a lot,
you know. Uh. So he went and he looked back
and he says, here is what we've noticed, and this
(17:06):
is so obvious to me, uh, that that presidents and
political parties are brought in and out of office largely
depending on how the economy is doing. Yeah, but they
kind of proved it, but not even just how the
economy is doing like he he was saying, like, the
misery index you can use to predict whether the the
presidency's going to change hands politically. So, uh, misery index
(17:32):
is six point five three, which is great. That's during like, yeah,
very low. Mr Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, and he got reelected
because things were pretty good, right as far as the
misery index goes. Yeah, yeah, everybody was pretty happy, even
though they didn't really know what the misery index was
because it wasn't invented yet. They just had a general sense.
(17:55):
Well yeah, they didn't call it that at a time. No,
They're just like, seems fine to me. You're miserable. We
I No, I'm not miserable, are you? So night Johnson
came to the end of his term and the misery
index was up to eight point one three, And then
he had his Democratic successor, Hubert Humphrey in line, and
because the thing had crept up, people a little more
(18:17):
miserable and they said, now get out of here. I
want Mr Nixon in office, right, And I guess I'm not.
I'm not sure about this, So I don't understand why
Johnson was replaced by Humphrey by the Democrats and in
this article, and it seems to be because of this
misery index that it would have predicted that. But he
was the incumbent president, so let's see, so he was
(18:44):
he would have should know this, No, he Yeah, he
was a one term or technically one in a third
or one in a quarter because he took over after
Kennedy's assassination. But if his term was up in sixty eight,
then he would have won the sixty four election, so
he technically, I think, would have been able to have
been president. Again, I'm not sure we could have found
this out too sure, but I'll bet there's somebody out
(19:06):
there who can explain it to us, and so email us,
will you? Uh? At any rate, Nixon gets elected and um,
the misery index shot up to eleven point six seven
during the first term, but then started to decline enough
that he did get re elected. UM. But then uh,
in nineteen seventy four, with Watergate, the misery index leapt
(19:26):
all the way up to seventeen point oh one. That's
not good now, that's that was the all time high
at the time from what I understand. I UM, and
that happened around nineteen seventy four, which meant that when
Watergate broke. Some people who have really subscribed to the
misery index say Watergate might not have been quite as
big a deal. If, um the misery index have been
(19:48):
low at the time, he might have been able to
squeak by without resigning or being forced out of office.
I think everyone has more leeway if things are great,
you know. But he his his his currency had been spent. Man.
I watched All the President's Men a few weeks ago. Again,
have you ever seen that great, great movie? Yeah, I've
(20:10):
always meant to, really really good and just sort of like,
they don't make a lot of movies like that anymore.
Spotlight reminded me of All the Presidents Men. It's good.
It's just I call it movies for adults. You know.
There's no chase scenes or anything remarkable. It's just good
dramatic movie making. Yeah, good stuff anyway, Wait, what's wrong
with chase scenes? Huh? What's wrong with chase? No, there's
(20:33):
nothing inherently wrong with the chase. But I know what
you mean, just for the sake of a chase scene,
which we see a lot of these days, you know
what I mean, Like Mark Ruffalo is chasing a priest
in a car and spotlight. Yeah, um, where were we? Okay,
we're with Nixon. Um one that with Nixon, you know
what I mean. Ford comes in office for a short
(20:54):
time and he actually managed to get the misery and
next year down. Well, I think just the fact that
Nixon was out. I think that probably helped um you
know and inspire like consumer confidence in the like. So
it crept back down to twelve point six six, but
not enough to keep um, the Democrats and Jimmy Carter
from coming into office. And Carter actually cited the misery index.
(21:17):
It was relatively new at the time. He talked too
much about it, but it was it was a g
whiz thing that you could really just point to like
this plus this, this is the misery index. Can you
can you hear me? That's my car? But that was
his famous quote, can you hear me? It came back
to haunt him though, to say the least, because he
talked a lot about the misery Index and then in
(21:37):
his term the it reached an all time high of
twenty one. Yeah, which, man, I really think that shock
to the system. Under the oil embargo, UM and plenty
of other stuff. This stuff gets laid at Carter's feet,
I think unfairly in a lot of respects. Well, I mean,
(22:00):
I would love for someone to really that really knows
their stuff to explain to me exactly how much a
president's influence has on the economy and how long it
takes for that to bear fruit. Yeah, I would love
to know that too, I think though, Uh, the guy
who came after Carter Reagan is a pretty sterling, unassailable
(22:22):
example of an impact a president can have on the economy.
Whether you agree with his politics or his economic policies
or not, he most decidedly had an effect on the economy. Yeah.
I just remember hearing one time. I need to look
this up, but somebody told me once that that the
economic impact of a presidential four year term is felt
(22:43):
the most like eight years later or something. Yeah, that
makes sense to me. Economies don't move on a dime. Yeah,
I just I don't know if that's holking lumbering things.
They aren't fully understood by anybody. Yeah, it's interesting to
me now more than ever before. Though, don't remember. Economics
used to just bore me. I know, I was really
really surprised when you suggested this one. It's slightly more
(23:04):
interesting to me, now what changed? Oh? Just wondering things
like that and during an election season, like are the
decisions we make now gonna affect us in one year
or two years? Eight years? Uh? Yeah, Well, if there's
any economists who are still listening after that initial remark
about the new astrology, we'd love to to get a
(23:25):
primer on how long it takes for a president to
impact an economy, if they do at all. And I'm
sure it's a arranged you know, it's not like starting
at eight years and really honestly, was Carter that band
or was he a victim of cross stars? Yeah? I
mean you can make a case where a lot of
bills of presidencies not being directly at their feet. Well
(23:47):
you remember that, uh Simpsons where they unveil a statue
of Jimmy Carter in Springfield and on the pedestal it
says Malaise Forever, and somebody goes, Jimmy Carter, He's history's
greatest monster. Carter. So, like we said, that came back
to haunt Carter because he talked a lot about the index.
(24:08):
It rose a lot. Then Reagan came in was like, well,
let's talk about that misery index that you like to
talk about so much, that's at an all time high.
Reagan got in there, um knocked it down to nine
point five five by the end of his term, enough
to get Bush Senior in UM it inched up some.
Then Clinton was able to Uh, it didn't go up
(24:28):
that much, though. And I read an interesting article today
on whether or not Ross Pero really got Clinton elected,
because that's sort of the popular thought he was a spoiler. Yeah,
I could see that, but um, he's definitely more in
line with UM Bush Seniors policies than Clinton's. Well at
the time, yeah, you would think, but I read, uh,
I read one article that said that it was kind
(24:48):
of a myth that basically that Clinton won by six
million votes and it would have taken seventy of Paros
supporters to have uh been aligned with with Bush m hm,
and supposedly exit polls showed showed it more like thirty
And so they're saying it's sort of a myth that
(25:09):
Pero swung the election to Clinton. I see, but I
mean that was one person's opinion to who knows. You know,
I've been reading a lot about you know that we
that that suspicion you can't quite kick that there's really
no difference between Republicans and Democrats these days, that they're
really just kind of all in the same little club.
I think people feel that way sometimes. I've been reading
(25:31):
a lot about that, and apparently it's all based on neoliberalism.
That's like the key and um, there's there's a lot
of If you look into Neil liberalism and the policies
of neoliberalism, you realize we're like living in the thick
of it. But no one everyone's kind of blind to
the idea that it's just a single thing that basically
everybody in power subscribes to and that it has a
(25:55):
trickle down effect of screwing over everybody below the top. Um.
But just the name itself seems totally fine, you know,
but it's a it's it's interesting. Yeah. I researched that
a little bit lately too. Yeah, there's been some good article.
We totally should let's do it, Chuck agreed. Man, we're
gonna get some emails for that one from billionaires. Yeah. Um,
(26:18):
so let's just finish out this quick little recap. Clinton
brought it down to seven point three five. Things were great,
Bush Junior gets elected. Um, despite the fact that Clinton
had a low index. Well, it depends on how you
look at the two thousand election. We should do one
on that one too. But this is the This is
that's considered one of those rare instances where the misery
(26:41):
index didn't indicate where it was going to go. But
you could also say it might have had things gone
slightly differently. In the Supreme Court, George W. Bush, the
index rose from seven point three five to eleven point four,
and then Obama came in it went down to seven
point eight seven. But another weird flaw in the system
is exposed there because, um, despite the fact that the
(27:03):
misery index was lower, things were not good. The stock
market had crashed, unemployment was rising at a rapid rate,
and they said, you know this. It basically was another
example of like, look, this misery index isn't all it's
cracked up to be, right, so let's work on it. Yeah,
I think a lot of people said this is too simplistic,
you can't rely on this. But we'll talk about some
(27:24):
of the additional factors that people have worked into the
misery index after this. All right, Chuck, So the misery
(27:54):
index open. Everybody's happy with him. They're like, this is
just too simple. Well, especially in what's called the post
stagflation era after the oil embargo UM. And so some
people have said, okay, you can there's certainly there's other
things you can add and to give a genuine, true
snapshot of what the conditions are like on the ground,
(28:17):
as it were, right, Well, yeah, not only what the
conditions are, but whether or not performance over a period
of time is getting better getting worse. Yes, And you know,
rather than say, oh, under under this president, the misery
index was this, you know, and it gives you a
pretty good idea. This with this one guy um named
Robert Barrow. He wrote book called Getting It Right, Markets
(28:39):
and Choices in a Free Society, and in it he
takes the misery index Oapen's Misery Index, and he says,
we can add some stuff to this to to make
it an even clearer picture, not just of the conditions
on the ground, but you can take it and apply
it genuinely to a president's entire term to see just
how good their economic policies were or weren't the health
(29:00):
of the economy. And he added some other stuff. Yeah,
he added four main new measurements. Uh, took the inflation
rate during the last year of the president's term, compared
it to the average inflation rate over the entire course
of the subsequent president's term, which is based on what
you were saying that like the a four year term,
(29:22):
the effects are felt like years down the road. Sure,
so I think that's what he was doing there, right, Yeah,
it makes sense. Did the same thing with the rate
of unemployment. That was number two. Ah. He added in
changes for the thirty year government bond yield over a presidency.
And then finally he said, UM, I need to look
at the difference between the long term GDP growth the
(29:45):
real rate of growth. Compare all these things along with
the original Uh, this plus this equals this, right, and
with the real growth rate. Um, that's where you take
the actual change either the shrinking or the growth of
the economy the g d P year over year. Right.
And he took that for year after year over the
(30:06):
course of a presidency and averaged it out. I guess
that's right. Yeah, And he came up with what's called
the Barrow Misery Index. And UM, A lot of people
think that that's where the misery index started. When In fact,
it was Oakin who came up with it about twenty
years before Barrow took it up and improved it. So
under Barrow's misery index, UM Clinton and Reagan that's Bill
(30:28):
Clinton of course came out on top. Uh. And then
it got named Steve Hankey about ten years later. This
was originally and then Hankey came along in two thousand
six and said, you know what, we need to add
even more things. And this all just makes sense. You
need to if you want a more detailed picture, then
add more detail to the data going in, you know.
So he said, we need more detail. Uh, why don't
(30:51):
we do this. Let's um, let's measure inflation and unemployment
like we're doing, and then let's now add interest rates
and subtract annual percentages from the GDP to get a
more accurate picture. And he said, you can use us anywhere,
you can use it all over the world. Well that's
what he did, and that's kind of what made his
his version of it pretty famous. He figured out how
(31:11):
to apply it to other countries, even countries that used
UM price controls to keep inflation in check, which means
price inflation is held back artificially. So Hanky looked into
other things like, um, the exchange rate in the black
market in the given country, that kind of thing, um,
and he figured out real inflation rates and he applied
(31:33):
it around the world to find out what country is
the most miserable in what country is the least miserable.
And what he found in two thousand fourteen was that
the most miserable country in the world was Venezuela, which
had a Hanky Misery index of seventy nine point four.
It's pretty high high, uh, and then Japan had the
(31:54):
lowest misery at five point four one. Yeah. The US
came in at about nineteen, correct I think eleven? Yeah? No, no, no,
eleven was our Oh I'm sorry nineteen yeah, yeah, ranked
nineteen within eleven. I didn't hear that, Yeah, because my
tooth is still gone. You think it'd be it would
(32:15):
be more pronounced if there were nineteen, I would have
heard it clear as about August can't get here soon enough.
So um. There are critics of this one too, though.
There's critics of all these indexes. Well, yeah, a lot
of them say no, still too elementary. Yeah, some people
(32:37):
say this is all just try like you can't you
can't use this stuff to to make any real predictions.
You could use it to look back at the past,
but to use it for the future, probably not. But
some people do believe in the idea that if you
have enough data and the right kind of data, you
can get a clear picture of misery. And again, that's
what we're after here, Like the whole point of the
(32:58):
misery and next is to figure out how unhappy and
and just low the average person in a country is
feeling at that moment. Right. So, um, HuffPo actually came
up with a pretty good one huff po boo. Yeah.
In two thousand nine, HuffPo came up with what they
called the Real Misery Index, Right. And so a lot
(33:21):
of people cite the the use of what's called you
three unemployment statistics, which when you hear unemployment numbers in
the news, that's what you're hearing. That's what the Bureau
of Labor Statistics issues as the official unemployment numbers. Right. Yeah,
And that's the very first thing that people will say,
if they want to poop poo the unemployment numbers, that
(33:44):
that these are these are just false numbers. Yeah. If
someone says, hey, man, look how great ex president is doing.
Look at the unemployment rate, right man, they're just using
the U three. They need to use the U six.
Wake up, pal up in your eyes, which you know
is valid. Well yeah, so, um, the e l S
has six measurements of unemployment. You one through U six,
(34:06):
and YOU six is the broadest. It includes people who
are so discouraged with the state of the job market
that they've given up looking for work and are just like,
have given themselves over entirely to judge Alex right, and
then um. It also includes people who are working part
(34:26):
time but wish they could work full time, but there's
no full time work available, Like I'm a graphic designer
about I work at Starbucks. So that's the U six measurement.
That's and that's considered the the broadest snapshot of unemployment,
the real um vision of unemployment. Yeah, like you said,
mostly they use you three, I guess because it's in
(34:46):
the middle. I mean you one. They would never use
you two. Everybody used to like but not anymore. I
still like you too, you get yeah, you know, not
like I used to. I'm not poo and anything, but
I did see that concert they did on the HBO,
(35:08):
and I have to hand it to him. My big
problem with you two for years it was they just
got so out of control with those live shows like
these Giant Spider spaceships and things. And I was always
of the belief that, man, you need to go back
to basics and just get up on stage and play again.
And that's what they did with this new tour. I mean,
there was a cool visual element, but the stage set
(35:29):
up in the way they did it was very much
back to basics, and it I think they really connected
with fans again. Yeah, that's kind of help. Yeah, because
you can only when the when the interactions between you
and the fans rather than the fans and giant spiders. Yeah,
you just you can only go so far in that direction.
I think they realized that. Sure. Anyway, where do you
go YouTube? I'll defend those guys. Um, even though I
(35:53):
know everyone in the world generally wants to punch Bono
in the face, I know I'm not one of them.
Kind of feel weird. I like them. Yeah, I'm on record.
I know if you're listening, well, if you're Jared indicators,
any any predictor Bono is going to come out to
be canonized one day, what you know, you're like, just
(36:14):
something about Jared. I don't like him, and you know
we found out about Jared and then um, now you're
saying something's got like they're going to find a cure
for cancer and a saliva or something. You never know. Um,
so did we even mention what the HuffPo what kind
of outrageous numbers they came up with? No, well, we
(36:34):
didn't mention everything they used. We were talking about the
use six measurement. HuffPo used that measurement, the most extreme
one of unemployment numbers. They also used other things like, um,
the inflation rate of food and drink and fuel and healthcare.
Because other the misery index just uses the consumer price index,
which is inflation as a whole. HuffPo used, um, the
(36:58):
the inflation of some really essential things that people can't
do without and where you're gonna immediately feel the pinch
when prices go up with those factors, right. Um. They
also included the rate of credit card delinquency, the cost
of housing, how many people are using food stamps. That
seems like a smart move to home, equity loan deficiencies.
I guess people who are laid on their payments um.
(37:21):
And then they took the average of those seven numbers
and added it to the U six unemployment numbers, which
here you can step back and say, wait a minute,
how would you how are you adding this together? How
does this make any sense? You can't just keep adding things, right,
And really you can take that all the way back
to the initial misery index, like what You're just adding
unemployment percentage and inflation, and all of a sudden you
(37:43):
have a magic number that doesn't make any sense. This
HuffPo metric really points out the inherent flaw in it.
I think, yeah, because in two thousand eight, the Oakland
Misery Index was eight point one, but huff po's real
Misery Index a k A. You think things are bad,
here's how bad they really are index was twenty nine
point nine compared to the eight point one, right, And
(38:04):
some people are like, oh, well, that just shows how
off the Oaken misery index is. Who knows. I know
they quit doing the real Misery Index at HUFPO like
five years ago. I think it was a am I
going to call it a stunt. It was a bit
of a stunt maybe, but I'm sure Really what happened
was the writer who was contributing it for free. Sure,
(38:27):
like left for a paying job. That's probably what happened
to the HuffPo Real Misery in Dingy. Yeah, you're probably right. Um,
I was reading this guy, Tim McMahon. He has a site,
or he writes first site, I'm not sure it's his.
Are not called inflation data dot com. Jim McMahon, Tim
his brother, not the Super Bowl Shuffle, No, his brother. Um.
(38:48):
So he mentioned this two thousand one paper that concluded
that unemployment causes one point seven times more misery than inflation.
And so if you're doing any kind of misery index
that uses those two, you need to first multiply the
unemployment number by one point seven before adding it to
(39:08):
um the inflation number to to properly wait it and
like how did they come up with that? So I
looked at the paper. It was actually pretty clever. There's
like twenty three years of the survey of life satisfaction
and happiness that these researchers looked at back in two
thousand one, and they found that um economically based or
just like how happy are you? Know here's the thing,
(39:29):
it was, how happy are you? It was like a
single question like would you say, based on how you're
feeling right now, that you are fairly satisfied, unsatisfied, very
satisfied with your life right now right. And then they
took that that measurement for that that country as a whole,
and you can do this for any country that participated
in the survey. And then they looked at inflation, and
then they looked at um unemployment for those years and
(39:52):
they could figure out the the variation between or the
interplay between unemployment and inflation andatisfaction. And they found that
that um that unemployment was one time one point seven
times more miserable than inflation in regards to life satis
fashion as that survey goes pretty clever. Yeah, it's a
(40:15):
lot of hocus pocus, but it's I thought it was
pretty clever how they did it. That makes sense to
me because to be without work, like if you have
a job and things inflation is happening, you still have
your job, sure, and you're like, man, this sucks to
pay this much more, but you can still conceivably pay
for Yeah, I'll cut back here or there. If you
if you're unemployed, then there's not a lot of hope. Yeah,
(40:36):
one the number might be conservative you. Yeah, I agree
with you. Very interesting stuff. So that's uh, that's it, man,
that's the misery Index. You got anything else, No, but
I'm looking forward to hearing from economists that me too,
like in an unbiased way to try to explain things.
Me too. If you if you send just you know,
(40:57):
these crazy political emails and they're they're gonna fall in
deaf ears because everyone yells at each other that they're right.
I just want to hear some real numbers, do it, chuck. Uh.
If you want to know more about the misery index,
you can type those words in the search bar how
stuff works dot com. And since I said search bar,
just play an old search bar. It's time for a
(41:19):
listener mail. I'm gonna call this, uh follow up on
vocal fry once again. Oh yeah, um. Regarding vocal fry, guys, Uh,
you guys were offended because someone said vocal fry was repulsive.
But there is another side of this, Dude's I suffer
from a neurological disorder known as miss aphonia, which we
(41:42):
totally should do a show in this. I agree. It's
a condition where a person has extreme emotional response to
commonly occurring sounds and I remember hearing a lot of times,
just like people chewing noises or gum or whatever, um
he said. In my case, my trigger noise is the
high pitched s sound when some people speak. Uh. It
feels like my brain is cringing, as if an allergic
(42:03):
reaction is taking place. Cannot stress enough. This is not
a mere annoyance, as a legitimate mental disorder that can
vary great and greatly in severity. I don't visibly freak
out when I hear my trigger noise, but it really
kills me inside. Gives me an instant headache. And that's why,
which is why I will get away from the noise
if at all possible. UM. I believe in avoiding complaining
(42:24):
in life and playing the victim, but this disorder really
has made my life like a subtle hell. It's been
especially toxic to my family relationships and my ability to
learn in school. UM. I felt compelled to email you guys,
because you definitely appreciate interesting medical conditions. I think would
be a great topic for a show someday. There's a
documentary about it called Quiet Please. If you watch the trailer,
(42:46):
you might be inspired to watch it to learn what
the condition is huge, thanks to everyone and Stuff you
Should Know. You make a mundane parts of my life
interesting and educational. Uh, I'm gonna anonymize this from Texas
because I didn't. You're back from him from text. Yeah,
text PS was in disbelief when Chuck said he had
not seen Billy Madison or Happy Gilmore. That's a good PS.
(43:10):
I believe it. It's a good PostScript and post PPS right,
not p s S. I think his post PostScript. Yeah,
but people often put PSS. What doesn't mean? Do you
think Stuff you Should Know could ever become a television show? Well?
Text never we actually did that. We we found out
the hard way that it came. Yeah, we did a
(43:31):
TV show on the Science Channel and it ran for
one full season that played out over the course of
several days, which we will always have. Chu, we'll always
have that season television. We did once. It lasted nine
or ten days. Let's just show them all at once,
out of order. But you never know, we might get
(43:51):
another shot at stardom. But we're not looking to no.
I like it. In this room where no one's looking
at us. Jerry didn't even look at us. She's just
there looking away and discuss That's right, good idea about
the mesophonia. I think we mentioned that before, Like that
was I really like that vocal fry episode, And that
was the one thing that I wish we would have
(44:13):
mentioned because it's a legitimate thing that it does affect
some people. Um, but yeah, look for a mesophonia episode
at some point in the future. Text uh. If you
want to get in touch with us, if you can
send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at how Stuff
Works dot com and you can join us at our
very own home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
(44:35):
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com