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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 of the additional factors that people have worked into the misery index after this. All right, Chuck, So the misery 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 of the additional factors that people have worked into the misery index after this. All right, Chuck, So the misery 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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.