Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentare goals which are typically at the very top of the policy agenda forevery national government, the misery index serves as a very usefulsummary measure of national economic performance.Some empirical studies of the misery index have been carried out.Tarantelli (1986) employed the misery index as a measure of stagflationin a regression analysis of cross-national economic performance. Inanother study of cross-national performance, McCallum (1986) reportedcorrelations between the misery index and both the incidence of strikesand a measure of “corporatist” institutional structure. However, neitherTarantelli nor McCallum examined the behavior of the misery indexover time for any of the countries in their samples. Thus the researchdescribed in this paper, along with the related research discussed below(Cavanaugh & King, 1988; Cavanaugh, King, & Titus, 1989; Cavanaugh,King, & Ertuna, 1989) apparently represents the first in-depthinvestigation of the time series behavior of Okun’s misery index.Historical Behavior of the Misery IndexFor both the U.S. and Canada during the 1970’s and early 1980’s themisery index reached historically high levels because of the simultaneousoccurrence of both high inflation and unemployment. Simultaneoushigh inflation and unemployment, a condition termed “stagflation,”was indisputably the primary economic problem of the 1970’s and early1980’s in North America and throughout the world (Bruno & Sachs,1985). 4 As shown in a plot of annual data in Figure 1, the U.S. miseryindex began rising in the mid-1960’s, and ratcheted up markedly duringthe 1970s. After peaking in 1980 at a level exceeded only during theGreat Depression of the 1930’s, the U.S. index thereafter fell irregularlyto near a 15-year low in 1988 as a result of substantial declines inboth inflation and unemployment. As shown in Figure 2, the miseryindex for Canada likewise trended sharply upward beginning in themid-1960’s, peaked in 1982, and then fell by 1988 to its lowest levelsince 1972.418