Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

consciousness-based education and governmentproportion of GNP since the mid-1980’s; for example, America’s totalbudget deficit for all levels of government (the most economically relevantmeasure) fell from 3.5% of GNP in 1986 to approximately 1.5%in 1989 (The Economist, 1990, p. 73). Also, contrary to many repeatedforecasts, neither deficit prevented the substantial decline and ultimatestabilization of both inflation and unemployment or aborted theunprecedented economic expansion. Just as much of the dire predictedeffects of the trade and budget deficits have yet to materialize, someother widely predicted problems, such as alarming predictions of basicmaterials shortages in the 1980’s, never emerged (Pluckhahn, 1989).One economist asked to summarize the economic lessons of the 1980’sconcluded: “The pessimists are usually wrong “(Pluckhahn, 1989, p. 1).9For Canada, the rate of inflation was approximated by the firstdifference of the natural logarithm of the monthly consumer priceindex, not seasonally adjusted, multiplied by a factor of 1200 to annualizethe rate and express it in percentage units. It is well known thatfor sufficiently small percentage changes in the untransformed series,the first difference of the natural logarithm closely approximates thecontinuously compounded rate of change of the original series. Canadianunemployment was measured by the civilian unemployment rate(seasonally adjusted) as reported in Main Economic Indicators, HistoricalStatistics 1960–1979 (Organisation for Economic Co-operationand Development, 1980, p. 29) and in the following issues of MainEconomic Indicators (Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment, December 1979, p. 69; December 1980, p. 69; December1981, p. 81; December 1982, p. 81; December 1983, p. 83; December1984, p. 87; December 1985, p. 87; December 1986, p. 87; December1987, p. 89; December 1988, p. 91; February 1989, p. 95).10The test that the Super Radiance group had no effect on the miseryindex during this period was based on a likelihood ratio test ofthe hypothesis that the impact assessment parameter estimates for eachcountry were all equal to zero. For the U.S., the likelihood ratio teststatistic was λ = 16.88, where λ is approximately distributed as a chisquarevariable with 6 degrees of freedom. For Canada, λ = 25.35, with4 degrees of freedom. See Cavanaugh (1990) for further details.436