The “misery index” is dramatically named and simple to construct: Take the month’s inflation rate and add to it that month’s unemployment rate. The idea is to capture how economic conditions are affecting typical workers and households. Can they get a job? And what is happening to the purchasing power of their wages?
The index is registering high values. You have to go back to the period of stubbornly high unemployment following the Great Recession to find the index registering as much “misery” as it does today. Prior to that, the index hasn’t been this high since the recession of the early 1990s.