Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The new Misery Index


By JOHN REMBER

In the late 1960s, economist Arthur Okun, attempting to make a dismal science even more dismal, created the Misery Index by adding the unemployment rate to the inflation rate. When the total got high enough, he postulated metaphorical screams of agony from people who were finding themselves without enough money to live.

The Misery Index came to mind during a recent trip to Costco in Boise. As we turned into the parking lot, we passed a young woman holding a cardboard sign that read: "Single mom. Lost job. Lost home. Three kids. Anything you can give will help." Before I averted my decent tax-paying eyes and drove on, I saw the dull mask of pain and shame on her face.

I couldn't help wondering about the fate of the female students I had taught in undergraduate writing classes, who had mostly assumed that their country would keep them from having to beg on street corners. They had plans for husbands, and children and grandchildren. Their trips to Costco would be for disposable diapers and leather furniture and giant-screen TVs.

When I was teaching these women to write, I would now and then stop talking about comma splices and coherent paragraphs and tell them never to have kids. "You can travel," I would say. "The orthodontist bill can be for your own teeth. You won't have to tend pheromone-emitting little parasites that will transform your free will into maternal baby-talk. You won't point to that 3-year-old in the city park sandbox and say, 'There goes my Ph.D. There goes my novel. There goes my summer in Tuscany."

Here's what I was really thinking: "Your country won't always protect you from the economic shredder, and it's way worse if you've got children to take care of. God has many faces, some of them dark and angry. Make sure you learn to write, because you might be holding a cardboard sign on a street corner someday. You'll want it well-written."

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I'd like to say that all of these students remained child-free, wrote novels and got Ph.Ds, and that I got a commendation from the Club of Rome for helping to reduce the American carbon footprint. But I settled for most of them learning to write good sentences and paragraphs.

They went on to jobs good and bad, husbands faithful and not, and kids who may or may not have been worth the time and effort to raise them. A few of them wrote novels or got advanced degrees in spite of their kids, which goes to show that some rare people can accomplish anything with will and skill.

But the woman with the cardboard sign wasn't one of them, and she burns in my memory. After leaving Costco, I saw lots of other people holding similar signs on lots of Boise street corners. I saw vacant storefronts and empty supermarket parking lots and going-out-of-business sales.

I began to wonder what Arthur Okun would think about his Misery Index these days. The nation's official unemployment rate is 10.2 percent. If you include the people who have stopped looking for work, that number goes to 17.5 percent. If you factor in the unwilling part-timers, it hits the low 20s.

That's a lot of misery, even if inflation isn't holding up its end of the deal. Our country is still going through the painful deflation of housing and commercial real estate bubbles, and the stimulus money that should be going to fund economic recovery is fueling a stock market rally, one with a strong similarity to yet another bubble. Anyway, once you're on a street corner with a cardboard sign, whether or not the economy is inflating or deflating doesn't make much difference.

So a new and more accurate Misery Index might involve counting the beggars in our nation's parking lots, added to the decibel level of the non-metaphorical screams they and their children utter.

I do wonder how much misery it will take for the unemployed and the bankrupt to decide the American social contract was written by predatory lenders. Here in the middle of Idaho, insulated from the homeless and jobless by a mountain climate that freezes them south every October, we can turn our decent faces away from their suffering. We can avoid thinking about what we might owe the creatures who share our DNA but not our comfort. We can avoid wondering what they see when they gaze at us and at the face of the God who looks over our shoulders.




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