Misery Index

There have been a couple of articles recently that have spoken about South Africa having a bad Misery Index rating. Its quite a harsh term, but ennui index or “not cool man” index isn’t going to grab headlines. Like a lot of statistics reported in popular media, it tends to be reported as a snap snot number at a particular time rather than the trend. So here is a historic plot that shows how miserable we have been since 1994.

Note that I have NOT started the y-axis at zero so you can get a better sense of the fluctuations. I don’t put too much value into this particular metric, but its interesting in a time when all eyes are on the president that we are seemingly less “miserable” than when he took over.