By one measure, the U.S. economy is the best it’s been since the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. The recent plunge in inflation has helped drive the U.S. Misery Index to its least miserable level since the spring of 1959. The Misery Index was proposed by the economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s, while he was a scholar at Washington’s Brookings Institution. When Mr. Okun proposed the index, the U.S. was in the grip of stagflation — a period of both high unemployment and high inflation. To capture the era’s misery, Mr. Okun (who had been on Lyndon Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers) proposed simply adding the ... (full story)