Shortly after the Great Recession started, I wrote a column in December 2008 titled "A Great Depression?"
Misery in macroeconomic terms is measured simply by the sum of a country's unemployment, inflation and bank lending rates, minus the percentage change in real gross domestic product per capita.
In late April this year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the United States Department of Commerce announced that it would start reporting a new data series as part of the country's national income accounts.
Financial markets have been primed for about a year now to expect higher US interest rates. They haven't arrived yet and probably won't until well into 2016.
The recession grinds on, and as it does, politicians of all stripes are asking: "Just how miserable are our citizens?"
Karl Schiller, West Germany's economics minister between 1966 and 1972, pithily pronounced that "stability is not everything, but without stability, everything is nothing".
The World Bank has been producing its annual "Doing Business" report since 2004 and its 2014 edition ranking Hong Kong second out of 189 economies surveyed, in contrast to mainland China's score of 96, hardly seems controversial.
President Barack Obama has picked Janet Yellen as his nominee to be the next chairman of the United States Federal Reserve.