Dear Editor,
In a letter to the Editor in March this year (titled ‘Gov’t has scant interest in utilizing statistics in relation to living standards and quality of life of citizens’), I wrote: “The starkest indication of the government’s avoidance of creating and using statistics on people-centric development is its approach to poverty elimination. With large oil revenues and a small population, Guyana has one of the world’s fastest growing economies and highest per capita incomes. But this is not a government that will talk specifically (if at all) about lifting all citizens out of poverty by a set date.” Guyanese are no longer fooled by big GDP numbers, biggest-ever budgets, big infrastructure projects haphazardly or suspiciously selected, or even by large oil revenues. People fully realize that such numbers capture very little of their actual living experiences and daily struggles. The PPP however will continue to avoid producing or using data on people’s living standards and quality of life.
Notwithstanding, there are two core indicators of national health citizens can easily use, as these indicators either involve readily available numbers or depend on subjective well-being (how we ourselves feel). The first indicator is the Misery Index. Economists calculate it by simply adding the unemployment rate and the inflation rate. If we were to add the rising poverty rate to the standard Misery Index, then we in Guyana face a national quality of life crisis. Evidence of misery abounds in Guyana. People are struggling to put meals on the table, to send kids to school, to travel to work, and to pay debts, rents, and bills. The Misery Index therefore is more than a number. It tells us about people’s capacity to survive, about their daily struggles and sacrifices.
The second indicator – one that directly relates to how we ourselves feel and think about our lives and livelihoods — is the level of fed-upness. You wouldn’t find this term in the text books, but more and more Guyanese are using it to describe their state of mind. People are just fed-up. Dissatisfaction, frustration, and hopelessness are the highest in living memory. Aggregated across the population, the level of national fed-upness is off the charts —stratospheric. How did we get here? It requires a colossal amount of government incompetence, indifference, and senselessness that, despite billions and billions of US dollars of oil wealth, a country and its people are in this state of misery and fed-upness. And both measures are trending bad to worse.
Sincerely,
Sherwood Lowe
