Nostalgic Hardship Inflation Index (NHII)

The Nostalgic Hardship Inflation Index measures the degree to which remembered deprivation is expanded or mythologized for present moral leverage. Five components — hardship intensity, anachronistic distortion, moralizing use of memory, progress inversion, and compression efficiency — are each scored from 0 to 2.

The NHII is not validated for use in family disputes, although its conceptual domain overlaps strongly with holiday dinner conversation. Reference implementation: Working Paper No. 46 (NHII = 9.1/10 — one sentence rewrites technological development while preserving the perfectly familiar tone of a parental lecture).