TODAY
By some leap of ellipsis, the state of the economy has come to
signify the health of the nation and by that measure, we're in the pink.
But a host of new quality-of-life indicators delivers a different
diagnosis.
Undaunted by the ever-ascending arc of the stock market, these
indices favor the more mundane rhythms of our lives: how much time we
spend with our families, how much TV we watch, how long it takes us to
get to work. "It's the Dow Jones of people's everyday lives," says Marc
Miringoff, Ph.D., about his Index of Social Health.
Miringoff, director of the Fordham Institute for Social Policy,
puts together 16 separate measures to create the annual index, including
rates of child abuse, teen suicide, drug use, high school completion, and
health insurance coverage.
Plotted against the gross domestic product, or GDP. the index
creates a graphic that Miringoff likens to gaping alligator jaws: one
going up, up, up, the other sliding steadily downward (see graph, below).
In short, there's more "ow" in the Dow than the market measures. Starting
in the mid-1970s, the nation's quality of life parted company with its
wealth, and the gap between social health and GDP is now bigger than it's
ever been. "We can no longer predict how well people are doing from the
growth of the economy," says Miringoff of this epochal divergence.
Other measures, such as the Index of Well-Being produced by
American Demographics magazine and the Genuine Progress Indicator, issued
by a San Francisco organization called Redefining Progress, are also
taking a look at the big picture. All agree that the real state of our
lives encompasses more than interest and income--medical costs, crime
rates, and our natural habitat, for example.
These indices are national, but the growth industry in such
measures is determinedly local. To date, more than 150 communities around
the country have created their own quality-of-life indicators, tailored
to their own population's needs.
Such community indicators report on a range of factors that
directly affect inhabitants: how good the schools are, how clean the air,
how safe the neighborhoods. They tell citizens how their community is
doing and what needs more work.
"The quality-of-life movement is emerging out of people's need to
start thinking and talking about serious things, and to make sure that
what they're talking about is based on hard data," says Miringoff.
"They're rolling up their sleeves and finding out what's really going
on." --A.M.P.
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