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 . 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 its ever been. "We can no longer predict how well people are doing from the growth of the econoriiy," 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."