In the late 1960s, economist Arthur Okun, attempting to make the dismal science even more dismal, created the Misery Index by adding the nation’s unemployment rate to its inflation rate. It was a way of calculating the number of Americans unable to earn enough money to live.

The Misery Index came to mind during a recent trip to Costco in Boise. As I turned into the parking lot, I passed a young woman holding a cardboard sign that read: SINGLE MOM. LOST JOB. LOST HOME. THREE KIDS. ANYTHING YOU CAN GIVE WILL HELP. Before I averted my decent, employed, tax-paying eyes and drove on, I saw the dull sheen of shame and fury on her face.

Seeing her, I wondered about the fate of the confident female students I had taught in undergraduate writing classes, who had mostly assumed that their country would save them from having to beg on street corners. They had plans for husbands and children and grandchildren. Their trips to Costco would be for disposable diapers and leather furniture and giant-screen TVs.

In the middle of lectures about comma splices and coherent paragraphs, I would now and then pause and tell my students never, ever to have kids.

“Without kids, you can travel,” I would say. “The orthodontist bill can be for your own teeth. You won’t have to tend pheromone-emitting little parasites who will transform your free will into maternal baby-talk. You won’t point to that three-year-old in the city park sandbox and say, ’There goes my Ph.D. There goes my novel. There goes my year in Tuscany.”

Here’s what I was thinking: “Your country won’t always protect you from the economic shredder. It’s way worse if you’ve got children to take care of. God has many faces, some of them angry. Make sure you learn to write, because you might be holding a cardboard sign on a street-corner someday. You’ll want it to be well-written.”

All of my students remained child-free, wrote novels and got PhDs, and I got a commendation from the Club of Rome for helping to reduce the American carbon footprint.

Not really. I settled for most of them learning to write good sentences and paragraphs.

They went on to jobs good and bad, husbands faithful and not, and kids who may or may not have been worth the time and money it took to raise them. A few of them wrote novels or got advanced degrees in spite of their kids, which goes to show that some rare people can accomplish anything with will and skill.

But the woman with the cardboard sign wasn’t one of them. After leaving Costco, I saw other people holding similar signs on other Boise street corners. I saw vacant storefronts and empty supermarket parking lots and foreclosed houses and going-out-of-business sales.

I began to wonder what Arthur Okun would think about his Misery Index these days. The nation’s official unemployment rate is 10.2%. Include the people who have stopped looking for work for whatever reason, and the number goes to 17.5%. Factor in the part-timers, and it hits the low twenties.

That’s a lot of misery, even if inflation isn’t holding up its end of the deal. And our country is still going through the pain of deflating housing and commercial real estate bubbles. The stimulus money that should be going to fund economic recovery is fueling a stock market rally, one with a strong resemblance to yet another bubble. Anyway, once you’re on a street corner with a cardboard sign, whether or not the economy is inflating or deflating doesn’t make much difference.

So a new and more accurate Misery Index might involve counting the beggars in our nation’s parking lots, and adding their number to the decibel level of their children’s screaming.

It won’t take much more misery for the unemployed and the bankrupt to decide that the American social contract was written by predatory lenders, and that it’s time to grab the nearest torch or pitchfork.

But here in the middle of Idaho, insulated from the homeless and jobless and hungry by a mountain climate that freezes them south every October, we can turn our decent faces away from their suffering and their anger. We can avoid thinking about the creatures who share our DNA but not our comfort. We can avoid wondering what they see when they gaze at us and at the face of the God who looks over our shoulders.