For me, income is something that points directly to good feelings. National income statistics often fail to make this connection. The wood, kerosene, batteries, and candles that allowed me to bumble about in the shadows of my house and make the fires over which I scorched hotdogs to husks cost me more than the electricity that in normal times I would have used to effortlessly cook, light, and heat. The difference in costs will show up as a rise in national income. There will be no government record of my burnt meals and shivering nights.

British economist Maynard Keynes explained the problem this way: according to national income statistics, if you marry your maid, national income goes down. The salary you no longer pay her is deemed to be a fall in the country's wealth, even though the two of you may be happier than before the marriage. In telecommunications, the national income stats measure output by the number of minutes the phone lines are used. This ignores the improvements to the quality of our lives that come from faxes and email. These novelties allow us to pack more information into a 30 second fax or email than into a 30 minute phone conversation. The fewer minutes you spend on the phone are now available for you to spend with your family. That counts as a fall in national income.

Improvements to the qualities of our lives are a challenge to measure. How do you account for the convenience of doing your banking with an automated teller when your night shift ends at 4:00 a.m.? Yale economist William Nordhaus used sophisticated technical and historical insights to isolate and measure the benefits from improvements in lighting technology. He calculated that in 1970 a dollar spent on lighting bought only about a tenth of the amount of brightness (as measured in kilolumen hours) that it buys today. At the turn of the century, that dollar bought you 4 percent of what it gets you today, and in 1800, a dollar got you one quarter of one percent of the brightness of today's dollar. But in terms of national income, that dollar gets counted the same way. The better safety of cars today, and improvements in medical care, and a long list of improvements to the quality of life are absent from statistics on gross domestic product. Don't look to these statistics to capture much of the suffering from the ice-storm.

As the power starts to come back on, people are getting a sense of how much better off they are now than in "the old days." I now understand why people wore housecoats and house hats, and that patrons crowded pubs not so much for the alcohol, as for the heat. These insights could give us some perspective on the talking heads who announce on television that gross domestic product per capita has hardly budged in 20 years, that life is rougher than it was back then, and that no progress has been made in bettering the lives of the poor. National income numbers, as they are calculated, are not up to the task of telling us about such improvements. US economist Leonard Nakamura estimates that if we took these improvements to quality into account, we would see the late 20th century as a time of growing prosperity. People who have recently travelled back in time courtesy of the ice storm, will have the raw information needed to weigh this statement.