‘Tis the season for taking stock, and nothing sums up our collective lives better than numbers. Here are three categories that tell us where we are as a nation and city. Economists might call them key indicators. I call them scary.

Murder: The recent execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams revived the death penalty debate, but little noticed was a chilling fact in one report: Since capital punishment was resumed in the United States in 1977, there have been more than 500,000 homicides in our fair land. With about 1,000 people executed in that period, our prisons are not exactly slaughterhouses.

That dubious honor belongs to our streets, where homicide is still a grisly fact of American life and death. FBI reports through 2002 show that 16,000-plus murders a year are the norm, for a rate of about 5.5 per every 100,000 people.

Those numbers are better than they were in 1991, when 24,703 homicides were reported, for a sky-high 9.8 per 100,000 people. But the current carnage is well above the norm of 50 years ago. In 1957, a smaller America recorded 8,060 murders, for a rate of 4.0.

New York City continues to lead the decline. The city reported 570 murders last year, down a whopping 75 percent since the 2,245 killings in 1990. Where the city used to record about 10 percent of the nation’s murders, we’re now responsible for less than 4 percent. The number is headed in the right direction again, with the NYPD saying the current total of 530 puts the city on pace to come in lower than last year.

Obesity: To spend even a few minutes in a shopping mall is to see proof of a troubling trend: We’re a nation of lard wagons. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 30 percent of adults – more than 60 million people – are obese and that two-thirds of all adults are overweight. Growing numbers of children also are losing the battle of the bulge.

The CDC, which uses a body mass index involving height and weight, says, for example, that a 5-foot-9 person should weigh no more than 168 pounds. Up to 202 pounds would be overweight, and more than 202 would be obese.

The price tag hits us all. Five years ago, when there were fewer fatties, the CDC put the cost of obesity at $117 billion. Higher costs for everything from health insurance to airline tickets – more weight means more fuel is needed to lift planes – can be traced to America’s supersize girths.

Again, New York City is ahead of the curve, or at least still has some curves. About 20 percent of adults here are obese, compared with 30 percent nationally, the city says. Yet that means about 1 million New York adults are obese, hardly a healthy sign.

Wedlock: If it’s true that our nation is only as strong as its families, we’re in trouble and headed for worse. Last year, more than 35 percent of American babies were born to an unmarried mother, according to federal statistics. That’s 1.5 million children – a sixfold increase since 1960. For many of those kids, the absence of a father means poverty and prison.

The city is even worse off. The Health Department says 52,890 babies – 42 percent of the total births – were born to unmarried women in 2003, the latest year available.

Of all the scary numbers, that one worries me most. For as the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan once noted on the subject, it means the future is already spoken for.

–