I never understood why people think big business is a reliable measure of economic health. It simply doesn't make sense. It doesn't take an economic genius to see how stock prices can rise while the economy as a whole is suffering.
Of course, it's an easy measure for the government to inflate and give a false sense of economic health as opposed to the really hard job of even assessing the economic health of such a vast and diverse nation nor figure out what to do if anything to improve the economic health in every part of this vast, diverse, and complex nation that is intimately integrated with the even more vast, more diverse, and more complex global economy where most leaders do not care about the economic health of their nation and may be terrified of the prospect of a prosperous economy that they will be unable to control.
BTW, the S&P 500 and the Total Stock Market Indexes are still viewed as far more representative than the DJIA and given the computing technology we have today as opposed to when this was created, the DJIA is retained more out of a sense of nostalgia than anything. However, it shows basically the same trends which has to do with the profitability of large corporations and not the general health of the economy.
A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman of the next generation. A politician looks for the success of his party; a statesman for that of the country. The statesman wished to steer, while the politician was satisfied to drift.