Don't Believe the Hype. We're Still No. 1

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Those cultural traits create the bottom line of our success: productivity, the closest measure of national efficiency, as well as technological creativity and ultimately wealth creation. In those areas, the U.S. continues to be the wonder of the world. From 1947 to the oil shock of 1973, our productivity grew annually at an average compounding 3% rate. For the next 20 years that rate was mysteriously cut in half, the background for much of the declinist vogue of the '80s. Then in the past decade, when we finally stopped playing with our newfangled computers and figured out how to use them, productivity returned to the magic 3% level of the immediate postwar era when America bestrode the world like a colossus.

Indeed, in the past five years, our productivity hit 3.5%, surpassing those magic years. Our only rivals at the top of the productivity list are the postage-stamp Scandinavians (Finland, Denmark and Sweden), while the lumbering giants we so fear, China and India, rank 49th and 50th.

True, we can ruin our future if we listen to the voices of defeatism and give in to the classic isolationist tendencies of protectionism and xenophobia. Fear could lead us to cut off trade both in goods and in brains, keeping out those wily foreigners who come here to learn our secrets and take them home. Of course, some do. They always have, but the majority are seduced by the openness, tolerance and energy of America and stay here to enrich us.

Our gloom amid boom is a comment more on our national mood swings than on the state of our economy or scientific culture. If we can just keep our heads, take our meds and resist fear itself, we'll do just fine.