THE FUTURE: Needed for America: Fewer Claims, More Growth

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At the threshold of its third century, America is afflicted by a "drift from dynamism," which threatens to allow the nation's global leadership to slip into "less sophisticated hands, at a perilous moment." So concludes the Economist's deputy editor, Norman Macrae. A longtime expert on world economics and political affairs, Macrae, 52, first gained attention in the U.S. in 1969 by writing a penetrating survey on the American dilemmas of race and poverty. Now he has produced a provocative if discursive report suggesting that the U.S. may be at the close of its industrial empire. He argues persuasively that the U.S. can no longer hold onto its economic might unless it immediately undertakes a major new drive for industrial growth.

America, which has held hegemony over the world from 1876 to 1975, may be losing its global influence for the same reason that British industry, dominant in the world from 1776 to 1876, decayed. The threat comes from "industrophobia"—the mood among intellectuals, ecologists, students and others from the educated and monied classes, which view business as vulgar and dangerous. On U.S. campuses, he writes, an "antigrowth cult is being taught to a generation of idealistic kids as if it was high moral philosophy or even a religion."

He scathingly criticizes these groups for delaying construction of the Alaskan pipeline. The slowdown retarded U.S. economic growth and helped the Arab-dominated OPEC oil cartel grossly inflate oil prices and expand its powers. Among the consequences: "The unemployment of black teen-agers in New

0 York City has been pushed up the last

1 few percentage points towards 40%, a ? few tens of thousands more brown men I in Bangladesh, and several hundred P thousand Israeli families have been put

in greater danger."

Macrae is also angry about American industry. The growth of U.S. output per man-hour in manufacturing in the past 25 years has fallen behind that of other industrial nations because of a slowdown of U.S. investment in new technology. American businessmen, like those in Britain, have succumbed to the rule of corporate bureaucrats. The spirit of entrepreneurship is broken.

Yet Macrae has great faith in America's potential to lead the world to vast new wealth. Indeed, he harbors few of the conventional worries that the world is running out of resources. He does not think, for example, that there will be an energy scarcity; alternative sources —nuclear, solar, geothermal, and others —will supply man's needs. Nor does he expect a food crisis, because land can be farmed more efficiently now through new scientific methods and the "green revolution" can be extended to most arable land. He downplays the famous "population explosion," claiming that the world's population growth has probably already dropped to 1.7% a year, which is the target of the United Nations Secretariat for 1985.