What Soft Landing?

The yo-yoing stock markets of 2000 may suggest otherwise, but a prominent economic forecaster says this year may end up as the most buoyant he's seen in 30 years of predicting productivity and growth. Dr. James F. Smith at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- deemed the nation's most accurate economic forecaster in three of the past five years by The Wall Street Journal -- says that the near-term outlook is "marvelous."

"All of us, even the most wildly optimistic, have had to increase our forecasts of real GDP (gross domestic product) growth several times, and are now doing it again," he said in late summer. "This has been driven by the wonderful gains in productivity, which seem likely to persist." GDP growth should surpass 5 percent this year, Smith says, the highest since 1984.

Smith zeroes in on a couple of intriguing trends: productivity gains and higher education. Productivity, which was largely stagnant in the years 1973-1991, rose at a 1.4 percent annual clip in the next five years and has been running at double that rate since then. While he says the cause is a mystery -- although many observers cite high-tech gains, especially the surge of the Internet -- Smith says that if the current 2.9 percent annual productivity gain can be maintained, long-term sustainable economic growth in the U.S. could stay at 4 percent.

As for education, he notes that the percentage of high school graduates going to college, 67 percent, is the highest ever. That bodes well for the economy and for economic spending, since college grads consistently earn more than high school graduates and have a lower unemployment rate.