Financial Affairs

Although nobody can predict how well one can earn a successful living in this country, there are several solid reasons to expect the country's economic progress to continue, perhaps at a more rapid rate of growth than the country has experienced in the immediate past:

* America today is blessed with low rates of unemployment, inflation, and interest. While there is no promise that these very favorable conditions will remain in place for very long, they certainly will contribute to continued progress in the immediate future.

* The country is producing nearly two-thirds more goods and services (after adjusting for the effects of inflation) than it did two decades ago. There are no apparent caps on how much the country can produce. We continue to increase our productivity and industrial base.

* The country has nearly 50 percent more real assets in the form of business machinery and structures than we had at the start of the 1980s. Those assets can be used to produce even more assets and goods and services in the future.

* Technological progress continues apace, especially in computers, telecommunications, and the Internet. There are in existence today a number of key technologies that will likely power the economy for several decades to come, not the least of which are optics, holography, artificial intelligence, recognition technology, virtual reality, robotics, and many others.

There is simply no telling what new technologies are now being developed in labs around the world that will eventually make their way into common use in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The economy has moved gradually from a world in which the value of goods was locked up in the materials that are used in the goods to a world in which the value of goods is locked up in the ideas that give birth to the goods. For example, only 2 percent of the value of a computer chip is in the material (basically sand) that is used to produce it.

In this new economic world, the inventive inputs of producers launch a spiral of economic growth and productivity at steadily declining cost in every material domain: land, energy, pollution, and natural resources. And the real prices of most physical resources, most notably, energy—have been on a steady decline for decades.