Americans 'too pessimistic about the future'

It’s summer vacation time in Australia, and our friends at Future Crunch apparently have taken time off from their good-news publication.

 

So let’s turn this Friday to Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post columnist and CNN host of "Fareed Zakaria GPS," a weekly international and domestic affairs program.

 

In a Post column headlined "Americans are far too pessimistic about the future,” Zakaria says:

 

"The U.S. economy grew an astonishing 5.2 percent in the third quarter of 2023, and the International Monetary Fund expects growth for last year to be 2.1 percent, which is substantially better than other advanced Western economies such as Canada, Germany and Britain. Inflation is dropping sharply, real wages are up and manufacturing employment is experiencing a boom. It is hard to find another country where so many measures are pointing in the right direction.

 

"The broader picture is even more positive. As I write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the United States has been besting its competitors in various crucial metrics for a while. The Financial Times did an analysis of the many ways in which the United States’ economy could be compared with Europe’s, and it found that in per capita growth, the United States has been ‘outperforming' Britain and the euro zone for 20 years and has ‘dwarfed' the economies of Spain, France and Italy.

 

"The U.S. technology sector dominates the world in a way that no country ever has. The value of the top 10 U.S. technology stocks is now greater than the value of the entire stock markets of Canada, Britain, France and Germany combined. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. It has the healthiest demographics of any advanced country, and it takes in around 1 million legal immigrants a year, which ensures that while Europe and Japan are expected to slowly sink in population, the United States will continue to grow."

 

"America has serious problems,” Zakaria says. "What nation doesn’t? But it has gotten through these kinds of crises before, and I am confident it will again.”