That assumes of course that the Luddites and the True Believers don't get their way. ("But despite our growing prosperity there is a renewed fear in many quarters that we are living on borrowed time, because we’re running out of resources and endangering our very environment.")
Key points:
"I found that by wide margin economists are exceptionally optimistic about the future of the American economy: most predict that the robust economic growth of our recent history will continue into the foreseeable future."
"The bottom line is that most economists are very optimistic about the economic future of almost all the world. They find pessimism implausible because the forces that have driven past growth — the accelerating pace of technological innovation and the strong incentives embedded in the capitalist system that steer us around potential roadblocks — aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon. Moreover, the consensus among economists is that climate change has very little potential to slow down our economic growth machine. Rather, economists identify the major challenges facing the American economy over the next sixty years as coping with the effects of an aging population and flaws in the Social Security system, exploding health care and health insurance costs, and our inefficient educational system.
Perhaps it’s time for us to stop worrying about a future of deprivation and finally learn how to handle unrelenting prosperity."
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