JOEL KOTKIN: America Is Better Than Its Politicians. I should hope so.

Ever since the election of Donald Trump, many of our leading academic voices, like Paul Krugman, predicted everything from a stock market crash to a global recession. Slow growth, mainstream economists like Larry Summers, argued, was in the cards no matter who is in charge. That was then. Now the United States stands as by far the most dynamic high-income economy in the world.

In such areas as economic growth, the U.S. is generally outperforming other rich countries — such as Japan, Germany and the rest of the EU — by roughly two to one. Meanwhile our most serious global rival, an increasingly overextended China, as well as much of the developing world, are seeing drops in once rapid growth rates.

Go figure.