Economic Growth Is Back for Real

World War I ended with the collapse of vast empires and the age-old monarchies that ran them. What kind of a new world would emerge from the imperial rubble? The poet William Butler Yeats was nothing if not pessimistic. In 1919, he wrote: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . Have we come to a similar breaking point in the world today, as some people think — an unfolding of events that leads not to peace and