Chuck the models.

• Author: Verleger, Philip K., Jr.
• Position: Oil prices

American entrepreneurs are on a roll. America's future could not be brighter.

It happened so quickly. Just two years ago, very good economists wrote of the United States' impending demise. These pessimists saw a country burdened by enormous debt, rising oil prices, and an underperforming and undereducated labor force. It was, in short, unprepared for the twenty-first century. Two years later, the books and papers published by these Cassandras have been relegated to the dark cloud, the modern equivalent of the dustbin.

Today, one expert has even been bold enough to write a book titled Unleashing the Second American Century. The author, Joel Kurtzman, is a former New York Times business editor and former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. Now a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, Kurtzman sees an almost boundless future for this country. Given recent events in Europe, especially near Russia's borders, he may need to revise his projection upward.

How could the U.S. situation change so dramatically and rapidly? The national debt overhang remains at a staggering 102 percent of GDR The education deficit continues. American children still lag far behind their counterparts in Europe or Asia. Employment in the United States has not fully recovered from the 2009 recession. As of this writing, 100,000 fewer Americans have jobs than in January 2008, the previous peak. In spite of these obstacles, our future still looks bright. The United States' transformation since 2009 has come about for two reasons. First, things were not as bad at the end of 2011 as pessimists described. Second, entrepreneurs in the United States--the little guys--cracked an important geologic code ignored by the large oil companies. Their success has put the United States on the road to energy independence, surprising almost everyone.

To take a step back, the pessimistic case of recent years has been put forward best by Jeff Rubin, the former chief economist at CIBC World Markets. In his 2012 book The Big Flatline, Rubin eloquently asserts that the United States is facing its sunset years. He contends that high oil prices and trillions of dollars of government debt will constrain U.S. economic growth. In his view, the idea of the United States returning to its days of robust expansion is a "nonstarter."

From Rubin's perspective, the United States should now follow Denmark's lead. The path back to strong growth, he observes, requires aggressive reductions in...