Americans need to focus on long-term growth.

• Author: Forrestal, Robert P.

All of us know that 1991 was a tough year for the U.S. economy. Even though the recession was mild by historical standards and some economic signs suggest that recovery has been moving slowly for some time, many businesses, consumers and lawmakers seem unwilling to believe this. Many people, especially after the Gulf War, had high expectations for a strong recovery based on memories of rebounds in the early 1980s and the 1970s. Unfortunately, the U.S. economy will not be able to return to the more rapid growth to which we have become accustomed, at least for the foreseeable future.

In 1992, I look for the economy to grow at a moderate pace of around 2 percent. Because employment lags behind GNP and many businesses are consolidating, I think the jobless rate will remain pretty much unchanged. Price pressures look more moderate than they have in some time, and the consumer price index (CPI) should increase 3 percent or a bit more as an annual average for the year.

I am not going to dwell on the reasons we are undergoing a transition from rapid growth to slower growth. Rather, I want to concentrate on the need for Americans to change their attitudes about growth in a fundamental way. I am not just talking about adjusting our expectations to less rapid growth but, more basically, about learning to stop supporting schemes that spur growth only in the short term. Instead, as a society, we must learn to evaluate alternative patterns of growth in terms of their ability to sustain expansion over the long term.

There is growing sense of urgency that something be done to quicken the pace of growth or to "jump start" the economy. The danger is, of course, that policymakers will be pressured into a "quick fix"--one that will spur the economy for a year or two only to create new imbalances tha will have to be corrected through yet another transition similar to the ones banking, real estate and many service industries have been painfully undergoing.

Why is it that Americans are so impatient in this recovery when the last recession was so much more severe in terms of the contraction in GNP and the toll on employment? You may recall that the jobless rate was 10.8 percent in November 1982, compared with 7.1 percent at the end of 1991. Moreover, the unemployment rate remained high well into the '80s expansion.

As I see it, the main reason for the current disappointment is that many people have confused cyclical economic problems with imbalances that require...