WASHINGTON

--Is America still a land of promise? The biblical metaphor was used in 1785 by George Washington, who described the new United States as a "second land of promise." More than a century later, the progressive journalist Herbert Croly wrote: "From the beginning the Land of Democracy has been figured as the Land of Promise."

The promise might seem to have been broken to many Americans suffering the effects of the Great Recession, the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The collapse of the world economy in late 2008 followed a generation in which incomes stagnated or declined for most Americans, while the rich reaped a greater share of economic growth than they had done since the years preceding the Wall Street crash of 1929.

What Herbert Croly, a century ago, called "the promise of American life" was actually two promises bundled into one: the promise of continued economic growth and that the gains from growth would be equitably shared.

The promise of economic growth almost certainly will be fulfilled in the years and decades ahead. Despite the crippling effects of the pre-2008 real estate and stock market bubbles, America's innovation machine is producing new technologies at a remarkable rate.

By vastly expanding accessible reserves of natural gas and oil, hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" may transform the U.S. from an importer to an exporter of fossil fuels, even as it brings about a welcome reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by replacing coal with lower-carbon natural gas. Rapid prototyping (better known as 3d printing), robot cars and trucks, civilian commercial drones, biosensors--all of these innovations are moving rapidly from the laboratory to the marketplace. The result will be increases in prosperity and quality of life that can hardly be imagined today.

A PARTNERSHIP

As in the past, today's technological advances tend to result not from private effort alone, but from partnership among the private sector, the public sector, and the nonprofit sector. Public investment in research and development has been critically important in the early stages of new industries, from radio and television to nuclear energy, jet engines, the Internet, fracking, and robotics. Nonprofit research universities also play a central role in the transmission of new ideas and new products from laboratory to marketplace.