Forum: Beware the Boom

Few joys are unalloyed any more in an increasingly self-critical age. The cigarette, the fried egg and the bacon, the automobile, the toy with lead-based paint — all have been judged to be as pernicious as they are pleasurable. Now the boom has fallen on the economic boom. Time was when the word connoted something unqualifiedly positive, as in “booming industry” and “boom times.” But because a boom all too often leads to inflation and then to bust, Data Resources Inc., an economic consulting firm in Massachusetts, has set up a “DRI Boom Monitor” to alert subscribers when a healthy recovery shows signs of turning into an unsustainable boom.

This early warning system, made possible by computer analysis of a va riety of indicators, will take the temperature of every economic advance. DRl President Otto Eckstein, a Harvard professor and member of TIME’S Board of Economists, rates the temperature of the current recovery to be near normal, al though he notes that optimistic business men are scrambling to stock their shelves and supply bottlenecks are be ginning to show up. But the question remains whether the boom index will real ly be able to warn of a dangerously rising temperature before it is already too high to be cooled down.