"The State of Humanity" is a ringing chorus of good tidings…Thus the volume, tough going in places because of an eye-glazing number of charts and statistics, is the boomsayer's answer to the omnipresent doomsayers, who, Simon says, have been wrong in all of their bleak forecasts for the past 30 years.

The dramatic growth projections concern some longtime residents. "I grew up as a country boy," said Herbert Dodd, 57, who has lived around the one-time cotton town most of his life. "I like it that way. I liked it much better when it was less crowded."; Pipe dreaming?

Others argue that the boomsayers are just pipe-dreaming.

Shoppers don't believe it, but we are entering a period of stable prices and rising employment. That word comes down from Sinai — Allen Sinai, 44, senior economist for Data Resources, the largest private forecasting firm in the country. "We're going to have five or six years of relatively low inflation, averaging less than 5%," he asserts.