The Great Boom Ahead: Your Comprehensive Guide to Personal and Business Profit in the New Era of Prosperity

Business consultant Dent here forecasts ``a long unprecedented boom without inflation'' to coincide in the late 1990s with the ``baby-boom'' generation's years of maximum lifetime spending. Economic trends are absolutely predictable, the author claims, as he interrelates productivity, politics and demography with interest rates, inflation, deficits and unemployment to show how a post-WW II ``automobile economy'' will yield presently to a global, U.S.-led, ``customized'' economy based on minicomputers and software under personalized entrepreneurial management. Analyzing industrial cycles from 1900 into the near future, Dent postulates four product-development stages: innovation (with only high-ticket buyers), a cost-reduction-growth boom, a competitive shake-out period and a ``maturity boom'' at popular prices. Identifying items entering this process (winter-sports duds yes, VCRs no) is the basis for business or investment success, according to Dent, whose scenario seems to assume stable conditions with no irrational financial panics, oil crises, world epidemics, Cold War revivals or aborted population trends. Fortune Book Club alternate. (Jan.)