Washington, D.C. -- Forget Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s testimony to Congress this week: The next
recession can be no more than 18 months away. How do we know?

Our favorite leading indicator has shown up on the Metro page of the Washington Post. There, over the
weekend, a headline declared: “Suburban Developers Find Public Anger Building.” Why is this an indicator? Well,
our “screaming-at-developers’ index” always seems to peak near the end of the economic cycle. And the news
right now is full of stories about city council meetings packed with citizens screaming obscenities at home builders.

One thing we have learned from careful observation is that the American people are steadfastly against two
things: They are against sprawl. And they are against density. But above all they are against recession and
joblessness, so when unemployment is rising and GDP is falling, anti-growth sentiment goes into hibernation.
At the trough, people plead “won’t you please please build something.”

But after the economy has been booming for a while and everyone is buying new homes, the backlash intensifies, and homebuilders loom as a convenient target. (We’ve never fully understood this, by the way; if traffic congestion is the main complaint against growth, why not attack GM and call for limits on how many cars can be built and sold?) The last time anti-growth sentiment reached a crescendo was in 1989 and 1990. Remember what happened next?

If my “screaming-at-developers’ index” seems a bit fanciful and not entirely serious, just see this week’s
Alan Abelson column in Barron’s, where he argues that the skyrocketing price of nannies in Greenwich,
Connecticut is a sure sign of speculative excess. The “scarcity of nannies and the surplus of ninnies,”
Abelson thinks, is a sign that the end may be near.

Both the “nanny bubble” and the “screaming-at-developers’ index” seem better indicators of something real than the indicators we are offered for global warming. These economic indicators at least make some intuitive sense, even if they lack a quantifiable basis. But lately Vice President Gore -- I almost called him Vice Parson Gore -- has been telling us that virtually everything imaginable is an indicator of global warming. Heavy winter snowstorms are evidence of global warming. Then the next year, warm winter weather is evidence of global warming. And don’t forget El Ni-o: what could be more certain proof? But now, of course, El Ni-o has been supplanted by La Ni-a, a cooling of Pacific Ocean water. Which is still more evidence of -- wait for it -- global warming.

This is what Jeeves would call “an attempt to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing
narrative.” Even though the federal government is spending $2 billion a year to promote the global
warming hypothesis, resistance remains strong and the people remain unconvinced. So the Vice President looks
increasingly petulant and stern and his warnings grow increasingly frantic. But if he should actually get his
way on national energy policy, home builders won’t have to worry about being screamed at as much. And we’ll
start tracking a new “screaming-at-the-vice-president index.”

-- By Steven Hayward