It's been a dreary week for economic news: slow job creation, falling home prices, lagging auto and consumer sales, and a sell-off in stocks. So it seems like a good moment to check in with one of Wall Street's leading perma-optimists, BlackRock Chief Equity Strategist Bob Doll, to see if he's still bullish on America.

To my considerable relief, he doesn't disappoint. "Credit markets are sound. Money growth is good," says Mr. Doll, whose optimism has been the right market call since March 9, 2009, when stocks hit their post-crisis lows. The Dow has since risen more than 85%, and Mr. Doll expects the slow economic expansion to continue.

As intriguing in this moment of U.S. pessimism is the 56-year-old uber-investor's long-term bullishness on American companies and U.S. competitiveness. "You could say we're the best house in a bad neighborhood," says the man who has spent 28 years managing money. "We have fewer problems and more solutions than Europe or Japan."
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"Over the next 20 years, the U.S. work force is going to grow by 11%, Europe's going to fall by five, and Japan's going to fall by 17. This alone tells me the U.S. has a huge advantage over Europe and a bigger one over Japan for growth," he says. "And the reason for this is pretty simple. We have higher immigration than both of these, and we make more babies. We have a higher fertility rate. And they are the long-term determinants of population growth and therefore work force growth." Mr. Doll and his wife seem to be doing their part with three children.

But many Americans, whether they favor pundits on the right or the left, may have a hard time accepting that population growth and immigration are the keys to our prosperity. Mr. Doll explains the economics: "The long-term growth rate of any economy is the product of the change in the size of the work force multiplied by the productivity of the work force." Productivity is very hard to predict, he reports, but demographics is easy. "You count noses." And that tally shows a very healthy America.
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Mr. Doll is less bullish on the future for U.S. jobs. "I hope the number is not as high as seven or eight [percent unemployment] but I think it's higher than five," he says. "Said differently, when I went to school, we studied that full employment was 3% unemployment and then I went into the work world and I never saw three. And I think with almost every passing cycle—for a lot of reasons, technology being cheaper and more reliable than most human beings, as an example—the structural unemployment rate slowly but surely has moved higher. And I think that continues. So I hope it's not seven or eight. I think it's a little lower than that, hopefully six or seven. . . . Sad but true. And that has political and social consequences that I don't think we even know what to do with yet."

[Funny how they misspelled bullshit in the title.]