Do you remember all those books from the 1980s and ’90s explaining why the United States couldn’t keep up with Japan? Once they were proved wrong, pundits came forth with a new batch of titles to explain why the American boom might last forever. The masterwork of the genre was “Dow 36,000.”

After the Dow sank, the optimists took a few years off before re-emerging. My favorite recent entry on the shelf of misbegotten titles was “Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?” from 2005.

Making economic predictions, suffice it to say, is often a fool’s game, but it is played with particular relish every time the calendar turns to a new year. Today, let’s try a slightly different approach.

There is no way to know what 2007 will bring. You can make a pretty good argument that the country is due for a financial crisis — or that the economy is about to swing up again. But while the answer may be uncertain, it’s clear that the single biggest economic question of the year will probably be this:

Will the surge in the paychecks of ordinary Americans continue in 2007?

In 2006, a slowly improving job market finally grew strong enough to bring solid pay increases to most workers. Thanks to falling oil prices, meanwhile, inflation plummeted. As a result, the real average wage of rank-and-file workers — a group that makes up about 80 percent of the work force — has risen more than 2 percent over the last year. That pace has been reached only one other time in the last three decades, at the peak of the great 1990s boom.