THE VIEW FROM THE TOP.(chief financial officers are more optimistic about US economy than chief executive officers)

In the perfect world of economic theory, corporations are impersonal machines, adjusting supply quickly in response to demand. In the real world, though, corporations are fickle institutions, run by individuals who are prone to bouts of giddiness and fear. Despite some evidence indicating otherwise, C.E.O.s are people, too.

Consider two contrary interpretations of the country's economy. The first comes from a recent survey, conducted by Fleet Capital, of six hundred and seventy-three chief financial officers at midsized manufacturing companies across the United States. (Midsized means that these companies have sales of between twenty-five million and a billion dollars.) Manufacturing was hit especially hard by last year's recession, and has been stagnant for most of this year. But the C.F.O.s said that they were upbeat about their own companies' prospects, confident that the economy will grow briskly next year, and convinced that the days of cost-cutting and retrenchment will soon be over.

The chief executive officers of America's biggest companies see it differently. Their vision of the near future is one of almost unrelieved pessimism. A recent survey of the members of the Business Roundtable, which comprises the C.E.O.s of a hundred and fifty of the nation's biggest companies, found that two-thirds of these C.E.O.s expect the economy to grow by less than two per cent in 2003--in other words, less than it grew this year. Sixty per cent of the C.E.O.s plan to cut payrolls, and only nineteen per cent intend to increase spending. John Trani, the C.E.O. of Stanley Works, summed up the mood among his peers when he said recently, "The industrial side is, in certain markets, [in] a depression."

The disparity recalls the early days of the Vietnam War, when many officers in the field reported that the war was being lost, while the generals at headquarters kept maintaining that it was being won. In this case, however, the opposite holds true: the officers in the field see light at the end of the tunnel, while the top brass smells defeat. So why are the C.F.O.s so much more sanguine than the C.E.O.s?

Part of it is that the big-company C.E.O.s are unnerved by the post-Enron backlash and by the damage done to their reputations and their stock. The hothouse atmosphere makes it harder for them to block out the public discourse and focus on what their customers and suppliers are telling them--to concentrate, in other words, on what's really going on in their businesses. "With smaller, more focussed companies, you may have a better feel for what's happening on the ground in your business sector," James Connolly, the president of Fleet Capital, said last week. "With Fortune 100 companies, you may be more likely to default to the macroeconomic consensus view."

The fact that your former golf partners are under indictment or that your stock is in a slump shouldn't necessarily ...