NEW YORK CITY—A year ago, Donald Trump successfully campaigned for the presidency on promises of sweeping change. A year later, chief economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics told an Urban Land Institute New York audience that America's economic and social fabric was better off than he'd predicted in November 2016.

“My mistake was that I thought something would get done,” Zandi said Wednesday. Despite “a lot of chest-thumping and bellicosity” from Trump and other elected officials, “nothing fundamental has shifted.”

In the near term, Zandi isn't expecting 2018 to bring much upheaval to what has been the second-longest economic expansion on record. “We're creating lots of jobs,” he told the ULI NY audience. “We're on track to create between two million and 2.5 million jobs this year; that's about what we created last year and the year before and the year before that.” The rate of positions being added is about twice that of people coming into the work force, “and so that means that unemployment and underemployment continue to decline.”