The Fabulous Decade [antikvár]

Foreword Perhaps the best way to appreciate how robust economic condi- tions were during the latter half of the 1990s is to recall just how much time was devoted to analyzing what the end would be like. The numerous accounts predicting "soft or hard landings" when the boom times faded had a common quality: they all seemed to reflect an underlying belief that the prosperity we were experiencing was just too good to be true. Some called it the Goldilocks economy—not too hot and not too cold, but just right. Democrats credited the policies of the Clinton administration, and some Republicans tried to explain that it was all merely a delayed reaction to the policies of President Reagan during the 1980s. There may be no simple right answer to the question of why conditions were so good, but one judgment that warrants little dispute is that, somehow, a combination of policy and good fortune produced better economic circumstances for most Americans. Indeed, for the foreseeable future, the prosperity that the United States enjoyed during the last five years of the 1990s is likely to be the gold standard in terms of economic performance. Growth rates aver- aged 4.0 percent over that span; productivity increases, which aver- aged only 1.4 percent from 1973 to 1990, averaged almost twice that in the second half of the 1990s; unemployment declined from 7.8 percent in 1992 to 4.1 percent by the end of the decade; and inflation, contrary to prevailing attitudes among economists about what was possible under such boom conditions, averaged only 2.9 percent for the period. Of course, the greatest attention was paid to perhaps the