The Roaring Nineties [antikvár]

Preface UST A DECADE ago, I left my quiet life in Stanford as a professor of economics to go to Washington, to serve first as a member, then as chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. I had spent the previous quarter century doing research on economic theory and economic policy. I wanted to see what really goes on—to be a fly on the wall. But I wanted to be more than a fly on the wall. I had entered economics in the sixties, the years of the civil rights and peace movements. I wanted, I suppose, to change the world, but I wasn't sure how; as an academic, I needed to understand the world better first. Little did I know how much I would learn. By the time I left Washington, having served throughout the first Clinton administration and then three years as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank, much had changed. These were the years of the tumultuous, Roaring Nineties—the decade of mega-deals and mega-growth. That much is in the public record. But the idea for this book was hatched as I considered stories that were not so widely available, or so well understood. The recovery from the 1991 recession, for instance, seemed to defy what was universally taught in economics courses around the world. The popular version, trumpeted by some