"New Economy."

The second half of the 1990s marked the longest sustained stretch of economic growth in U.S. history. Unlike other periods of long-term economic expansion reversed by rising inflation, growth continued and even accelerated as inflation declined. The combination of rapid technological change, rise of the services sector, and emergence of the global marketplace had experts convinced that the United States was in the midst of "a second industrial revolution." Despite the historical inaccuracy of the label (the second industrial revolution took place during the latter half of the nineteenth century), there can be no denying that a new U.S. economy began to take shape—one that defied many long-standing economic axioms. Since 1980, for example, the economy lost approximately 43 million jobs through restructuring and downsizing. Economists called them "sunset jobs." In their place, as analyst Horace W. Brock pointed out...