"The Long Boom" is back!

Recession? What recession? A coauthor of 1999's infamously optimistic screed says the future is still bright.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Apr 30, 2002 | Rereading, at the late date of 2002, "The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity" is the intellectual equivalent of dosing on nitrous oxide, guaranteed to bring on giddy nostalgia for late-'90s techno-optimism.

First published as a cover story in Wired magazine in 1997, then as a book in 1999, "The Long Boom" declared that technological progress would bring about two more decades of economic expansion and ameliorate, if not eliminate, such vexing bothers as cancer, poverty and global warming. It epitomized the Left Coast, future-eating techno-idealism that helped fuel Internet mania.

Ah, for the late '90s, when getting wired meant that our lives could only get longer, happier, healthier and richer as we all got linked up in history's first truly global society.

But in the early 2000s, such cockeyed optimism has become about as popular as a Taliban T-shirt in a JFK gift shop. As a consequence, "The Long Boom" suffered its own market correction, dismissed as just one more spatter of froth from the dot-com bubble.

But suddenly, doomsaying about the state of the economy is also ringing false. The U.S. economy grew 5.8 percent in the first quarter of 2002. Few economists are ready to declare that boom times are back -- layoffs are continuing at major corporations, and profits are still in short supply -- but the recent recession is being labeled one of the mildest on record, just as the authors of "The Long Boom" predicted. Is it time for the techno-optimists to do their own gloating in a chorus of merry I-told-you-sos?

Peter Leyden was a coauthor of the original "Long Boom" manifesto as well as of a forthcoming book, "What's Next? Exploring the New Terrain for Business," to be published by Perseus in September. He's a "knowledge developer" -- note the late-'90s job title -- for the Global Business Network think tank.

From his office in Emeryville, Calif., he talked about how the long boom survived the dot-com implosion and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and why the new economy is alive and may soon even be well.

How do you evaluate the recession that we appear to be emerging from? Has it really just been a blip on a larger growth path?

It's been an extremely shallow recession.

We were in a long boom, we are in a long boom and we're going to be in a long boom for a while. It's analogous to what we saw in the wake of World War II, the post-World War II boom.

People often think of the '50s and '60s as the great golden age of the American economy. Everybody's boats were floating on the rising tide of economic expansion as we built up the suburbs. But they forget that in fact the postwar boom, which went on for about 25 or 30 years, was just punctuated constantly by recessions. It had six clear recessions -- in fact much more dramatic recessions than we've experienced in the last 20 years.

When the economy slows, let alone goes into a recession, that does not negate the larger context of a vast economic expansion.

Next Page: Will a nuclear attack blow up the long boom?

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