If you were born around 1980, you grew up in a space happily between — between eras of existential threat (Cold War/War on Terror, or Cold War/climate change), between foreign policy debacles (Vietnam/Iraq), between epidemics (crack and AIDS/opioids and suicide), and between two different periods of economic stagnation (the ’70s and early Aughts). If you were born later, you experienced slow growth followed by financial crisis followed by a recovery that’s only lately returned us to the median-income and unemployment stats of … 1999.
And even with under-4 percent unemployment, the differences between our economy and 1999’s are notable: Our current expansion features lower work force participation rates and weaker productivity growth, a fertility collapse instead of the modest 1990s baby boom … plus it’s all floated by deficits that seem necessary but aren’t a sign of deep economic health.
But perhaps the best way to understand the lost world of 20 years ago is that it was the just-enough-internet era. There was just enough internet to boost economic productivity (the Facebook-Amazon era has not had a similar effect), just enough to encourage subcultural ferment, just enough to challenge cultural gatekeepers and give lonely teenagers succor. It was the early blogosphere instead of Twitter mobs, serendipity instead of ruthless curation, geek culture as an insurgency rather than a corporate establishment, online as an escape for eccentrics rather than an addictive dystopia for everyone.
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