ECONOMIST DOUG HENWOOD SCRUTINZES THE 1990s AND BRILLIANTLY DISSECTS THE SO-CALLED "NEW ECONOMY." During the 1990s boom, we heard constantly about the New Economy. A technological and organizational revolution that precipitated an unprecedented era of rapid productivity growth and rendered recessions as obsolete as rotary-dial phones. Mass participation in the stock market transformed workers into owners; the freewheeling US economy became the envy of the world; and "globalization, " whatever that is exactly, had rendered national borders obsolete. Some of the manic exuberance surrounding this story has disappeared with the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble and the scandals that emerged as the froth cleared. But what really happened? Why did the stock market go on an eighteen-year tear? Was there really a technological revolution? Is the world as borderless as everyone says? Did class distinctions really erode? Was corporate malfeasance really a matter of a few bad apples--or was the rot far more pervasive than that? And what does the future hold in store? Economic journalist Doug Henwood answers all of these questions in After the New Economy.

Henwood is an author, host of a weekly radio show in New York, editor of Left Business Observer, and a contributing editor of The Nation. In this examination of the New Economy of the 1990s—which Henwood calls a "manic set of variations on ancient themes"—the author looks at historical precedents to this type of "new era." He assesses where we stand in its aftermath in the areas of work, income, globalization, and finances, and the contribution that the 1990s boom has made to a new anti-capitalist global movement.
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Some of the manic exuberance surrounding this story has disappeared with the bursting of the Nasdaq bubble and the scandals that emerged as the froth cleared. But what really happened? Economic journalist Doug answers all of these questions in "After the New Economy."

Doug Henwood scrutinizes the "news economy" of the 1990s and questions whether it lives up to the grand claims of being unimaginably productive and freed of antique logic.