Mark said:

>The 90's were one of the most prosperous periods in history. The lowest sustained
>unemployment, massive job creation, low inflation, low interest rates, high stock market gains,
>increase in home ownership etc. Giving Clinton all the credit is a big stretch though.

I live in the heart of the Silicon Valley and was here before, during and after the Dot Com. Right now, economically the place is a smoking wreck. Everywhere you look there are failed businesses and empty office buildings. A significant fraction of my neighbors are unemployed with their careers more or less terminated (thank heaven I stayed in aerospace). Things were pretty good here during the Dot Com. The mindset was not unlike the Gold Rush of 1849. However it was based upon other people's money, e.g. a stock market bubble, ridiculous real estate valuations, labor exploited by offering worthless stock options, etc. A small number of people struck it rich during the bubble and had sense enough to cash out and leave the Bay Area before the implosion. Many of those folks are enjoying the good life in Grass Valley. Some of the less intelligent ones hit pay dirt on the Dot Com, bought real estate in Woodside (a suburb for high rollers in the Bay Area) and then saw their new found riches evaporate when Woodside's real estate valuation collapsed. The whole Dot Com was based upon furious economic activity for services that no one really wanted, e.g. Pets.com, webvan.com, etc. Except for an expansion in Internet capability and some improvement in computer technology, nothing of real signficance came from the Dot Com. So who paid for all of this? The Dot Com was paid for mostly from 401k mutual funds. In essense the prosperity of the 1990s was paid for by private investors (suckers) squandering their pensions. The conclusion here is that real prosperity can not be made through "get rich quick schemes" were money is being transferred from one pot to another with greedy parasites skimming off a percentage. There needs to be a new source of wealth to augment the traditional sources of wealth, e.g. primary products and conventional manufacturing. New technology is the obvious answer. The Dot Com offerred that but it turned out to be a lie. We need to invest in a technology that pays off in the end. Biotech is one candidate. I'd like to think that Space commercialization is anothter. Nanotech is a long shot. If we stay with the status quo, we'll slowly whither away as our manufacturing capability is shifted to places with cheaper labor and our natural resource base is depleted.

Gary