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But then something changed, and people began to realize, by the millions, that it wasn't really their fault that nothing worked. They came to see that Old Economy products like automobiles worked much better at their very worst than New Economy goods, such as handheld Internet devices, worked at their very best.
So people stopped buying stuff. Voila: recession.
The question of fault remains, of course. Why does nothing work? Because what we've been buying all these years is the prospect of workability, which we valued more highly than workability itself. Which would you pay more for? A glass of immediately drinkable water 1.0 or a glass of water 2.0 that can't be drunk for six months but will by then, you've been promised, have turned to wine?
High-speed Internet connections, Web-enabled cell phones and billion-pixel-per-sq.-in. TV monitors are water 2.0. Not only don't they work (except for certain rumored customers in certain districts in certain unnamed cities), they're also substitutes for those things that do work (hard drives, basic long-distance service) but have come down so far in price over the years that these products are now known as "commodities," and no one can make money selling them.
It's a mess, all right. The profitable things don't work, while the unprofitable things still do, except no one wants to make them now, and those who use them waste them. Consider electricity. While half the U.S. was earning paper millions dreaming up Tom Swift gizmos, the business of generating raw megawatts was neglected, turning a former commodity into a luxury. Now, in parts of California, the electricity doesn't work either. This is bad.
Recessions have a function, experts say--restructuring the economy to prepare it for new growth. Recessions are very complicated, see. Let's just hope this one works.