> Both times the United States bounced back, boosted on the first occasion by Paul Volcker’s conquest of inflation and on the second by a productivity spurt tha

> Both times the United States bounced back, boosted on the first occasion by Paul Volcker’s conquest of inflation and on the second by a productivity spurt that sent growth rates soaring in the mid-1990s even as Japan stalled. In the late 1990s the usual chime was Robert Solow's observation that "computers show up everywhere but the productivity statistics". It wasn't until after 2001 that business investments in IT began to pay off in productivity growth (which became one of the dominant explanations for the jobless recovery at the time).