ABSTRACT
Introduction Conventional thinking can be deceptively dangerous when the world is changing. In such times, clinging to old paradigms is at least as risky as embracing new ones before their validity can be fully established. My thesis today is that some elements of the so-called 'new paradigm' growth theories are simply modem incarnations of the economic trends of earlier era. Other elements clearly strain credulity: none of the arguments I am about to develop could support the late 1990s stock market valuations for Internet companies in the US; nor do I suggest that economic growth is about to accelerate dramatically. But if I am right, and the decades of the 1970s and 1980s were the exceptions rather than the norm, then we must particularly guard against using the paradigms and parameters from those 20 years to shape our views about the present period and our projections for the future.
