ABSTRACT
Reports on the death of the new economy are widely exaggerated. A couple of years after the failure of the so-called new economy, the drama of the burst of the dot.com bubble of 2001, it takes little courage for a statement like this. A closer inspection of the pre-as well as the post-bubble literature shows that today’s condemnation of project new economy is as strong and widespread as was its praise during the 1990s. Both attitudes are understandable, at least to some degree, but nevertheless misleading. The expectation that the new information and communication technologies (ICTs)1 would fundamentally change the nature of a capitalist money economy and prepare the way to a nirvana economy were unfounded from the beginning, at least if one takes the historical experiences of previous fundamental technological changes as well as the well-established knowledge of economic theory as measuring rods.
