Is this a mid-1990s moment for the economy? Three reasons for optimism

There are parallels today to the strongest period of growth and prosperity in recent decades

A painful recession was fading into memory, yet the expansion felt unsatisfying to many. There was evidence of huge technological leaps everywhere except in the data on worker productivity. And the unemployment rate was falling to levels that forecasting models predicted would trigger a burst of inflation.

That was the economic situation in the mid-1990s, and it also describes 2018. An intriguing — and optimistic — possibility for the years ahead is that the parallels with the 1990s won’t end there.

Back then, technological advances that had been building for years finally started to translate into higher rates of productivity growth economywide.