The inexorably rising share of the nation’s output that is conceptual appears to have accelerated following World War II with the insights that led to the development of the transistor, microprocessor, laser, and fiber optic technologies.
By the 1990s, these and other critical innovations had fostered an enormous new capacity to capture, analyze, and disseminate information and had begun to alter significantly how we do business and create economic value, often in ways that were not foreseeable even a decade ago. Indeed, it is the proliferation of information technology throughout the economy that makes the current period so special.