"The Future Is Now"

"Today’s economic anxiety is not the same anxiety that simmered between 1980 and 2000. Back then, recessions and slowdowns were understood as the pangs of a new economy struggling to be born. But the recession we now seem to be entering is to the information age what the recession of, say, 1957-1958 was to the industrial age—a 'normal' recession in the midst of an economy with stable bases, an economy that (to use a current cliché) 'is what it is.' The 'jobs of the future' that were promised 20 years ago are here. Choreographers, blackjack dealers and security guards have replaced factory workers as the economy’s backbone, if not yet its symbol."

In The New York Times Magazine, Christopher Caldwell discusses how today's service-based economy will change political rhetoric.