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A small cadre of my colleagues here at Business Week can rightly call themselves the John the Baptists of the New Economy. (They were not the New Economy but bore witness to the New Economy, the New Economy that enriches every creature that crawls in America.)
In the desert of economic thought, these prophets saw high technology, and they saw that it was good. And in high technology, they recognized productivity more copious than the eye could see.
And they began proclaiming about productivity and the incredible growth of the New Economy and the prosperity that it begat to the denizens of North America (at least those below Canada and above Mexico).
In fact, they did a lot of proclaiming. And they won awards and did some more proclaiming until one day they stopped and sat on a rock and pondered whether all this productivity leading to the red-hottest, then blue-hottest, then white-hottest economy in the history of capitalism could be unequivocally laid at the feet of the high-tech revolution. And with no incontrovertible evidence forthcoming, the pondering has gone on.
GURUS GALORE.
So finding myself with seven free minutes this week (in the frenetic New Economy, the only people who usually have time to think are the prophets), I did some productivity pondering of my own. When, I wondered, were the first rumblings of the New Economy juggernaut heard by productivity prophets with their dusty ears to the ground (hey, they're prophets, not runway models). So I buttonholed one of our gurus and asked. (That's one of the great things about working for the most powerful business newsmagazine in the world -- you've got gurus galore.)
The date I got was mid-1995, so I ran that through the theoretical productivity model I've been working on, and sure enough, I got a hit. Yes, indeed, if you account for a lag in economic data reflecting the real world, the start of the productivity boom began around the same time that Starbucks opened its 500th outlet.
In 1994, it set up shop in New York, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Minneapolis. And in 1995, it added Philly, Baltimore, San Antonio, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Austin. High tech, hah! Juan Valdez has as much to do with the Incredible Expansion as Bill Gates or Michael Dell. And while hundreds of millions of lattes account for part of the power-up in productivity, coffee beans alone can't explain while we're all working our keisters off.
Certainly there are demographic factors to consider: Baby boomers finally buckling down to business. Frantically striving Gen X, Y, and Z'ers who haven't taken 10 or 20 years to get their acts together. Still I wasn't satisfied that I had gone far enough in getting at the motor driving the Great American Labor Machine.
ANCIENT HERB.
So I pondered some more until my temples ached and a word popped into my skull. I plugged it into my productivity equation, and bam, another hit. What was the word? Ephedrine. In 1995 (that year again), Metabolife International was formed to sell Metabolife 356, an herbal dietary substance for weight loss. The active ingredient in Metabolife is ephedrine, a derivative of the ancient Chinese herb ephedra -- a speedy substance that gives you a blast of energy.
The enormous popularity of Metabolife has led to a raft of similar products, like Metabolift, Metabolize and $ave, and Metaform Diet Stack, to name just a few. Walk into a GNC (or even a Kmart) or search ephedrine on the Web. You'll find mountains of the stuff. Wash some down, and you'll be cleaning the lint out of the back of your closet late into the night.
With the country chugging oceans of designer coffee and popping mounds of ephedrine capsules (which most often also contain caffeine), productivity growth becomes less of a puzzle. No wonder we're going like Energizer Bunnies -- we're all hopped up and running around a caffeinated economy.
Scotti, Business Week senior editor for government and sports business, offers his unvarnished views every week, only on BW Online
EDITED BY BETH BELTON
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