By that standard, they have been a disappointment. The issue is productivity. Those who look to computers for economic miracles, and there are many, insist that measuring their contribution only in dollars misses the less tangible improvement in quality that computers have made possible. But quality is often in the eyes of the beholders rather than in their wallets. And the more output from each of the nation's workers, the greater the national wealth.
People work faster or concentrate better, and that shows up quickly in tangible output.
By this definition, the output resulting from the computer revolution of the last 25 years has been disappointing. Computers have, of course, contributed to productivity and economic growth. But that contribution has failed to register in government statistics as the kind of robust catalyst that made the 1950s and 1960s such prosperous years. One possibility is that the statistics are wrong. A panel of economists came to this conclusion in a report to Congress last week, suggesting that growth has actually been quite robust but that this fact has been obscured by overstating the amount of output lost to inflation.