by Debora Spar

About the author: Debora Spar is a professor at the Harvard Business School and the author of Pirates, Prophets, and Pioneers: Business and Politics Along the Technological Frontier.

A long, long time ago—in about, say, March 1999—a crop of scruffy prophets trumpeted the coming of a new economy. Waving IPOs (initial public offerings) and visions of vast riches, these New Age gurus declared that technology would solve all mankind’s ills and that the market had at last triumphed over all that might restrain it. Societies were now free from meddlesome authorities, they declared, and governments were all but dead.

In the new economy, it appeared, individuals—the great, the good, the weak and the small—would be free at last from the bonds that...