This article is the first in a series of 12 over the next 3 weeks written by Anthony D. Williams and me based on our newly released book Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. The book is receiving a lot of buzz.  The Economist calls it “a Schumpeterian story of creative Descruction.”

The book argues that many of the institutions of the industrial age have finally come to the end of their lifecycle, and now being reinvented around a new set of principles and a networked model.

The election is over, but the economic stagnation gripping the country is not. Many economists are warning us to buckle down for a period of prolonged sluggishness, reminiscent of Japan’s lost decade or the Swedish crisis of 1992.

Arguably, we’ve been in this slump for a decade. We just didn’t know it. Booming house prices and the massive expansion of cheap credit made a lot of us feel rich as kings. Now that the jig is up it’s clear that the housing bubble was masking a dark economic picture.