What prompted you to begin this inquiry?
Michael Porter: There was a clear feeling at HBS that something different was happening in the U.S. economy—this was not just a deep recession caused by the housing mortgage crisis and so forth. The recession is very real, but something more was going on. This project was born from that feeling, and the belief that the school could convene and analyze and understand in ways we had not taken full advantage of.
As Jan and I started looking at the data, a whole set of indicators validated disturbing trends that began well before the Great Recession.