The past decade generated an abundance of headline events " the bursting dot-com bubble, 9-11, the banking crises, the home building meltdown, endless war, budget deficits, election cycles " the list goes on. Yet while most of us were looking the other way, a major shift occurred in the structure of the U.S. economy. From 2000 to 2010 the U.S. economy lost productive scale at a frightening pace, reversing long trends of expansion.