When Alan Greenspan addressed the Harvard University class of 1999, he shared a message of wealth and prosperity that was reflected in many aspects of American life. “You are being bequeathed the tools for achieving a material existence that neither my generation nor any that preceded it could have even remotely imagined as we began our life’s work,” he told the new graduates. The stock market had more than doubled in the previous five years, and the unemployment rate was at a 30-year low. The United States, Greenspan reminded graduates, was enjoying, “the greatest prosperity the world has ever experienced.”