Buy, Lie, and Sell High: How Investors Lost Out on Enron and the Internet Bubble

What Happened in e-learning

e-learning offers an example of how the U.S. bubble set the U.S. back in a key space—one that is critical both to productivity enhancement and to increasing employment. e-learning is about increasing what economists call human capital.

The United States took an early lead internationally in applying the Internet to learning. In 1999, says a study of e-learning in the United States, “Almost weekly, new learning portals opened—some for consumers, others for businesses, and still others for specific industries or trade associations. By October 1999… consultant Elliott Masie predicted more than 150 such portals would emerge before the end of the year.”^[103]

During the late 1990s, online higher education was subject to ...