Nearly 10 years ago, in the book The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity, Peter Leyden and two co-authors, Peter Schwartz and Joel Hyatt, wrote: "[W]e could be entering another couple of decades of vast economic expansion - a boom to rival all booms."

The Long Boom was published in 1999, but researched and written beginning in 1996. In today's dubious economic climate, it's easy to dismiss the book as a product of its time - flush with dot-com fever, smug with the optimism that comes from uninterrupted economic growth and relative global peace. But even after the tech crash of the early 2000s, the financial and psychological freefall that followed Sept. 11, and the current anxiety over rising oil prices, the struggling dollar, and the subprime mortgage crisis, Leyden remains convinced that we're still in the middle of an unprecedented boom time - a 40-year period that began in 1980 and has produced historic gains in productivity and quality of life for individuals, societies, and nations.

This is not what you would call a majority opinion. Since January, one leading economist after another has declared the U.S. economy to be in a recession. "We have not confronted a situation like this in over half a century," former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told CNBC in April. In May, Martin Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, wrote in the Financial Times that "the combination of falling real incomes, declining household wealth, and a dramatic drop in consumer confidence suggests further falls in consumer spending."

There are dissenting voices, including the White House, which at a May press briefing said, "The evidence of [a recession] isn't there so far," and UCLA Anderson Forecast Director Edward Leamer, who in his March forecast wrote, "until I see evidence of a decline in spending by consumers and businesses because of credit problems, I am going to believe that this is just another symptom of 'recession depression.'" But such interpretations occupy an increasingly slim minority position.

Leyden prefers to look beyond the hair-splitting diagnostics that are used to determine if a recession has begun. A former managing editor of Wired magazine and a special correspondent in Asia for Newsweek, Leyden today serves as director of the San Francisco-based New Politics Institute, which calls itself "a new kind of think tank helping progressives understand today's transformation of politics due to the tumultuous changes in technology, media, and the demographics of the country."

Convene sat down with Leyden in May, during one of his frequent trips to Washington, D.C. During an hour-long conversation, Leyden - handsome and youthful, with wire-frame glasses and a carefully trimmed layer of stubble - explained why recessions don't happen the way they used to and what the meetings industry stands to gain from the emerging global economy.

Would you say that we are in a recession right now? And, does the label mean anything?

With absolutely certainty you can't say it's technically a recession yet. So I will hold out until we see more evidence, because it's not clear we absolutely are going to be in one. But I would go to your second point, which is that it's probably not going to matter as much as certainly the vast majority of people think right now. And I think it goes to really understanding recessions in the more modern or contemporary context - compared to what they've meant through all of the 20th century, until the very latter part of it.

Through most of the 20th century, recessions were essentially rebooting the economy in a very fundamental way, and we had very crude methods for doing that. If we were going into a recession, nobody hired, or people got laid off in vast waves. And the government, in the early half of the 20th century, let alone the 19th, had almost no way to interact with the economy, except in extremely crude ways. So what you had were these big "boom-bust, boom-bust, boom-bust" things that tore up the whole economy, freaked everybody out, and brought this mentality that a recession was going on.

With the advent of networked computer technologies, advanced telecommunications, and the infrastructure of the late-20th century and early-21st century, we're actually able to do so much more, proactively, quickly. There's an increasingly evolving understanding of how to react to information and measure things as a result of computer technologies. If you look historically, we actually very rarely experience recessions now. And they're very mild and very shallow.

With oil prices being high, there's the echo of the 1970s recession. Do people see the symptom and attribute it to the same cause - when in fact the cause may be different?

There is a vague parallel between what is happening today and what happened in the post-war boom, including the oil shocks. The thing that's different about this time as opposed to the '70s are those additional pieces I talked about, which are information technology that is unheard of, levels of information transparency we had no idea about, much more sophisticated ways of intervening in the economy.

So, what does recession mean in that larger context? It means adjustment; contextual problems, as opposed to system failure in a big way. There are some fundamental things we have to get right. It's not like the whole thing is hunky-dory. But in the bigger picture, we're going through an adjustment; every so often, you need to recalculate.

What are we adjusting from? To?

The most fundamental thing happening in the world today, bar none, is the globalization of everything. And that is so difficult and unprecedented, that it is disrupting a lot of things. The closest analogy we have to the structural changes going on in the world today is what happened in the early part of the 20th century, when you had the transition from an agrarian economy in the late-19th century to an industrial economy, and the shift from rural living to urban living in big cities. That created a grinding transition that at the time was very difficult for a lot of people. The economy changed so fundamentally that the way we organized the economy, the way we dealt with the economy, was inadequate.

What types of opportunities does that kind of climate present - especially for nonprofit associations?

What I tell people is: Step back, look around you, and track the inevitable. If you start to at least see that happening, understand it's happening and that it's not going to go away - then with a little foresight, you can look ahead of the curve and say, "What are the inevitable opportunities that are going to open up in this new environment?"

And there are myriad ones. You have to boil down to the essence: What is the value that I provide in the old economy? What do I do - as opposed to "I work at a newspaper"? Because really what you do is, "I process information and communicate it effectively." Squeeze down the essence of what you do, and then look in the new environment and say, "Okay, how does that value actually manifest, how does it thrive and succeed, in this new environment?"

In the meetings industry, I think there's a great opportunity here for physically gathered people to learn about this new world. If you want to squeeze down the essence of what conferences do, they gather people physically together in order to learn something new about what's happening in this rapidly changing world, and allow them to re-network with people who are also adjusting to this new environment. My sense is that the value of that transaction, that service, is a growth industry.

When you get a system change at this kind of level - the globalization of everything, reorganizing the entire fabric of the economy, transitioning to a whole new technology - there's a lot of learning that has to happen. And learning not just in an abstract way, but learning in an almost emotional way, which is what happens at conferences. You physically are there with other people who are struggling with the same issues. You connect with them and they encourage you. You can go for drinks and loosen up and form a bond that you never would have had sitting there reading a book on how to change.

Right now, we see things like rising jet-fuel costs, rising airline-ticket prices, rising food costs - all of which directly affect meetings. Is that something our industry should be concerned about?

I don't want to minimize those hardships for planning. Those are going to temporarily raise your costs and cut into your business a little bit. There are going to be businesses that even in a mild recession freeze the travel budget, or executives are going to attend one less conference. But my contribution to the conversation is: Don't lose perspective on what's really happening here in terms of the long-term vitality of your industry.

The long-term situation of people jumping on planes or getting someplace to physically gather is here to stay for a long time. In fact, you could argue for the future of your industry - with the increasing interconnection of the planet, the rise of the middle class in all these other countries, the gathering of people in conferences has just begun. For example, if you track global travel and you track the growth of conferences, I would be willing to say that they have probably kept at a steady growth pace right alongside the last 25 years of both the Internet (which was supposed to make us all sit in our dens with our slippers on and never talk to people), and globalization. But I think those two things have actually fueled the desire for people to connect. It's connected them with people they'd never been connected to, and given them the ability to cross borders and do things that they never would have been able to do before.

Do you see advancing technologies one day reducing the need for physical gatherings?

I think that there is a level of physical connection with people that technology, at least for the next 25 to 30 years, just can't replace. There's a level of connection, of nuance, of communication, of bonding, of sharing food, that's not replicable. On that level, I wouldn't get too worried about losing that piece.

And, as much as I think this physical-gathering thing is good, I think you could develop a very robust virtual-meeting business that doesn't necessarily have to be forced on the industry by a tech competitor coming in and disrupting the events environment. You could imagine the events industry itself, with enough open-mindedness and innovation, building alongside the physical gathering a really interesting virtual-conference experience that some people might integrate completely. Or maybe it's complementary, or you do one physical gathering a year and three virtuals a year. The point is, my gut reaction is not to see it as threatening. Just be smart about it, understand what the technical possibilities are, and also understand that ultimately what you do well, the service you provide, is far beyond technology. It's about connecting people, what makes a good experience - the whole thing. That could be transplanted into a more virtual environment, and it could be very synergistic. I don't see them as oppositional.

Do you consider yourself a cockeyed optimist?

I have been accused of being an optimist for a long time. [Laughs.] The main thing that allows me to be an optimist is the adjustment of my view of the big picture. That adjustment of the long view, the bigger picture, that trending in a 10-year frame rather than a one-quarter frame, makes all the difference in the world. It makes better businesspeople. It makes better decision-makers, because ultimately it's that kind of frenetic obsession with the next month, the next week, the news on my BlackBerry that makes you do stupid moves. And not make the wise investments, not make the larger strategic decisions that in the long run are going to benefit you the most.

Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.