Why the last 10 years have been an economic disappointment for most Americans.

As we dig out from the rubble of the financial sector's collapse, it's common to hear analysts fret that the United States may now be facing a Japan-style "lost decade." Throughout the 1990s, after its real estate and stock bubble burst, Japan struggled with low growth for more than 10 years. It emerged from the decade shrunken and sapped of confidence, with very little to show for a large amount of government spending and near-zero interest rates.

I'm not particularly concerned that the United States is in for a lost decade. Our political and financial leadership reacted much more quickly than Japan's did, and the U.S. system, for all its faults, processes failure quickly.

More importantly, we've already had our lost decade. When 2010 dawns in several weeks, it will bring down the curtain on a decade—the oughts—in which a great deal and not much at all happened, economically and financially speaking. In fact, a startling number of contemporary indicators are at or below the levels at which they stood 10 years ago.

Let's start with the single most important economic number: jobs. Over the past 10 years, job creation has been extraordinarily weak. In September, on a seasonally adjusted basis, there were 108.5 million private (nongovernment) payroll jobs in the united States—almost precisely the number there were in June 1999. (To see the data, go here and then check "nonfarm private.") In the past decade, in other words, the private sector hasn't created a single job. That's awful, especially when you consider that the population grew 9 percent during those years, from 282 million in 2000 to 308 million today.

The stock market performed like somebody running on a treadmill. A lot of energy was expended to travel the tiniest of distances. As this depressing 10-year chart of the S&P 500 shows, stocks went precisely nowhere in the past decade, despite all the efforts to help the market, from slashing capital gains and dividend taxes to keeping interest rates extremely low to bailing out just about everyone.

Meanwhile, Americans seem to have lost their interest in investing. Between 1992 and 2000, the percentage of households owning mutual funds doubled, from 24.4 to 49 percent. And between 1992 and 1999, the percentage of Americans owning equities—either through mutual funds or as individual stocks—rose from 36.7 percent to 47.9 percent. To build on that impressive growth, in this decade, George W. Bush made the "Ownership Society" a theme of his presidency, suggesting that investing in securities could be the solution to everything from Social Security's long-term insolvency to the health care crisis. But Americans largely ignored these calls. According to the securities industry's Equity Ownership in America 2008 report, the proportion of the population that owned stocks or bonds fell from 57 percent in 2001 to 48 percent in 2008. And in 2008, 45 percent of U.S. households owned stocks—inside retirement programs and in brokerage accounts—down from 49 percent in 1998.