{
  "id": "lost-decade.stalled",
  "term": "lost decade",
  "sense": "stalled",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 19,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A past period in which a collective self's window was narrower than its own model had it, so the time reads as taken from it.",
  "folk_gloss": "a period of about ten years in which a country's economy fails to grow",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "past.temporal",
      "period.temporal",
      "collective-self.shared",
      "read.information",
      "window.range",
      "narrow.spatial",
      "time.dimension",
      "take.acquisition",
      "narrative.self-story",
      "model.representation"
    ],
    "interaction": "The narrative measures the period not by where the group ended but by where its model said it should have been; the gap is read as time removed from its trajectory rather than as time lived.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "a loss measured against an expectation",
      "time read as taken, not spent",
      "a period named by what did not happen"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Japan's economic stagnation after its asset bubble burst in the early 1990s is widely called its 'lost decade'.",
      "domain": "economics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "golden-age.past-peak",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "a golden age is a past period read as wide; a lost decade as one where widening stopped"
    },
    {
      "id": "miracle-economy.outran-model",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "the inverse: widening beyond the model's expectation"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "lost decade",
    "lost decades",
    "the lost decade"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-lost-decade.stalled"
}